We wrapped up all the pitcher projections and now we can move on to the hitters!
There are a lot of stat projection publications available on the internet and magazine shelves. Rather than trusting one (although if I had to pick one, it would be Baseball Prospectus), I like to average the projections together. In a perfect world, I would take data from the several years I’ve done this to figure out how to weight the projections in the average, but for now just a straight average will be fine. This tends to round out the higher/lower outliers while still allowing them to have a say in the conversation. Let’s take a look at the average projections for Travis d’Arnaud:
| Travis d’Arnaud | |||||||||
| PA | AB | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | OBP | SLG | |
| 2016 | 276 | 251 | 27.00 | 4 | 15 | 0 | 0.247 | 0.307 | 0.323 |
| Projections | |||||||||
| MLB.com | 335 | 38.00 | 10 | 45 | 0 | 0.257 | 0.314 | 0.394 | |
| Steamer | 276 | 31.00 | 10 | 35 | 1 | 0.254 | 0.322 | 0.42 | |
| ZiPS | 363 | 43.00 | 10 | 36 | 1 | 0.248 | 0.309 | 0.393 | |
| ESPN | 31.00 | 7 | 26 | 0 | 0.251 | ||||
| Baseball Prospectus | 416 | 47.00 | 13 | 49 | 0 | 0.249 | 0.321 | 0.414 | |
| Sporting News | 312 | 37.00 | 12 | 42 | 1 | 0.256 | 0.32 | 0.415 | |
| NBC Rotoworld | 308 | 40.00 | 11 | 41 | 1 | 0.224 | 0.302 | 0.372 | |
| Rotowire | 323 | 38.00 | 10 | 34 | 0 | 0.251 | 0.314 | 0.393 | |
| Baseball America | 405 | 42.00 | 11 | 40 | 1 | 0.24 | 0.297 | 0.371 | |
| FBG 2017 | 348 | 42.00 | 13 | 39 | 0 | 0.252 | |||
| Average | 389.5 | 329.57143 | 38.9 | 10.7 | 38.7 | 0.5 | 0.2482 | 0.312375 | 0.3965 |
There are two players who could be the difference between the Mets competing for a Wild Card and dominating the division: Lucas Duda and Travis d’Arnaud.
Travis d’Arnaud is no longer a prospect. He’s shown flashes of brilliance and has spent a lot of time on the DL at different points in his career. The projections aren’t great as they see him playing about 55-65% of the time hitting on par with his numbers from last year that were super limited.
What the projections don’t take into account: he took the wraparound out of his swing, which early spring has been a positive sign.
Sources:
MLB.com and Steamer Projections can both be found here.
ZiPS projections can be found here.
ESPN projections can be found here.
Seidler, Jarrett & BP Staff. (2017) Baseball Prospectus 2017. New York, New York:Turner Publishing Company
The Fantasy Baseball Guide (2017)
Sporting News Fantasy Baseball (2017)
Baseball America Fantasy Guide (2017)
Rotowire Fantasy Baseball (2017)
Rotoworld Fansty Baseball (2017)
Notes:
Article Written on 3/14, stats collected 2/19 and may have changed after collection. Not all sources above may have been used in this article specifically but were used in judgment calls for reliability of the data
