If you like what you’re reading then you will like my 2015 Fantasy Baseball Guide! Last year’s fantasy guide was more than 150,000 words and had 440 player profiles (of hitters and pitchers). My approach to player evaluation is to ask questions about what the player has done in the past and what he may do in the future. I certainly provide a narrative on how I feel a player will perform, but I also ask a lot of open ended questions that I hope will get you thinking about the information I’ve provided.

There’s a lot of buzz about how the new dimensions at the Mets home ballpark is going to help increase Curtis Granderson’s home run totals in 2015. The new dimensions are being made primarily in right center (image below):

Based on that information if looks like this should help increase the home runs for Granderson, but most of his home runs the past three seasons were hit to right and a little bit to right-center field (image below courtesy of FanGraphs).

The question is will the power come back next year? From 2010-13 (when he played for the Yankees) he had a 14.7% HR/FB rate on the road compared to 20.6% at home. Last year he had a 6.2% rate at home compared to 13.5% on the road. So, last year he showed the same power as before, which implies the power is still there. The question how much do you think the alterations to the home ballpark will affect him. Last year he hit 113 fly balls and seven home runs. Suppose his HR/FB rate jumps to 10% then he would’ve hit 10-11, which isn’t that much more. Maybe he hits 25 next year, but I don’t see anymore than that.

One thing I didn’t expect to see in 2014 was his strikeout rate decreasing nearly seven percentage points along with the SwStr% decreasing four percentage points, which implies he’s approach at the plate has improved. The question is if the strikeout rate decreased so much why wasn’t there any improvement in the batting average? It turns out he got extremely unlucky on fly balls. The image below shows his batting average on fly balls since 2008 (I excluded the 2013 season because of a small sample size).

Last year was his lowest batting average on fly balls with .270; from 2008-10 the batting average was .298 so there should be some positive regression next year. I’m projecting Granderson to hit .238 (in 530 ABs) with 23 home runs, eight stolen bases and 70 runs and RBI.