From 2007-13 Steve Pearce had 17 home runs in his Major League career. Last year he hit 21 at the age of 31. It’s expected to assume Pearce had a career year and automatically assume he cannot repeat 2014s numbers. To be honest that’s what I did and that is the reason why he wasn’t in my 2015 fantasy guide.

Let’s first look at his home run power spike. Anyone who reads my writing knows I look at extra base hit percentage to get an idea of how much hard contact a hitter is making. Usually I combine all of a hitters extra base hits, but since Pearce’s HR/FB rate last year was literally ten percentage points higher than his career rate I excluded home runs from the calculation. The table below compares his hits against his doubles and triples.

The numbers in the table confirms that he wasn’t making harder contact than year’s past. In fact he was making the same amount of hard contact as the previous two seasons and it looks like he got lucky with the HR/FB rate last year. However, I don’t expect him to automatically turn into a pumpkin.

The first reason is his fly ball rate was the highest of career last year (45.6%), which means even if the HR/FB regresses he should be able to hit for some power. The second is the home ballpark. Camden Yards is a great ballpark for home runs and specifically, right handed power. The third is he’s expected to bat fifth behind Adam Jones and Chris Davis. If Davis even somewhat positively regresses Pearce is going to have a lot of men on-base when he’s hitting. I’m projecting a .258 AVG with 16 home runs, 68 RBI/runs and three stolen bases.