2018 Positional Power Rankings: Center Field
I remember, when I’ve written some positional power rankings before, I got to write about shortstops. And when I wrote about shortstops, Troy Tulowitzki ranked way above everyone else. It was always laughable at the time how much better he was than his peer group. It’s no longer so laughable because now this paragraph just serves as a reminder that we all get older and time is a monster to even the innocent. Tulowitzki is never healthy these days and we’ve entered a whole new age of young and talented super-shortstops. But anyway, I’m drifting from the point. When I wrote about prime Tulowitzki, I got a kick out of how much better he was than the next-best guy. Now I’ve gotten the chance to write about center fielders. This is the hardest I’ve laughed in days.
When this post went up a year ago, the Angels were first at 8.3 projected WAR, and the Rays were second at 4.7. And now, the gap has only grown. The gap between the Angels and the Rays is, by itself, bigger than almost every single team’s center-field WAR projection. You aren’t here because you needed to be reminded that Mike Trout is good. I’m not here because I need to remind you that Mike Trout is good. But just in case anyone was slipping — just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently — Mike Trout is good. Mike Trout is so good that, if you took Mike Trout, and then you removed from him enough talent to make the next-best center fielder, you’d still have enough left over to have an All-Star center fielder. Provided you took only talent, and not arms or legs or eyes. Even Trout’s career couldn’t survive the loss of one of those. (Probably.)
Below, summaries of every team’s center-field situation. Here’s the introduction to this series, in case you’re behind. If you are behind, boy, do you ever have a lot of reading to do. Cancel your plans for the weekend.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Mike Trout is the God Emperor of Anaheim.
Mike Trout is the Los Angelos God-Emperor of Anaheim.
Mike Trout is the Left Field Los Angelos God-Emperor of Anaheim.
Mike Trout is the Left Field Los Angeles God-Emperor of Center Field Anaheim.
Damn, I thought I was the only one who knew about Troutās K-less streak (now snapped, alas). Silly me. I’m probably not even the only one who knows that (as of a couple of days ago) no one else with 0 K had > 20 PA, and only four other players had > 10 PA. Thereās probably even someone out there who knows how many two-strike counts Trout has had this spring. When youāre Mike Trout, nothing you do or donāt do is unknown.
Mike Trout is powered by sandtrout under his uniform? I guess it makes sense
Mike Trout, projected to be slightly better than the bottom 9 CF combined
I like that he’s projected to be as valuable over 651 PA worth of time as the next best two CF crews over 1400 PA.
Mike Trout has a chance to be better than the entire group of White Sox position players. If Abreu and Garcia are traded early, he has a really good chance.
Itās wins above replacement- not home runs.
If you have Kiermaier projected to be a better defender than Buxton in 2018, you have likely made a significant mistake (from a rate perspective). The DRS and Statcast data helps to refine projections, and it doesn’t look like it is being used.
It’s an exaggeration to call it “a significant mistake”. Both Buxton and Kiermaier are the best defensive CFs in the game. The difference is Kiermaier has been one of the best for four seasons now. In fact, his 2015 season was one of the best defensive performances ever. He’s dependably the best, and the projections are heavily based on dependability in past performances.
Marlins thought they could outsuck the White Sox with negative graphs, pah!
One Eyed Trout would probably post a solid 5 WAR or so
I came down here after looking at the chart to talk about how Adam Engel deserved a chance to prove himself on offense just because he was so elite on defense and on the way down saw that Jeff Sullivan wrote it better than I could have ever. Guess that’s why he writes for Fangraphs and I have 45 Twitter followers. I loved that last paragraph more than I can say. BASEBALL IS BACK.
That pretty accurately summarizes my opinion of Taylor; I expect something between last year’s BABIP-assisted performance and the projections, and an end result in the top 10 CFs overall.
Podhorzer’s done a lot of diving into Taylor’s power via his xHR/FB and it generally holds up. He’s certainly not really a .360 BABIP guy (who is?) but with his speed and quality of contact, .320 or .330 wouldn’t surprise me.
He’s also the best defensive center fielder the Dodgers have had in a decade (by which he’s slightly above average), which is both astounding and a testament to how defensively poor the Dodgers have been in CF since Matt Kemp’s debut.
“Provided you took only talent, and not arms or legs or eyes.”
I kind of want to see a player get to the majors and post at least 2.0 fWAR in a season while missing an arm or a leg. It would be amazing to witness. Is it possible? Probably not (well, maybe for the leg. Prosthetic legs work much better than prosthetic hands).
