We wrapped up all the pitcher projections and now we can move on to the hitters!
There are a lot of stat projection publications available on the internet and magazine shelves. Rather than trusting one (although if I had to pick one, it would be Baseball Prospectus), I like to average the projections together. In a perfect world, I would take data from the several years I’ve done this to figure out how to weight the projections in the average, but for now just a straight average will be fine. This tends to round out the higher/lower outliers while still allowing them to have a say in the conversation. Let’s take a look at the average projections for Yoenis Cespedes:
| Yoenis Cespedes | |||||||||
| PA | AB | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | OBP | SLG | |
| 2016 | 543 | 479 | 72.00 | 31 | 86 | 3 | 0.28 | 0.354 | 0.53 |
| Projections | |||||||||
| MLB.com | 555 | 87.00 | 33 | 97 | 4 | 0.286 | 0.345 | 0.533 | |
| Steamer | 532 | 73.00 | 28 | 84 | 4 | 0.263 | 0.322 | 0.481 | |
| ZiPS | 596 | 83.00 | 30 | 95 | 5 | 0.266 | 0.317 | 0.498 | |
| ESPN | 87.00 | 32 | 98 | 5 | 0.275 | ||||
| Baseball Prospectus | 602 | 74.00 | 28 | 86 | 5 | 0.261 | 0.317 | 0.475 | |
| Sporting News | 560 | 80.00 | 30 | 92 | 4 | 0.273 | 0.33 | 0.493 | |
| NBC Rotoworld | 547 | 88.00 | 32 | 95 | 5 | 0.271 | 0.333 | 0.506 | |
| Rotowire | 551 | 85.00 | 31 | 95 | 5 | 0.279 | 0.333 | 0.517 | |
| Baseball America | 594 | 79.00 | 27 | 88 | 5 | 0.274 | 0.324 | 0.473 | |
| FBG 2017 | 546 | 84.00 | 31 | 93 | 5 | 0.273 | |||
| Average | 599 | 555 | 82 | 30.2 | 92.3 | 4.7 | 0.2721 | 0.327625 | 0.497 |
The Mets season depends on Yoenis Cespedes. He went into the off-season as possibly the best hitter on the market. And it looks like Cespedes is going to have another Cespedes like season with an average of 30+ homers projected and 92+ RBI’s.
His slash lines don’t look to regress too much, and in addition Cespedes has already talked in camp about how he wants win the MVP this year.
Sources:
MLB.com and Steamer Projections can both be found here.
ZiPS projections can be found here.
ESPN projections can be found here.
Seidler, Jarrett & BP Staff. (2017) Baseball Prospectus 2017. New York, New York:Turner Publishing Company
The Fantasy Baseball Guide (2017)
Sporting News Fantasy Baseball (2017)
Baseball America Fantasy Guide (2017)
Rotowire Fantasy Baseball (2017)
Rotoworld Fansty Baseball (2017)
Notes:
Article Written on 3/14, stats collected 2/19 and may have changed after collection. Not all sources above may have been used in this article specifically but were used in judgment calls for reliability of the data
