I love looking back after a season at what people were saying during spring training. Sure Sandy Alderson said that the team could win 90 games but we all knew that wasn’t a realistic goal. Instead, guys like Adam Rubin, Joe Lemire and the fine folks over at Bleacher Report all made predictions for the season. Let’s see how they did.
ESPN’s Adam Rubin speculated about whether .500 was a legitimate goal and if it mattered. Turns out the Mets fell short of that goal. He also correctly alluded to the trading of Ike Davis. He correctly speculated that Chris Young was overrated by Sandy Alderson but thought the same of Bartolo Colon. Colon ended up being a strong point for the Mets.
One of the funniest things to look back on were the bullpen projections. Names like Jose Valverde, Kyle Farnsworth and Bobby Parnell were quickly replaced with Jenrry Mejia, Vic Black and Jeurys Familia. In the end, Rubin had the Mets finishing in 4th in the NL East with a 76-86 record. They ended up winning three more games and finishing in 2nd.
Bleacher Report Featured Columnist Sean Cunningham made some of the more amusing predictions. He had Chris Young finishing in the top 10 in home runs in the NL, Travis D’Arnaud becoming a first time All-Star and Daniel Murphy finishing in the top 5 for the batting title. Murphy’s .289 average puts him at #13.
Cunningham did get two things spot on. He predicted that Zack Wheeler would have the team’s worst winning percentage and that Juan Lagares would win a Gold Glove. While Wheeler’s wasn’t quite the worst at .500, it wasn’t good and Lagares could easily take home center field’s top award next month.
Sports Illustrated’s Joe Lemire made a few bold predictions that got away from him. Among them were that the Mets would have a winning season with 82 wins. We know now that this wasn’t the case.
The prediction game is fun but it’s meant more as an exercise than a critique. Predicting sports is near impossible and baseball is probably the trickiest of them all. I’ll be sure to make my predictions for 2015 well known so that one year from now I can see how wrong (or right) I was!
