By Brian Joura January 7, 2021
One of my goals as both a fan and a writer is to accurately judge each player, manager, coach and executive. It’s always a challenging thing to do because you can’t help but to have favorites, biases and people you just don’t like. As an example, it is my firm belief that LOOGYs were massively overrated, both by fans and management of the Mets. But that bias of mine does not extend to thinking all lefty relievers are bad. In my mind tendering Robert Gsellman and cutting loose Chasen Shreve was a big mistake. To me, Shreve’s performance greatly outweighed the flexibility of Gsellman, both his available options and alleged ability to pitch effectively in MLB as both a starter and a reliever.
Some people think there’s a bias from me towards Michael Conforto. But my position is to judge a player both by what he’s done and what he’s likely to do going forward. Conforto had a great year in 2020, if he kept up his pace over an entire 162-game season, he would have finished with a 5.4 fWAR, a full 1.0 better than his previous best. That’s terrific.
However, the previous two season, both with over 150 games played, resulted in fWAR marks of 3.0 and 3.7 for Conforto. My opinion is that’s more likely to be Conforto’s true talent level than what he did in 2020 extrapolated to a full season. My personal value for Conforto is as a 3-4 fWAR player. That’s a really good guy to have on your team. If you had a 3-4 fWAR player at every position, you’d probably win the pennant. The Nationals, the last team to win a World Series in a 162-game season, had at least a 3-fWAR season from just three hitters and three pitchers.
Meanwhile, Nick Castellanos put up fWAR marks of 2.5-3.0 in three of the four years before he was a free agent following the 2019 season. He got a 4/$64 with an opt out after one year. My valuation of Conforto has him as a better player than Castellanos. If Castellanos was worth an AAV of $16 million, Conforto to me would be worth somewhere around $20 million.
If Conforto was a free agent this season, rather than next, he would be behind George Springer in the pecking order. Springer was on pace for a 5.1 fWAR season in 2020, slightly behind Conforto. But Springer was better previously. He enjoyed a likely career year with a 6.5 fWAR in 2019 but he also has a 4.5 and 5.0 seasons under his belt – making three seasons better than Conforto’s best – outside of 2020.
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