2019 ZiPS Projections – New York Mets

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets.

Batters

The lineup feels a lot like one fielded by the St. Louis Cardinals. There are no bonafide superstar projections on the offense (Robinson Cano‘s projections don’t look like they used to, though ZiPS thinks he’ll still be a good player) but there’s a surprising amount of depth, providing a number of solid options for those times when stuff hits the fan. That approach is a smart way for a team in contention to construct its roster, given that teams with serious playoff aspirations should be more risk-averse than middling or rebuilding teams are; depth is certainly a preferable strategy to hoping injuries somehow pass you by. There’s one thing St. Louis has that the New York Mets have lacked, however: a track record of actually doing a good job shuffling their offensive talent around. The Cardinals very rarely bury players, but the Mets have been known to do all sorts of weird things, such as going into seasons without an obvious starting job for Michael Conforto, signing Jose Reyes and then playing him way too often, prioritizing Jay Bruce’s playing time, and needing some bad luck on the injury front to actually give Brandon Nimmo a full-time job coming off a .379 on-base percentage in 69 games in 2017. Whether you want to blame their managers or ownership, the Mets have made some real head-scratching decisions.

And so while are a lot of options here, the Mets will have to prove that they can deploy their talent effectively. Jeff McNeil doesn’t have an obvious starting role, so the team has to demonstrate that they want to find at-bats for him, not just give them to him grudgingly as they did in 2018, only after the obviously worse options played very obviously worse. Once Peter Alonso is down in the minors just long enough to get another year of cost control for the Mets … errr … I mean once Peter Alonso is finished polishing his game coincidentally in just enough games to delay his free agency for a year, getting him playing time should be the priority over the more expensive Todd Frazier. Yoenis Cespedes‘ heel surgeries will likely keep the Mets from having to make any tricky outfield decisions (his ZiPS projection is mostly theoretical) for a while, but that won’t last forever.

Pitchers

I like Jed Lowrie, but if you could buy baseball players from a catalog, I’d be calling customer service and telling the agent “Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with him, and he works fine and everything, but do you have him in pitcher?” The front four looks very solid, but the team has given every indication that Jason Vargas will take the fifth starter job if no other options are acquired this winter. Remember what I said about how contending teams should be risk-averse? Vargas is an extremely risky pitcher, and even though it hasn’t been so long since he pretended to be Greg Maddux for a few months in early 2017, I’d really like the team to do better here, given the noise they’ve made about contending and the very real improvements in other parts of the roster.

Edwin Diaz is a significant addition, and it’s surprising how cheaply they were able to add Diaz and Cano to the roster, both in terms of money and prospects. Of all the ZiPS teams to go up on FanGraphs so far, Diaz has the highest projected WAR of any relief pitcher and the lowest ERA, by three-tenths of a run. And that’s not just because I’ve run bad teams; Craig Kimbrel, Kenley Jansen, Andrew Miller, and Brad Hand have already gone live. Signing Luis Avilan to just a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to spring training may go down as one of the best low-key deals of the winter, and the back end of the bullpen is better than many think.

Bench and Prospects

Perhaps my favorite projection for the Mets this year is the league-average projection for minor league reliever Stephen Villines, who I suspect would attract the interest of my friend/mortal enemy/ex-FanGraphs editor Carson Cistulli. He’s not really on the prospect radar much, but he had an interesting first professional season, striking out 54 of 138 batters in the Sally League, 25 of 77 for Hi-A St. Lucie, and then after a final promotion to Double-A Binghamton, striking out 17 of 43 batters. That’s 96 strikeouts against just 13 walks and three homers in 66.2 innings. Now, if he was doing this by blowing batters away with a 95 mph fastball, he’d be on prospects lists. But he doesn’t — he’s a soft-tosser who gets by on changing speeds and a slow slider. But he’s also a sidearmer, with a motion that looks like he wants to throw submarine but gives up halfway and just whips it around, kinda like Terry Leach’s delivery (I’m dating myself). We’ve seen sidearmers/submariners survive with slower stuff than you’d expect was sustainable — guys like Chad Bradford and Mike Myers come to mind — so while Villines could blow up in a bad way against Triple-A hitters, I’m intrigued.

ZiPS already gives Andres Gimenez a win per 600 PA in 2019 and projects enough growth from him to make for an interesting decision for the Mets at shortstop in a few years. ZiPS has come off its love for Dominic Smith, but still thinks Dilson Herrera would at least be a good role player if he can stay healthy. Believe it or not, Herrera is still just 24 (he turns 25 in March) even though it feels like he’s been around forever. There’s really no room for him on the Mets the way the team is currently constructed, but he could still resurface elsewhere and have some type of major league career — people wrote off Jose Peraza at way too young an age, too.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.