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.

Wade Miley is really good, but most people don’t know that because his numbers have been inflated by the Diamondbacks ballpark. The table below shows his career home-road statistics (he has identical BABIPs at home versus the road).

Being traded to the Red Sox doesn’t necessarily help his fantasy value, but the Diamondbacks ballpark is a bad pitchers park so the change will not be very dramatic. What will be dramatic is he will not have a chunk of his starts in the friendly confines of the NL West (excluding Colorado obviously).

The reason why the strikeout rate improved was because of the increased usage of the slider (image below from BrooksBaseball.net).

His fastball can be flat so he’s going to be home run prone so the HR/FB rate could actually increase next year. However, among starting pitchers with at least 20 starts he threw the second highest total of pitches down in the zone last year. Therefore, the HR/FB rate could increase, but not by a lot.

The biggest positive about going to the Red Sox is since he’s a high ground ball pitcher and Boston’s defensive infield should be an upgrade, which will make him streamable at times (usually when he’s playing outside of the AL East). He’s never been on the DL since entering the majors, which means he should be able to provide 170-plus strikeouts, a sneaky option for 14-plus wins and an average ERA and WHIP.

My 2015 projection for Miley is 200 IP, 3.85 ERA, 1.34 WHIP, 175 Ks and 13 wins.