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 Jay Bruce:
| Jay Bruce | |||||||||
| PA | AB | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | OBP | SLG | |
| 2016 | 187 | 539 | 74.00 | 33 | 99 | 4 | 0.25 | 0.309 | 0.506 |
| Projections | |||||||||
| MLB.com | 535 | 70.00 | 27 | 90 | 3 | 0.247 | 0.305 | 0.465 | |
| Steamer | 439 | 55.00 | 21 | 65 | 5 | 0.237 | 0.302 | 0.446 | |
| ZiPS | 583 | 72.00 | 22 | 89 | 6 | 0.244 | 0.305 | 0.437 | |
| ESPN | 73.00 | 27 | 90 | 6 | 0.243 | ||||
| Baseball Prospectus | 558 | 67.00 | 24 | 76 | 7 | 0.231 | 0.3 | 0.436 | |
| Sporting News | 567 | 72.00 | 27 | 87 | 5 | 0.24 | 0.302 | 0.439 | |
| NBC Rotoworld | 511 | 63.00 | 27 | 82 | 5 | 0.237 | 0.298 | 0.454 | |
| Rotowire | 545 | 73.00 | 28 | 90 | 5 | 0.237 | 0.3 | 0.459 | |
| Baseball America | 576 | 68.00 | 25 | 81 | 7 | 0.238 | 0.296 | 0.428 | |
| FBG 2017 | 551 | 74.00 | 29 | 86 | 10 | 0.267 | |||
| Average | 570.5 | 532 | 68.7 | 25.7 | 83.6 | 5.9 | 0.2421 | 0.301 | 0.4455 |
Jay Bruce. The subject of frustration for many Mets fans this off-season. It’s been repeated all over the place this off-season that Jay Bruce is the poster child for the old school vs new school debates on how to tell if a player is a star or not. He’s consistently a 30 home run guy! he also has a poor average and a poor on base percentage. Plus, he’s blocking Michael Conforto.
The projections see his power taking a step back, but not his playing time. It’s going to be interesting to see how Terry handles Bruce this season. This is being written on 3/14, so answer is not clear yet.
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
