Not having any baseball right now is tough and we are looking for ways to still engage with our favorite pastime and dream about the 2020 season, whenever it starts. So we are going to start examining the Mets roster and look at projections from Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, ZiPS and Steamer to them in perspective with the 2019 season.
We wanted to address COVID-19 directly first. All of our favorite baseball players are humans, first.
“I’m a normal guy. Like I love baseball with all of my heart, but at the end of the day, baseball is a job title,” Pete Alonso said. “Like me as a first baseman for the New York Mets, that is a job title. I want to be a human being first.”
I loved that quote from Pete Alonso from the perspective of “we are not defined by our jobs” but now I love that quote because we have to protect all of us during these unprecedented times by remembering we are all humans first. It’s not enough to play in front of empty stadiums, the players are humans and they shouldn’t be playing.
And with that, I’m excited to kick off the 2020 series of projections with Pete Alonso. This year we decided to go in alphabetical order, hitters first than pitchers.
First in the alphabet is the 2019 non-roster invitee to spring training who wasn’t sure he’d make the 2020 team out of camp due to service time considerations.
It’s a good thing they didn’t try to obtain an extra year of control as Alonso’s call up paid dividends immediately.
By playing a whole season, he smashed the single-season homer record for a New York Met and a rookie with 53, picking up the Home Run Derby title and the Rookie of the Year along the way. He’s already rocked spring training this year claiming that his goal is to “be on a float drunk as hell”.
Don’t we all want that? Either for him or ourselves?
Let’s take a look at his amazing 2019 stats and then peak at how different sites think he’ll do in 2020.
2019 Stats: 693 PA, 597 AB, 53 HR, .260/.358/.583, 5.0 WAR, 141 DRC+
There are two dubious math things happening here. First, all of these projections have different histories of being correct, predict different playing time and have vastly different formulas that make them up. Averaging them all together cannot be taken seriously as an aggregate line.
Rather, it’s a line of stats that can point us in a general direction of what projections think are going to happen. Second, all of these projections were made based on a 162 game season.
We aren’t going to pretend to know what the length of the season is going to be at this point. Cumulative stats (homers for example) are going to need to be prorated. The slash line is what we should focus on here.
Looking at the slugging percentage, most projections see a very slight drop in power. That makes sense since it’s very hard to break records in back to back years. What’s interesting is who thinks a drop will happen vs. who doesn’t.
BP tends to be more conservative about back to back performances and they are projecting almost an identical year to last season, putting up the same WAR and an almost identical DRC+. ESPN, usually more bullish, is one of the more dampened projections.
Even the worst line from the ultra-conservative on projections baseball-reference has Alonso hitting a line that would lead the offense (where they see a significant drop in power they also see a rise in OBP).
The Mets are hoping Pete Alonso carries the offense again and the projections show that a strong sophomore season could be in store for Alonso
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.
