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.
Wilmer Flores, from tears, to a multitude of walk-off’s, will go down in Mets lore history. You already know by now the Mets parted ways with him this off-season and that he signed a 1-year deal with the Diamondbacks. For the last several years, Mets fans have always joked with themselves, “is he good enough to start everyday” and for the last couple of years, there have been enough injuries where the answer has been “it doesn’t matter, he basically has to” until he gets injured.
2018 Average Projection: 446 PA, 316 AB, 96 H, 17 HR, .270/.311/.465
2018 Actual: 429 PA, 386 AB, 103 H, 11 HR, .267/.319/.417
All things considered, like haphazard playing time, the projections did remarkably well with Flores. You can see them here. They all missed his dip in power, which was notable and probably made Flores a role-player in the eyes of other teams this off-season rather than a starter. But Flores put up good numbers again and did well for a bench player.
More importantly for this article, he played close to his projected numbers. Now those numbers are not enough to push the Mets forward which is why he’s not a Met anymore. It’s just amazing that even with a dip in power, he seemed to always get hits when it counted.
Happy trails Wilmer! We’ll see you in September in Queens!
