When Brodie Van Wagenen took over as the New York Mets general manager, his first big splash was to make a blockbuster trade to acquire his former client Robinson Canó. That deal has become the defining trade for Van Wagenen and not for positive reasons.
Canó hit a homer on Opening Day in his regular season Mets debut (actually he played a role in all the scoring offense that day), but from that point on, he struggled to find any rhythm offensively through an injury-plagued season.
2019 Stats: 423 PA, 390 AB, .256/.307/.428, 13 HR, 28 2B, 39 RBI, 0.3 WAR, 89 DRC+
While his season was a disappointment as a whole, Canó did finish with strong second half that salvaged what turned out to be the worst season of his career. The 37-year-old hopes to build off that second half to produce better results in 2020.
The good news is that most of the projections see Canó making a step back in the positive direction. Even Baseball Prospectus, who basically see him performing the same, projects Canó to play more games, giving him a higher DRC+ than last year (putting him at 7% worse than the average major league hitter rather than 11% where he was last year).
It’s interesting that Steamer and ESPN feel the same about Canó. ESPN classically overvalues players, making them more enticing to draft. Yet Steamer has a reliable record of accuracy in their projections and came to a similar conclusion as ESPN on Canó.
Although the average projections across the board aren’t pretty, if Canó can stay healthy and consistent, he will be just one key cog in what should be a formidable offense for the Mets.
What will be tricky for manager Luis Rojas is to figure out how many games Canó plays and how to balance the players making the most money vs the players with the best bats.
Of course, we have no idea what this means in a shortened season and we can’t accurately make a prediction until we know how many games will be played next year. With that being said, 15 homers feels incredibly optimistic (it didn’t feel optimistic when I first drafted this article on 2/17).
Still, Canó appears to be an X-Factor this season because of how low the expectations are for him after 2019. If Canó can produce anything close to his career .843 OPS in 2020, that would be a pleasant surprise.
(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)
