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.
Throughout December we’ve reviewed the projections for tons of pitchers who started out Spring Training with the Mets, today we start hitters (amazing coincidence that it fell on the first day of the year). As with pitchers, we are doing these reviews in the reverse order that we wrote them in the spring, meaning we start with fringe players first.
Last year we wrote that Adeiny Hechavarria was going to be a long shot to make the team, but Todd Frazier and Jed Lowrie were nursing injuries. That sentence looks quite different after the season where Lowrie was injured for pretty much all of it. The projections for Hechavarria are in the following table followed by his stats as a Met, as a Brave (he was released in August) and overall in 2019:
2019 Mets: 151 PA, 142 AB, 5 HR, .204/.252/.359, .611 OPS, -0.2 WAR, 73 DRC+
2019 Braves: 70 PA, 61 AB, 4 HR, .328/.400/.639, 1.039 OPS, 1.1 WAR, 132 DRC+
2019 Total: 221 PA, 203 AB, 9 HR, .241/.299/.443, .742 OPS
Essentially, as a Met, Adeiny was under performing either by a sizable amount or a massive amount depending on what statistics you favor for this kind of thing. Baseball Prospectus, via DRC+, was projecting him 10% worse than the average player, he was performing 27% worse than the average player.
Then he got released, picked up by another team and like other players in the last decade, everything swung the other way. He actually finishes the year above average in all metrics that matter (OBP, OPS, WAR, DRC+). Going back to DRC+, as a Brave he was 32% better than the average player.
So on the whole, the projections undersold Adeiny a bit, but really he had two different seasons depending on which uniform he was wearing.
