Happy Opening Day! We’ll get to a game preview and everything else for the best of the day of the year a little bit later. Right now, we are still trying to finish our annual projection meta-analysis series where we look at 5 different projections for players on and not-on-yet the Mets roster this season.
Today we look at a new lefty in the Mets pen – Justin Wilson. Wilson made his debut with the Pirates at age 24 in 2012 and stayed with the Pirates until after the 2014 season where he was traded to the Yankees for Francisco Cervelli. The following year he was traded to the Tigers for Luis Cessa and Chad Green. He was traded again on the 2017 trade deadline to the Chicago Cubs where he played last season.
2018: 54.2 IP, 3.46 ERA, 3.64 FIP, 1.427 WHIP, 11.4 K/9, 0.7 WAR, 4.65 DRA
Career: 3.33 ERA, 3.30 FIP, 1.268 WHIP, 9.9 K/9, 3.91 DRA
Wilson was signed as lefty veteran for the Mets pen. When he signed the only lefty on the Mets roster was Daniel Zamora (who gets his projection tomorrow). Now the Mets flex both Wilson and Luis Avilan who made the team on an NRI (his projection the day after tomorrow).
Here’s how Wilson is projected for 2019:
(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. )
With the exception of ZiPS and ESPN, most projections have him regressing from his career numbers. That makes sense for ESPN who generally overproject veteran stats. ZiPS has a good track record though so maybe they see something in Wilson that everyone else is missing. ZiPS and Steamer are rarely this far apart. At the end of the season, this profile will be an interesting one to go back to to see a difference in the ZiPS and Steamer projection engines. Finally, it’s not surprising at all to see the regression on BP and BR, as they tend to be the most conservative of the projection programs.
