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.

Carl Crawford’s 2014 seasons’ numbers are a little misleading as an incredible September heavily inflated those numbers (table below).

When see numbers like that I’m more inclined to believe the larger sample size before the one fluky breakout month. You’ll notice the ground ball rate dropped almost eight percentage points, which indicates he may been making harder contact – maybe because he was finally healthy?

At the end of May he went on the DL with a sprained left ankle; he missed 41 games. In the last four seasons he’s only averaged 96 games played. Even if he’s healthy, which is a big if, he’s going to be platooned against left handed pitching. Last year he was platooned with Scott Van Slyke; the Dodgers also acquired Chris Heisey from the Reds who will also be another platoon candidate. Moving forward Crawford will probably start receiving the Coco Crisp treatment in that he’ll play 90-110 games but there will be a lot of days off in order to keep him healthy.

Overall, I think the batting average regresses to the .280-.289 range and the home runs stay in the 7-10 range. The big wild card is the stolen bases. To his credit he stole roughly the same number of bases before and after the injury (9 and 14 respectively) so it’s reasonable to expect 15 as a floor with room for 25-30. For me Crawford doesn’t provide the upside to warrant taking him in drafts because the likelihood of injury is high I don’t see him performing at the level he did with the Tampa Rays.