Mets 2025 projections: Jose Siri & Tyrone Taylor

Last year, new PoBO David Stearns came to town touting an emphasis on defense. Harrison Bader, Brett Baty, Zack Short and Joey Wendle all made the Opening Day roster. By the end of the year, only Bader was still on the team and he was riding the pine. Emphasizing defense sounds great until you have to watch those guys hit. Bader’s 86 OPS+ was the highlight of the group and even that overstates what he was most of the year, thanks to a six-week hot streak in the middle of the season. In his final 157 PA, Bader posted a .161/.223/.273 line. That’s a .496 OPS. Wendle had a .493 OPS with the Mets and that was a 42 OPS+. That’s horrific.

The Mets didn’t bring Bader back. But they got Bader 2.0 when they traded for Jose Siri. At this point in their careers, Siri is a better defender than Bader and he has more power, too. But there is a giant question mark surrounding whether he can hit. Two years ago, Siri posted a 105 OPS+ in 364 PA. That got him more playing time in 2024. But in 448 PA last year, Siri had a 76 OPS+. In 1,186 PA in the majors, Siri has a lifetime 88 OPS+.

Tyrone Taylor took over CF duties from Bader last year. It took a while, because he had a dismal month of May. But from June 1 to the end of the year, Taylor had a .763 OPS in 229 PA. Pete Alonso had a .788 OPS last year – the closest mark to Taylor’s season-ending numbers – and he had a 123 OPS+. Taylor finished the year with a 99 OPS+ in 345 PA and lifetime he has a 101 OPS+ in 1,317 PA.

Siri’s a better defensive player, with a +40 in 2,672 innings in center field but Taylor with a lifetime +6 FRV in 1,137.1 innings in CF is no slouch. For the Mets, the question is if you want to play a great defensive center fielder with a balsa-wood bat over a solid defensive player with a league-average bat. At some point, the better defense is preferable to the better offense. Maybe that’s the case with these two players. Or maybe not.

It’s easier to look at the two players offensively. Since we’re doing two players in one projection piece, we’re going to use FGDC, which is a sort of aggregate of the five systems that are hosted on FanGraphs. It’s not a perfect averaging of the forecasts. But it’s close enough for our purposes. And here they are for our two players:

JS – 413 PA, .210/.269/.393, 17 HR and a 1.5 fWAR
TT – 336 PA, .233/.289/.400, 10 HR and a 1.1 fWAR

The conventional wisdom of the computer models is that Siri deserves more playing time. And if the difference in OPS is only 27 points, that’s probably the right answer. However, if it’s a 79-point difference like it was in 2024, then Taylor’s likely the better overall player.

Last season, Bader started 59 of the Mets’ first 80 games, while Taylor started 35 times in the same time frame. But over the final two months, Taylor got 27 starts while Bader received 33. And the only reason that Bader received that many was that the Mets had to cover for both an injured Starling Marte and a slumping J.D. Martinez.

My guess is that it starts out similarly to last year, with the better defensive player getting more time initially. Will Siri hit enough to maintain his playing time edge? Will someone else get hurt to require multiple times with both of the team’s center fielders starting the same game? Here’s my totally biased forecasts for these two players:

Siri – 342 PA, .203/.260/.394, 13 HR

Taylor – 410 PA, .250/.320/.420, 11 HR

You’ll have more credibility if you weigh in now with what you think Siri and Taylor will do this year. All predictions for him are welcome, although the ones that use the same five categories as the article make me smile.