NY Mets free agent reunion with Jesse Winker isn’t free of major red flags

What is Jesse Winker projected to do this season?

Projecting a player in Winker’s situation is almost unfair because he’ll have the benefit of facing a lot of right-handed pitchers and therefore should theoretically have better numbers. Nevertheless, FanGraphs and their multitude of projections can give us some sort of a guide into what type of numbers he could put out regardless of exactly how he is used.

ZiPS has him hitting .239/.353/.382 with 12 home runs and 54 RBI. The heavier part of a planned platoon with a chance of seeing his role increase or decrease rather easily, it’s not terrible. The low number of home runs is a bit disappointing yet much easier to accept if we were to see a jump from a guy like Francisco Alvarez.

The trouble with Winker is there isn’t much else he offers aside from the dozen or so home runs we can expect on top of a flurry of walks. In a lot of ways, we can almost compare him to Daniel Vogelbach. Winker can at least play the field albeit incredibly poorly. He can run a little, too. At the plate, the projections don’t have him doing much more than Vogelbach in 2023. It was that lone full year with the Mets when Vogey hit .233/.339/.404 with 13 home runs and 48 RBI in 319 plate appearances—far less than the 466 for Winker’s projections and yet the home run and RBI totals are incredibly close.

Winker fell into familiar bad habits in September, successfully working out of them in the playoffs. We’ll be thankful if his end-of-season numbers look anything close to the .253/.360/.405 he combined to hit. We shouldn’t be shocked if it ends up being far less.