CF Is An Island

Last week, we spent a few days talking about position adjustments, and specifically how 2B and 3B relate to each other in terms of defensive value. While there certainly wasn’t anything regarding a consensus reached (except for maybe that I’m nuts, which was a popular opinion among some), it was a worthwhile discussion, and one that I’m glad we had.

Today, though, I want to shift to talking about how center field relates to the 2B/3B spots and it’s placement in the middle of the position adjustment chart. Where do center fielders come from, and how good are they defensively?

Unlike second baseman and third baseman, a lot of major league center fielders have spent almost their entire baseball career playing the position. It’s the spot where they belong, because while they are excellent athletes with more than enough athleticism to handle shortstop, they come with one basic defect – they throw left-handed. No would deny that guys like Carl Crawford, Grady Sizemore, Denard Span, Juan Pierre, Darin Erstad, or a younger Johnny Damon had the speed, reactions, and athletic ability that would compare favorably to most shortstops, and they all are (or were, in Damon’s case) premium defensive talents. However, by virtue of throwing left-handed, they’re automatically excluded from the pool of potential 2B/3B/SS. Their positions are limited, thanks to handedness, to 1B/OF.

Of the 1B/OF spots, CF is clearly the natural landing spot for these plus athletes, since it has the largest quantity of opportunities with which to add defensive value. Not surprisingly, guys like Erstad, Pierre, and Sizemore have proven to be some of the best defensive outfielders in the game. If they were born as right-handers, there is a good chance all three would have ended up playing shortstop. These guys actually give us a pretty good proxy for what we should expect if we took a SS and moved him to CF, because for all intents and purposes, they are shortstops playing center field. By virtue of throwing left-handed, they were excluded from the SS pool, but they’re still premium defenders.

So, what about the right-handed throwing center fielders? Are they as good defensively as their LH brethren, or are they a collection of guys who were kicked out of the infield, such as B.J. Upton?

Interestingly, very few center fielders have backgrounds in the infield. Adam Jones was a shortstop in high school and the minor leagues, and we mentioned Upton, but as far as regular center fielders go, that’s about it. Carlos Beltran, Mike Cameron, Curtis Granderson, and Torii Hunter were all drafted and developed as outfielders, and there’s never been any thought of trying them in the infield, even though they aren’t excluded by their handedness and are definitely premium defensive talents.

Interestingly, MLB has pretty clearly laid out that infielders simply don’t play center field in their spare time. Last week, we ran through a pretty big list of guys who moved from second to third base with frequency, but there are only four players in MLB who played at least 50 innings at both SS and CF last season – Alexei Ramirez, Jerry Hairston, Alfredo Amezaga, and Willie Bloomquist. That’s one rookie who the White Sox were trying to figure out where he fit (since he didn’t come up through their minor league system) and three utility players for teams that weren’t contenders.

However, that could be simply a result of roster construction – teams carry four or five outfielders on their roster in a given season, so there usually isn’t a need for an infielder to move to the outfield within a given season. Do teams move players between SS/2B/3B to the outfield between seasons, when they’re putting their rosters together, and what do the results of those moves (or non moves) tell us about center field’s relation to the infield spots in the defensive spectrum?

We’ll look at those issues this afternoon.