Time to turn our attention to center field, the eighth position we’ve tackled since Dave Cameron kicked off the series with an informative introduction.

Used to be, you put a fly catcher in center and didn’t worry too much about offense, even if he batted leadoff because he was fast. Willie McGee and Otis Nixon come to mind, though their on-base percentages were decent enough, maybe. They didn’t have power, though. Those years, the position’s isolated power was around 10% worse than league average.

These days, it seems the position has evolved. There are center fielders now who don’t count fielding as their best strength, and their collective power is now closer to average than it used to be. Even Kevin Kiermaier — in some ways a throwback, defense-first burner — has decent power. Maybe down table, around two thirds down the list, you’ll find some guys that would have fit on any 80s squad in center.

But Leonys Martin, Billy Hamilton, and Odubel Herrera are today’s maybes instead of yesterday’s sure things, it seems. Today we wonder if Odubel’s defense is as good as his tools, or if Martin will ever hit lefties, or if Hamilton will ever hit righties. In any case, they provide diversity where some other positions have lacked it. There’s a long way from Yoenis Cespedes to Billy Hamilton.

Let’s separate the burners from the bombers among today’s center fielders!

Looks like two or three stars, a couple clearly above-average guys after that, and then a big bucket of decent. They won’t all get there the same way, but today’s center fielders can swing the stick a bit.

#1 Angels

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Name	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	Bat	BsR	Fld	WAR
Mike Trout	658	.300	.405	.580	.414	54.4	3.1	0.6	8.7
Craig Gentry	35	.234	.291	.306	.266	-1.2	0.2	0.5	0.1
Rafael Ortega	7	.237	.299	.318	.275	-0.2	0.0	0.1	0.0
Total	700	.296	.398	.562	.405	53.0	3.3	1.2	8.8

This ranking is not built on depth. Should (perish the thought) Mike Trout go down with a season-ending injury, the Angels’ center-field situation would drop down to the bottom of the heap. That may sound like a knock on Craig Gentry — a decent defense-first center fielder when his legs are right — but more it’s just another way to fawn about Trout.

There are so many ways to fawn, though. As August Fagerstrom pointed out in his player cap, he’s already accrued more wins than any player in the history of baseball through their age-23 season. Only Ted Williams, Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, and Ty Cobb were any better with the bat alone, and Trout adds legs and glove to the package. Or you can go the route of Tony Blengino, who found that Trout was better than Micky Mantle through the same age. Or Jeff Sullivan it up, and chronicle the way that Trout has adjusted to every single wrinkle that the league has thrown at him, like handling the high pitch, and now including now taking inside pitches yard to the opposite field.

Or you can just be succinct, as Fagerstrom was when he summed up his player cap on Trout: the best in the world.

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Ben and Sam preview the Rays’ season with ESPN Insider’s Tommy Rancel, and George talks to Tampa Bay Times Rays beat writer Marc Topkin (at 24:47).

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Early next week, our Positional Power Rankings are going to turn to the pitching staffs. I’m slated to write about the top 15 starting rotations, and if I were to begin writing that piece now, I’d end up discussing how the Dodgers have the best starting rotation in the game. This is a controversial statement, because the Dodgers are built upon fragility, and they’ve already had something like 27 pitchers injured. How could the Dodgers possibly have a better rotation than, say, the Mets? The Mets roll four or five deep. They have three could-be aces. It’s easy to love the Mets; it’s correct to love the Mets. The argument for the Dodgers is that they have plenty of depth, and it’s also — importantly — that they have Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw’s not hurt, and Kershaw is basically two aces in one. No rotation has a better starting point.

I’ll write about that next week. I’ll write about it using many of the same words. When ranking the best groups, I think people have a bias toward even spreads over something more top-heavy. All of this here also functions as a spoiler. The PPR series runs down the rankings at every individual position, but a question a lot of people like to debate is, which team has baseball’s best outfield? We’ve had this conversation before, a year ago or something, when fans would compare and contrast the Marlins and the Pirates. Those remain two very good outfields. Yet based on what we have on FanGraphs, baseball’s best projected outfield for 2016 will play half its games in Anaheim.

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Whatever choices you’ve made in life, they’ve been poor enough to bring you here, a nearly interminable weblog post dedicated to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the league’s assorted right-field units. This, in case you’re unaware, is part of a larger position-by-position investigation being conducted by this site’s authors.

As basically everyone knows, the typical exchange rate between words and pictures is about 1,000 to 1. Due to advanced work being conducted by top scientists, the following image has actually been valued at roughly 6,000 words. Or, at least that’s how many words follow it.

Right fielders: are they more than just left fielders on the opposite side of the diamond? It’s the question of our time. Let us go then, you and I, and consider it at exhaustive length.

