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.
Seth Lugo was pegged as a bullpen member before the 2019 season, a change for him as he was swinging between the bullpen and starting. Before last season, Lugo was seen as the 7th inning person behind Familia and Diaz. But Familia and Diaz struggled and the bullpen ended up falling on Lugo. The chart below was pulled from our projections article last March and it is followed by Lugo’s 2019 numbers:
2019: 80.0 IP, 2.70 ERA, 2.70 FIP, 0.900 WHIP, 11.7 K/9, 2.2 WAR, 2.71 DRA
The short story: Almost every projection with the exception of ESPN saw Lugo taking a step back from his 2018 performance. Instead, Lugo put up another year (1.1 runs better by DRA and almost a full win more depending on who you get your WAR numbers from).
This matches what we saw on the field. Lugo was a beast and was used a lot because of it. In reality, his inning numbers should have been down as most projections saw him starting a bit but Lugo was used in the pen and used a lot. ESPN is notorious for over projecting players as better as they are, so Lugo meeting them as the outlier shows how good he is.
Same statement as last year: if Lugo joins a strong Familia and Diaz, then this bullpen will be great. The difference was last year we were wondering if Lugo could repeat. This year we are wondering which Familia and Diaz we see.
