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.
So far we’ve gone through hitters (part 1, part 2) and the first set of pitchers (part 1), today we continue with the second set with Seth Lugo, Steven Matz, Rick Porcello and Marcus Stroman:
(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)
Seth Lugo’s numbers are helpful as we try to predict “what does bullpen usage look like in 60 games”. We would expect Lugo to see action every 2-3 games (closer to every three games) so 26 or so innings seems about right.
You have to take Porcello’s numbers with a grain of salt. Projection programs in the winter were trying to predict how much playing time he would see in a regular season. Since they were produced, Syndergaard had TJ, thus pretty much cementing full time roles for both Porcello and Wacha as their role to lose, rather than to fight to gain.
Out of the four pitchers listed – Stroman is the most important for the season. He was arguably the #2 starter when Wheeler and Syndergaard were still on the team. He is now the clear #2 starter. He’s also quickly becoming fan favorite (or at least, this fan’s favorite).
