Day 2 of our look at projections for Mets players for the 2019 season! Yesterday we kicked things off with d’Arnaud and we continue with catchers on the 40-man with Tomas Nido, who right now looks to have the least amount of major league playing time out of the three catchers on the roster.
With d’Arnaud and Plawecki out for chunks of last year, Nido got some playing time, but couldn’t take advantage of it, especially once the Mets traded for Mesoraco and Plawecki got healthy.
2018: 90 PA, 84 AB, 1 HR, .167/.200/.238, -0.5 WAR, 58 DRC+
Career: .181/.210/.255, 61 DRC+
That being said, there are worse depth options than Tomas Nido. Remember last year when the Mets went through a Jose Lobaton phase? Not fun. Here’s what BP, ESPN, ZiPS, Steamer and BR think Tomas will do:
(Citations: Baseball Prospectus (BP) projections are from the Baseball Prospectus annual which can you can get here. It’s highly recommended. ESPN projections can be found here. ZiPS can be found here. Steamer can be found here. Baseball Reference projections (BR) can found on the players BR page which linked elsewhere on this article. )
Yesterday we saw d’Arnaud with the projected .704 OPS, which is basically average (emphasized by his 99 DRC+). Nido is projected to post an OPS about 90 points lower, a DRC+ of 91 or 9% worse than the average hitter. Considering his career DRC+ so far of 61 (39% worse than the average hitter), this is dramatic improvement.
Obviously the projections struggled with figuring out his playing time, you could have told me that before I wrote this article. If Nido gets 240+ PAs like Baseball Reference and ZiPS sees, then something went horribly wrong with the Mets this year.
Ultimately, I still believe Mesoraco on an NRI makes for an interesting spring. If he plays well either Mesoraco gets released to sign somewhere else/traded, d’Arnaud gets traded or maybe even the Mets try to move Nido (which right now is the least likely option).
