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. Jerry Blevins had an off year last year, which is why he remained a Met throughout the season and why he was not part of the sell-off in July. He had a stellar 2017 where he posted a 2.94 ERA, 3.12 FIP and 1.367 WHIP. Projections were wise to see that he would regress off those numbers but they didn’t see how far he would regress.
2018 Average Projection: 50.86 IP, 3.64 ERA, 3.44 FIP, 1.33 WHIP, 10.4 K/9
2018 Actual: 42.2 IP, 4.85 ERA, 4.96 FIP, 1.359 WHIP, 8.6 K/9
Jerry just didn’t enjoy the same dominating performance he had in 2017 where he got hitters to strike out a whopping rate of 12.4 K/9. Computers saw him regressing down 2 points there and in reality he ended up doubling that regression.
Baseball Prospectus was the best at seeing he his regression where they saw him posting a 4.41 ERA, the only projection program giving him a 4+ ERA (the next closest was Steamer at 3.76). It’s worth noting that in their 2019 Projection, they having posting a 3.98 ERA, so better than his last projection despite his performance being worse than their last projection. This confirms what a lot of us believe to be true that this past season for Jerry was a blip not a trend.
Jerry right now is still a free agent which is a product of how slow this free agent market is and how his 2018 performance knocked him down to a third tier bullpen pitcher. He’ll still find a major league contract and with his personality I would be against him coming back to the Mets, even if it doesn’t make sense.
