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.
Before we even get into reviewing his 2019 projections, when looking back on what we wrote about J.D. Davis last year – oh boy. We were so down on him, and were proved so wrong by the end of the season. We were frustrated because we liked Luis Santana and Ross Adolph as prospects. Then with the Lowrie signing, trading for J.D. Davis seemed redundant. But Lowrie only got to the plate 9 times so it was as if we never signed J.D. in the first place. We did talk about how J.D.’s minors numbers were fantastic (.292/.362/.521) before looking into what computers projected for his 2019 season:
2019 Stats: 453 PA, 410 AB, 22 HR, .307/.369/.527, .895 OPS, 1.0 WAR, 122 DRC+
Holding ZiPS aside, which doesn’t have the same playing time calculation as the rest of them, the projections struggled with finding Davis time in the field which makes sense on a team that was struggling to find Jeff McNeil playing time before the season started thanks to the odd off-season the Mets had leading into 2019. Davis got an opportunity and ran with it, hitting 70 points higher, getting on base 70 points higher and slugging around 120 points higher than his projected totals. Baseball Prospectus had him right around league average for a hitter and he ended up 22% better than average.
BVW failed in a lot of different ways last year, but this wasn’t one of them. The Davis trade was an absolute steal for the Mets. He has a similar problem going into this season, where he doesn’t quite have a position and the Mets still may trade him to upgrade somewhere else.
If that doesn’t happen, it will be interesting to see how computers adjust in their 2020 projections.