If you are a long time reader of this site, you know that pretty much every spring, in a very unscientific way, we collect the projections for Mets players from a variety of sources, average them together and create a conglomerate projection for the upcoming season (which we then return to at the end of the season).
Rather than doing that again for every player, we are going to go through some players a group at a time and look at their data. I’ve restricted it to players I’m anticipating seeing a larger portion of play time. I also had to remove some players that are no longer with the Mets (wishing you the best Jacob Rhame!)
Anyway, today we start the first of three posts for pitchers. Pitchers are going to work a little differently. If you checked out the hitters projections (part 1, part 2), I only showed the final conglomerate projection and the 60 game version. But when I did the pitchers in the Spring, only Innings Pitched and WAR were cumulative stats, so I’m taking the incorrect view that the rest of the stats should be the same (that simplifies a lot that shouldn’t be simplified) so I’m going to show all the data again with the original sourcing.
Today we’ll look at Dellin Betances, Brad Brach, Jacob deGrom, Edwin Diaz, Jeurys Familia, and Robert Gsellman.
(Citations: BP projections come from the Baseball Prospectus Annual, a must read for all baseball fans and can be purchased here. ESPN comes from their fantasy baseball projections and can be found here. Both ZiPS and Steamer are found on FanGraphs. ZiPS can be found here, Steamer can be found here. BR comes from the Baseball Reference for this specific player and is linked earlier in the article)
At the start of the season I thought that the Mets success would be aligned to how well Brad Brach performs, he was a sneaky, under the radar resigning who could have a huge positive impact. He still has not reported to camp yet, so his projections here may be a mute point.
Really the only new thing to consider is how much time will pitchers see on the mound. Plus, with more pitchers on the roster overall time on the mound compared to a 60 game stretch in a regular season, will be less as well.
In the stats above, we have a lot of what the Mets success hinges on. Jacob deGrom is the best player on the team and the Mets need him to be that, again. The bullpen was the weakest part of the team last year. Here we have the projections of the three most important players in the pen: Diaz, Familia and Betances. Let’s see what happens at the end of July.
