As we continue to wait to see what happens with the start of the baseball season, we continue to think about projections for different players. Under normal circumstances a player like J.D. Davis would be difficult to project. He’s coming off a breakout year without a clear position on to a Mets roster that gets increasingly crowded the healthier it gets.
J.D. Davis made me look like I had the worst take in the world last year, and I love it. Last year around this time I was vocal against the Davis trade because I was a big fan of both prospects the Mets gave up (Luis Santana and Ross Adolph) plus the Mets just signed Jed Lowrie and Davis looked like an extra player that was needed.
Lowrie ended up basically never playing, a story that is still continuing and Davis went from a 78 DRC+ in in 2017 and a 68 DRC+ in 2018 (meaning he was 22% worse and 32% worse than the average hitter in the league both of those seasons) to 122 in 2019 (flipping it, hitting 22% than the average hitter). Plus we all fell in love with his charm in the dugout.
2019 Stats: 453 PA, 410 AB, 22 HR, .307/.369/.527, 1.0 WAR, 122 DRC+
The problem for Davis is where does he play. The Mets have a million corner outfielders and no center fielders, and dozen fringe third basemen. It will be Rojas’ job to find time for him somewhere because when he plays, Davis delivers.
Looking at his 2020 projections, it seems that most places are saying that he played above his level last year, he’s projected for steep step backs in power and a moderate step back in OBP, but even with that a line of .270/.333/.472 is still quite good when you’re not supposed to be nearly the best bat in the linuep. And remember, of course, we are really only looking at his slash line, stats like homers, PA’s, AB’s don’t mean anything without knowing how many games will be played this season.
This is one of those rare projection articles where we see regression, agree that the regression makes sense but the regression is still so much higher than we were anticipating a year ago we don’t care.
(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)