Jim Abbott only had one hand, although that’s not quite the same as only having one arm. He exceeded 2 fWAR six times in a 7 year span, topping out at 5.5 WAR and throwing a no-hitter. 22.7 career WAR is impressive.
True. I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of a hitter. I should’ve remembered Abbott, he played during my childhood.
Who makes it to the majors first? A woman or a man who lost his legs and had them replaced with prosthetics?
Nod to Pete Gray who made it to the majors with only 1 arm back in 1945. Alas, he wasn’t good enough to stick but he was good enough to make it there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Gray
Regarding JBJ, looking at xwOBA tells me that instead of declining/having an unlucky blip, he had two seasons of good fortune followed by regression towards his true talent level. That is more concerning, in my opinion.
Shouldn’t let the package of *basically average bat/elite glove/good baserunner go to waste! Even in Boston š
I enjoyed the “banana from 7-11” comment way more than I should have.
You have a heart, thats all
The best positional article so far, with apologies to the other ones. Who didnt let out a giggle at Odubel Herreras portion? Adam Jones is ranked 18th, and obviously Mike Trout is the incarnation of every other sports best athletes, if they actually stayed the best for the better part of a decade while still remaining young. Somehow. Viva la defense!
Very funny on Odubel, but I think that April he really did try to concentrate on walking – I remember stories about his off-season commitment to discipline.
I think pitchers just adjusted and ODB did not adjust back. Too bad he can’t put together his amazing defensive seasons with his peak walk and power surges, or he could be the #2 CF on here.
The only thing better than reading something that was written by Jeff Sullivan — is being read to something Jeff Sullivan wrote — by Morgan Freeman.
“Blackmon wouldn’t really get to take that home version of himself elsewhere, given how Coors is unique.”
Larry Walker and Matt Holliday would likely disagree with this assessment.
Was going to say the same thing – you can’t just look at a guy’s road numbers and think that’s who he’ll be if he moves on.
That sort of thing is just extremely lazy.
I don’t feel like he said anywhere that his road numbers are what he is. I think FanGraphs, and especially Sullivan, knows now that Coors helps a lot at home but also takes away from the road performances.
Everyone does know that, but, as Walker and Holliday demonstrated it is very possible for a player’s overall performance to be maintained when he transitions to a new home field.
Good players who have left Coors Field have continued being good players. They don’t all of a sudden become the road versions of themselves.
There is something about Blackmon (and Carlos Gonzalez) that you don’t see when you examine Holiday, Arenado or other players who have been great in Colorado. Jeff mentions this offhandedly, but its abnormal to see such huge home/road splits in plate discipline stats (some split is normal, because home teams usually get some close calls in their favor). Blackmon’s plate discipline statistics are completely different at home and on the road.
The thing that Blackmon and Gonzalez have in common that they don’t share with Arenado, Holliday, etc is that they are left handed.
We know that major league players get most of their development in-game, especially when it comes to pitch recognition. We also know that left-handed major league hitters often have a lot more developing to do when it comes to the recognition of the left-on-left breaking pitch than right-handed hitters (since L on L matchups are so rare prior to the professional ranks; you can’t be a standout HS or college hitter if you can’t hit R on R breaking stuff, but you can L on L due to limited opportunities for it to hurt you).
This poses a problem for LHB from Colorado who have half of their repetitions against major-league quality breaking stuff taken away from them by the fact that breaking pitches often don’t perform at a major league level in Colorado.
Compare Arenado and Blackmon. Arenado has very similar walk and strikeout rates on both home and road. Blackmon is another hitter entirely: his K rate goes from 13% to 20%, and his walk rate drops from 7.5% to 5%.
There are also some elements to Blackmon’s game that play particularly well at Coors: Coors featured like 60% of all ground-ball triples in MLB last season, and Blackmon hit most of them. Ground-ball triples are exceptionally rare, but Coors is big enough that Blackmon’s speed can turn pulled grounders down the line into triples with some frequency. Last year Blackmon lead MLB with 14 triples: he hit 13 of them at Coors Field.
Blackmon is a player whose batted ball-mix and skillset are particularly enhanced by the Coors environment, and so there’s extra reason to be concerned about what he’s going to look like when hes removed from it that simply don’t exist for, say, Nolan Arenado, whose performance and approach are pretty consistent across both home and road.
