2023 Steamer Projections: Teoscar Hernandez could see a drop in Seattle

The Mariners biggest acquisition, so far at least, has been trading away Erik Swanson and Adam Macko in order to fill a massive offensive hole in their roster. They acquired Teoscar Hernandez in the deal, who has quietly been a very good hitter over the last 4 years. Knowing that it’s interesting to take a look at Steamer to see what they have to say about him.

I think most Mariners fans are happy to have Hernandez. He doesn’t play great defense and is below average. With Julio next to him and a fairly simple RF in Seattle, he should be able to cap it at below average, without falling into the poor defender category. We are also going to see him DH a bit, cause the bat needs to be in the lineup as much as possible.

Steamer thinks we will see a bit of regression from Teoscar Hernandez

For each of these that I do throughout this whole series, I’m going to try and provide a couple of reasonable comparisons from the players career, and put that up against the Steamer projection. We saw that it was pretty darn accurate looking for Julio Rodriguez. Will the same hold up for Teoscar Hernandez?

Steamer shows him having a decent size drop-off. He played really well in 2020, which increases his averages when you apply the multiplier to get to a full season. He also dominated in 2021. It still seems like quite the drop-off. They’re projecting him to play more games than last year, but score runs at a lower rate, and be worse across the board for his slash line.

Sure, Seattle isn’t the greatest place to hit, but Teoscar hits the ball hard. It’s not a fluke either. Baseball Savant and Baseball-Reference have different numbers for him in 2018 and 2019, so I’m going with Baseball-Reference here.

Over that time frame, he averaged a 92.3 mph exit velocity with a hard-hit rating of 50.3%. It’s incredibly impressive. So maybe we see the HR go down a bit, but I think you are still going to see a lot of extra-base hits from Teoscar. That being said, Hernandez has actually been projected to hit five more HR if he would’ve played in Seattle during his career. So, 30 HR isn’t that far off for him.

Plus, you are looking at a guy who is 20th in WRC+ over the last three years. That’s really good to put with a kid like Julio, alongside Suarez and Big Dumper. All of a sudden, the lineup is much deeper, especially after upgrading Frazier to Kolten Wong.

I think Steamer is taking the safe road with Teoscar. It wouldn’t surprise me to see him put up better numbers than they project. I’m not saying he goes crazy and enters the MVP conversation, but a .265/.327/.490 with 30 HR and a 128 WRC+ seems like a reasonable projection.