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.

It’s hard to forget Bryce Harper just turned 22 years old this past October. For a lot of top tier prospects they’re entering Double-A at the age of 22, but Harper is performing at the Major League level.

For two years in a row Harper has missed a substantial amount of time due to injury. What’s interesting is both of those injuries came on fluke plays. Last year he tore a ligament in his thumb sliding into a base and in 2013 it was because he ran into a wall while playing a fly ball. Usually I like players staying healthy in the future if the injuries are fluky rather than tissue-based injuries, but since he plays the game so hard the likelihood of him sustaining a fluky injury is higher.

Starting on April 26, 2014 he missed 57 games with the torn ligament in his thumb. For the first 25 games of the season he struggled, hitting only .232. When he came off the DL on June 30 it was obvious he wasn’t 100% when he came back from the DL because he was rolling over on a lot of balls he would’ve crushed. When August rolled around he caught fire. In the last two months of the season he hit .283 with a .805 OPS and ten home runs.

Also, his strikeout rate increased dramatically last year as it rose seven percentage points (from 18.9% to 26.3%). You may be thinking a lot of that increase occurred when he first came back from the DL, but he struck out 26.9% the last two months of the season.

If you look at his three Major League seasons he has hit between .270-.274 every year so it’s natural to project him to have a batting average in that range in 2015. However, last year he was able to hit .273 last year with an incredibly high .352 BABIP. The BABIP was fueled by a .333 batting average on ground balls. The two years prior he only hit .240 on ground balls. If the high strikeout rate continues to be north of the 25% may only be a .250 hitter next year.

Since Harper is so young and has missed big chunks of the past two seasons it’s hard to get a gauge what his current true talent really is. He has the raw physical tools to be the best fantasy player in baseball, which makes him intriguing on draft day. If he can play in 145-plus games he easily hits 26 home runs with room for more and if Matt Williams doesn’t bat him seventh all year he could have 90-plus RBIs.