#1 Nationals

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Name	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	Bat	BsR	Fld	WAR
Bryce Harper	651	.306	.421	.577	.420	52.8	0.8	1.9	7.3
Clint Robinson	28	.249	.324	.383	.310	-0.2	0.0	-0.1	0.0
Matt den Dekker	21	.252	.309	.394	.306	-0.2	0.0	-0.1	0.0
Total	700	.301	.414	.562	.413	52.4	0.8	1.7	7.3

Whether it’s true or not in every case, accepted wisdom nevertheless suggests that wildly talented ballplayers rarely possess the appropriate temperament to become, later in their careers, wildly talented coaches. The reasoning goes like this: a player who contends with considerably little failure during his active career is unlikely to understand the trials of those who are forced to contend with failure at a much higher rate. Or something along those lines.

It wouldn’t be surprising to find such a phenomenon applying to Bryce Harper, who’s been (to varying degrees) one of Earth’s best hitters since he was 17 or 18 years old and who — at the age of 22 — just produced the top batting line of this young and frightening century among all players who aren’t Barry Bonds. One can imagine a 55-year-old Harper, taking control of club that’s just finished in last place, and wondering why all his players just don’t decide to be the best in the league at hitting.

Because projections are, at the most basic level, regression machines, Harper isn’t forecast to approach the 10-win threshold in 2016 like he did last season. But given his youth and talent and constantly improving approach, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he did that. And it would certainly be even less of a surprise if he recorded the top season among major-league right fielders.

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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Minnesota / Milwaukee / New York (NL) / New York (AL) / Oakland / Philadelphia/ Pittsburgh.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the San Diego Padres. In this companion piece, I look at that same San Diego farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Padres have the 11th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

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There’s a weird narrative going around with regards to the Dodgers right now. Somehow, the team’s lavish spending on international prospects has been construed as a sign that the team isn’t committed to winning in the short term. Or something. I’ll let Dylan Hernandez’s words from the LA Times try to explain it better.

This was the risk the front office assumed with its long-term plan, which is to be in 2020-something what the World Series favorite Chicago Cubs are now. That strategy explains why the pitching staff consists of primarily spare parts while tens of millions of dollars are being invested in Latin American teenagers.

There’s some logic to the idea, except you wonder if the team’s decision makers are looking too far ahead to recognize the opportunity right in front of them — specifically, that Clayton Kershaw is theirs for at least three more seasons.

At the end of the 2018 season, Kershaw will have the option of doing what Zack Greinke did over the winter and void the remainder of his contract. Greinke didn’t return. Kershaw might not, either.

The three-year period coincides with Kershaw’s prime years; the three-time Cy Young Award winner turned 28 on Saturday.

It’s puzzling why the Dodgers aren’t maximizing their chances of winning a World Series while this once-in-a-generation pitcher is on their roster.

Let’s look at some facts.

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Aaron Sanchez wants to be a starter. Most pitchers want to be a starter. Jesse Chavez and Gavin Floyd want to be starters, too, and they all might deserve it, which is the current conundrum in Toronto. Not that having too many qualified starters is a bad thing, per se, but it presents the team with some tough choices, choices that could complicate things down the line.

At the very least, Toronto can feel good about their depth. The top of their rotation might not match the firepower of their contending peers, but they’ll be sending two seemingly competent starters to the bullpen at the end of Spring Training, with Drew Hutchison heading to the minors as perhaps the eighth starter on the depth chart.

As I’m writing this, I’ve come upon a tweet by Jon Heyman who was present in Blue Jays camp the other day and reported that Chavez is set to the head to the bullpen, so in fact it looks like the last rotation spot is down to two. And Chavez to the pen makes sense anyway; he’s had the worst spring of the three, for what it’s worth, but more importantly, he’s done the swingman thing in the past. Each of the last two years, he’s seamlessly shuffled between relieving and starting — not something everyone can do — and so he doesn’t necessarily need to be stretched out right now to be able to contribute to the rotation later down the line. And Chavez will need to contribute to the rotation later down the line. Pitching is fickle.

So we’ve got Gavin Floyd and Aaron Sanchez, and in that same Heyman tweet I linked, he seemed to suggest Floyd has the leg up on the last spot. Sometimes with Twitter, it’s hard to tell what’s being reported and what’s being speculated, but there’s clearly some sort of sense that Floyd could be the leader in the clubhouse.

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Ask a current major league batter about his two strike approach. Watch the words stop coming out of their mouth.

About twenty minutes into a long conversation with Josh Donaldson about his approach to swinging the bat, we got to what he can do to deal with the low and away pitch in counts where he has to protect. I didn’t realize it, but I’d asked for his two-strike approach. “I don’t really want to get too in depth into that,” he said, shutting off the inquiry.

Brandon Moss, the most loquacious of interviews, just laughed when I asked him about how his approach changed. Quickly, I learned not to talk about it.

But it was still out there. And when Paul Konerko told me (during another long conversation about hitting) that he felt like a strikeout was a weakness, my ears perked up. He’d tell me about his two-strike approach. He wasn’t in the league any more.

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Last season, Billy Butler ran into 10 outs. If you didn’t know that before, you definitely know that now. And if you’re anything like me, now that you know that, you want to know what happened. Boy have I got the post for you. It’s this post!

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