Given that Blackmon will also be 31 years old and has shown declining CF defense, he will need to hold enough of his offensive value (driven in part by his speed,14!! triples) while moving to a corner OF position to earn a big contract. Given the FA market we just saw, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine him struggling in a way that Arenado will not when he hits the FA market.
My curiosity got the better of me so I did the math.
If you convert all 14 of Blackmon’s triples into doubles (assuming the RF cuts the ball off before it gets to the corner), his SLG drops from .601 down to .579.
I’m not sure what that does to his WAR but I can’t imagine it lowering it more than 0.2 or so.
Anyone want to tackle that part?
Yeah its just an example; how many singles are doubles because of his speed and the big park?
The thing people overlook a lot about Coors is that, in an attempt to make it not have the HR effects that Mile High did, its massive, and so it runs much higher BABIPs than normal. I think Blackmon is a great example of the kind of player who can really benefit from that. Jeff points out the huge swing in his home/road BABIP; the fact that a player with 5+ seasons has maintained a home babip that much higher is incredible.
Did you know that in all but like 2 seasons since the opening of Coors Field, a Rockie has finished 1st or 2nd in batting average in the National League?
Coors has great outcomes on balls in play and really encourages players not to be patient; you can see that in the approach used by basically all regulars on the Rockies (Arenado has both lower K and BB at home .. so does Blackmon). Outside the Coors environment, Blackmon runs extremely ordinary OBPs since he loses both the BABIP and the walks.
Shave off the slugging from the triples, some home runs, and drop the batting average, and you have a nice player: .340 OBP, .500ish SLG..
That’s what Yasiel Puig put up last year, in a 3 win season.
That’s a far cry from the MVP candidate Blackmon was last year.
A corner OF with below-average plate discipline has a really hard time being a 4-5 win baseball player.
I totally agree on how Coors impacts plate discipline. Balls in play are rewarded to the point that guys will swing at just about anything.
AND they get less punished for that because breaking stuff isn’t as good.
I believe this is also a large part of the home/road splits issue.
WAY more than any other team in MLB, the Rockies have a much different environment when they travel.
Eno did some research and found that the plate discipline pattern exists – I can’t find that article anywhere.
My pet theory is that it is long-term detrimental because those MLB reps are actually also development time for young players, and only the transcendent talents (Arenado) overcome it to stay well-rounded players.
Unfortunately, without knowing more about player development its basically impossible to pursue with our knowledge set.
I think playing his entire career there into his 30s has permanently made Blackmon a lesser player in a normal environment due to all the lost MLB-caliber L on L reps.
But player development paths are one we just don’t know that much about unfortunately, especially outside of proprietary org knowledge.
This fuels my theory that the Rockies should actually try to build in the exact opposite way that they have until recently: develop pitching and pay for hitting.
Blackmon has a career .370 BABIP at home, and .305 on the road. He has a career 5.5% K-BB at home, and 14.7% on the road. He has 27 triples at home, and 6 on the road. I know Rockies players shouldn’t just be considered the road versions of themselves, but Blackmon has benefited from Coors to an unusual degree. That’s going to warrant some justified skepticism, even though he’s still clearly an overall positive player.
I see Charlie moving to an outfield corner following this season, and he obviously won’t garner the same sort of contract if his offense remains the same while playing a less-demanding defensive position. So I do agree that his value isn’t going to be as high if that happens.
I don’t see him losing 2 wins off his value, though.
It’d be great to see Engel make a dramatic improvement. In the second year of a rebuild, this is a fine project for a White Sox fan to work on, so I’ll be cheering him on. But there’s no way they’ll let him be this bad for 600 PA. Leury Garcia, Ryan Cordell, Charlie Tillson, and maybe even someone like Tito Polo will get a shot to be the guy who eventually gets bounced for Luis Robert.
Below is how AJ Pollock performed on line drives and fly balls:
2014: .474 AVG .516 ISO .611 wOBA
2015: .493 AVG .475 ISO .590 wOBA 92.7 MPH EV
2017: .479 AVG .497 ISO .609 wOBA 93.9 MPH EV
Below is how AJ Pollock performed on groundballs:
2014: .304 AVG 55.3% Pull % .281 wOBA
2015: .307 AVG 49.6% Pull % .286 wOBA 86.4 MPH EV
2017: .200 AVG 66.9% Pull % .187 wOBA 83.2 MPH EV
It seems really strange that someone can perform virtually the same on balls in the air, but decline dramatically on the ground. Iām not sure if this means a bounce back is in store for Pollock, but the Dbacks better hope it does
What this probably indicates is that Pollock added a bunch of roll-over, pulled ground balls with poor expected outcomes to his batted ball mix.
