Every spring at 213 we gather a whole bunch of projections for players and average them together to see what a conglomerate of baseball sources think a given player will perform over the year. It’s wholly unscientific – averaging averages and not weighting them for previous accuracy or amount of playing time they feel a player will see.
After four days of looking at players who had minor impacts on the 2019 Mets (Drew Smith, Jacob Rhame, Tim Peterson, Corey Oswalt) we finally return to a pitcher who actually played in 2019 – Steven Matz.
Matz ended 2019 pitching 154 innings with a 3.97 ERA and a 4.62 FIP. We wrote in 2019 that most computer projections, with the exception of Baseball Prospectus had Matz performing slightly worse than his 2019 numbers. Here’s a summary of his 2019 projections and results:
2019: 32 G, 160.1 IP, 4.21 ERA, 4.60 FIP, 1.341 WHIP, 8.6 K/9, 1.9 WAR, 4.39 DRA
COmputer models pretty much missed Matz in terms of ERA and FIP but nailed his K/9. More specifically, this is the first projection review we did this year that Baseball Reference nailed and Baseball Prospectus missed (with the exception of DRA). Baseball Reference was the outlier for a step backwards and they were pretty accurate on what that looked like.
Looking ahead, at 213 we hope that Matz stays in the rotation but who knows with how the Mets will balance Porcello and Wacha. Matz has more upside. I guess we’ll find out in a couple of months.
