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. I’m also a completionist, so if I wrote a stat projection article last year, I have to review it at the end of the year for accuracy. Accuracy and projections haven’t gone the Mets way the last two years due to the amount of trades and roster changes so some articles feel more awkward than others, like this one. So were the 2018 Stat Projections on Hansel Robles correct?
Hansel’s rookie season was great but his 2017 was not so the Mets were unsure what they would get from the relief pitcher who in his last season and a half in Queens spent more time pointing up at the sky for fly balls becoming homers than locking down the game. Below we compare the average projected line to his actually stats from 2018. You can find the line by line projections here.
2018 Projections: 56.26 IP, 4.51 ERA, 4.525 FIP, 1.39 WHIP, 59 K, 28.5 BB
2018 Mets: 19.2 IP, 5.03 ERA, 7.13 FIP, 1.576 WHIP, 23 K, 10 BB
2018 Angels: 36.1 IP, 2.97 ERA, 3.22 FIP, 1.294 WHIP, 36 K, 15 BB
2018 Total: 56.0 IP, 3.70 ERA, 4.59 FIP, 1.393 WHIP, 59 K, 25 BB
First thing that popped out to me – Robles had a tremendous season with the Angels. He returned to be the type of pitcher that he showed he could be in his rookie season.
Next, the projections were eerily close to his final, combined line. He pitched almost exactly the same amount of innings, his WHIP was insanely close to average projected line and he ended up with the exact amount of K’s.
Not a single individual projection program had Robles with an ERA lower than 4.28 (Baseball Reference) so everyone missed that. Steamer was the most accurate on WHIP at 1.39 (they also were close on FIP at 4.65).
Hansel clearly benefited from being traded mid-year. Can he keep that up into next year? Will his new, ex-Met teammate Matt Harvey rebound the same way? Will any of us see it since the games are on the West Coast and as Mets fans we all, including myself, suffer from a tremendous East Coast bias?
