Every spring I collect several projections sources and average them together to do a meta-projection. Last year I pulled projections from Baseball Prospectus, ZiPS, Steamer, ESPN, and Baseball Reference. Were the 2018 projections correct for Paul Sewald?
Before the 2017 season, Sewald was a non-roster invitee to Spring Training. It was wildly predicted by most Mets pundits that he would end up on the Mets roster at some point in the season. Before 2018, it was unclear how many games he would pitch in as his existence on the roster was dependent on the health of other pitchers. The 2018 Mets, similar to the 2017 Mets, struggled in that department, so Sewald saw some time.
You can see the original projections here.
2018 Average Projection: 56.9 IP, 4.33 ERA, 3.995 FIP, 1.309 WHIP, 59.4 K, 20.75 BB, 9.376 K/9
2018 Actual Stats: 56.3 IP, 6.07 ERA, 4.23 FIP, 1.509 WHIP, 58 K, 23 BB, 9.3 K/9
Outside of the ERA and WHIP, the average projectile line did remarkably well. Sewald got almost the exact amount innings that was predicted, his FIP almost matched his projected ERA, he got nearly the amount of K’s and BB’s as well.
Mainly, his 2018 numbers tell the story of someone who was slightly unlucky (much higher ERA than FIP) but found himself in situations to get hurt by luck due to his WHIP.
For a pitcher like Sewald though, I really look at WHIP to see how he’s doing and no one predicted his WHIP to be this high, the closest was ESPN and Baseball Prosectus who both had it at 1.34 (and Baseball Prospectus also predicted the highest ERA at 4.75 so they get the edge as the most accurate overall).
Tomorrow we’ll look at former Met, Hansel Robles.