Also, lowering the EV on ground balls can change their expected hit probability pretty substantially: a low-angle grounder (say -4 degrees) hit 95-98 off the bat is a fast ground ball that makes the outfield in 1-2 hops and will get through for a hit if it’s hit at all away from a fielder.
The same ball hit 90 MPH off the bat bounces an extra time or two and is much more likely to be reachable and turn into an out. Losing 3 MPH on ground balls on average will make a LOT more of them into routine plays.
Hyun-Jin Ryu struck out Mike Trout for the first time this spring yesterday.
I have upvoted your comment, but it is just as much for the brilliant pitching achievement of Hyun-Kin Ryu as it is for your comment. All hail Hyun-Kin Ryu, conqueror of worlds.
The Los Angeles God Emperor of Anaheim has perceived this treachery and allowed it. He will crush Ryu’s puny rebellion if it continues.
Can someone help me understand why Steamer/ZiPS are so low on Michael Taylor’s fielding? Seems odd that a player whose last two full seasons manning CF have yielded ~12 fielding runs of value would be predicted for so low a total this season (and therefore be in the 20s of these rankings). Seems to me that a lot of seemingly inferior defenders are predicted to have better seasons with the glove than Taylor, when it’s precisely there where he’s been most consistent.
Steamer’s CF defensive projection has Taylor at +4.3, which isn’t too bad compared to Kiermaier at +13 and Hamilton and Pillar at +8….it looks like they regress the defensive projections pretty heavily to the mean.
ZiPS on the other hand, has Taylor at +2.7, behind a whole bunch of guys (Hernan Irribaren??). I’m not sure if this is true, but they might be leaning pretty heavily on DRS vs. UZR as the fielding metric. Take a look at this summary:
https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=cf&stats=fld&lg=all&qual=1000&type=1&season=2017&month=0&season1=2015&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=24,d
We have all centerfielders with 1000+ innings in CF between 2015-2017, sorted by UZR/150. Taylor’s ranking passes the smell test. But, take a look at the DRS column – Taylor sticks out like a sore thumb at +2 for his career, essentially league-average.
Bottom line, I agree that Taylor’s +3 fielding projection feels low by about a factor of two…he should be right on the heels of Inciarte and Cain imho.
If something happened to Trout tomorrow and he never played another game in the majors, would he actually be a HOF candidate even though his career would be this short? I’d say he was so completely dominant for long enough that he would be.
Technically, a player needs to play in 10 seasons so no, he would not be a HOFer. He will become eligible on opening day 2020.
That said, it would not at all surprise me if they waived the requirement and put him in (depending on what exactly ended his career of course).
The HOF would almost certainly make a special exemption for Trout in any of the circumstances where he stopped being able to play baseball immediately, since those involve completely catastrophic injury or death.
As for Jon Jay, after this[1] recent article in The Hardball Times, I’m convinced he’s one of the best line drive hitters of all time (or something). In particular, check out the “lowest standard deviation of launch angle” chart; Votto, predictably, places very well at 5th. Who’s above him? Nick Castellanos (Statcast-and-xwOBA darling), Matt Carpenter, Jon Jay, and Brandon Belt. All 5 guys are at least very good hitters, and all have noticeably above average career BABIPs, but even so Jay is clearly a superior BABIPer to all of them. Mike Trout might be the most valuable hitter, Votto might be the “best” or “most talented” hitter, but Jon Jay is MLB’s master of the line drive. How he does it, we’ll probably never know, but that THT article was quite an insight on that matter.
[1] https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/mike-trout-statcast-darling/
Hail Lunker
Thank you for the annoying pop up ads that force me to login again on my ipad. Not as annoying as the leftists taking over this once-decent site, but still very annoying. My clicks have decreased significantly in recent months and I see no indications that this trend will not continue. Keep up the sh1tty work losers!
“It was not very Mets to have a young player like Conforto overachieving. It was very Mets to have such a young player struggling to find everyday playing time. It was not very Mets to have that same young player thrive in a regular role. It was very Mets to have the young player go down to severe injury. It is not very Mets to have the young player ahead of schedule in his injury rehab. It would be very Mets if the young player came back and were no longer the same.”
This is one of the best paragraphs I have ever read.