On a Scale of Charlie Blackmon to Willy Taveras, Brenton Doyle Is an 11

Over the past few weeks, I’ve done a few big-picture stories looking at things like bunting and aggressive baserunning. Small ball, you might say if you were feeling charitable. “That Max Carey-Lookin’ Nonsense,” you might say otherwise.

During that process, I kept running into Rockies center fielder Brenton Doyle. Not literally, of course. Doyle is extremely fast (98th-percentile sprint speed); I could not run into him unless I were chasing him on a bicycle over level ground, and even then it’d be dicey.

Doyle gets the most out of his legs. He’s 19-for-23 in stolen bases on just 101 opportunities, and the defensive components of his Baseball Savant page are all in red and pegged to the right: 99th percentile not just in arm value, but range as well. Despite playing just 112 games, he’s been 19.4 defensive runs above average, making him the fourth-most valuable defender in the league this season and the second-most valuable non-catcher.

Unfortunately, the bat is not so good. Doyle is new enough to the majors that he showed up at no. 19 on Eric Longenhagen’s most recent Rockies prospect list from three months ago. Eric put a 60 on Doyle’s power but called his pitch recognition “sushi raw” and his minor league strikeout rate “a ruby red flag.” Sure enough, out of the 279 position players with at least 300 plate appearances this season, Doyle is dead last in wRC+ at 36. He’s hitting .192/.242/.324 with a walk rate of 5.3% and a strikeout rate of 35.0%, which is the fifth-highest among players with those playing time constraints. He can hit the ball hard — his maximum exit velocity this year is 111 mph — but he doesn’t make enough contact to access his game power. He has reached a 105-mph exit velo 14 times this year, or just 1.8% of his swings and 1.0% of the total pitches he’s seen. Worse, five of those batted balls had a launch angle of less than 10 degrees.

The thing is: Elite defensive center fielders can get away with not hitting much. Like every denizen of the Delaware Valley, I’m enjoying the Johan Rojas Era quite a bit. Kevin Kiermaier became a Rays legend with a career wRC+ of 98. Kevin Pillar is going strong in his 11th major league season, and he has an 86 wRC+ for his career, with one season over 100. And he’s only the second-best active defensive center fielder named Kevin who spent most of his career in the AL East! Jackie Bradley Jr. was a really good hitter for a minute, but he kept getting big league jobs for years even after his bat went off a cliff. The list goes on.

If Doyle is really one of the best defenders in the league, he probably has to run a wRC+ over 40 to be an everyday player, but not by as much as you’d think. Already, WAR has him as merely a below-average player even though he’s hitting like the world’s fastest pitcher.

My interest in Doyle is threefold. First, he’s a fast guy, and fast guys are usually interesting. Second, he’s an extreme outlier, and extreme outliers are usually interesting. Third, he’s on the Rockies, a weird team that I can’t quit gawking at. (In the past six months, we’ve had 12 non-RotoGraphs posts on the site, including this one, that were tagged to the Rockies and didn’t involve a specific transaction or prospects. Six of those were interview pieces by David Laurila; I wrote four of the other six.)

In this case, Doyle fits in with a distinct thread of Rockies history: their 30-year-long center field dilemma. See, Coors Field is known for two things: First, the air is thin, so it’s easy to hit home runs. Second, the outfield is gigantic, so the center fielder needs to be able to run like a gazelle being chased by the cops, particularly if the corner outfielders are in the lineup for their bats and not their gloves.

So if you were running the Rockies, you’d go out looking for a center fielder who can play a Gold Glove-caliber center field and, on top of that, hit for enough power to take fullest advantage of the offensive environment. That sounds simple enough, until, after thinking about the matter for 30 seconds, you realize that the player you described is prime Ken Griffey Jr., and those don’t grow on trees. It’s hard enough even to find a player who’s good at hitting and center field defense. The best the Rockies have done for an extended period of time is Dexter Fowler, vice-chairman of the Adam Jones School of The Advanced Stats Hated This Guy So I Didn’t Appreciate How Cool He Was In His Prime And I Regret That Now.

In their franchise history, the Rockies have had 43 individual seasons of 300 PA or more by a center fielder, including Doyle’s. I’ve plotted them here, as offensive runs (hitting and baserunning) against defensive runs (defense and positional adjustment) above or below average. I’ve highlighted 2023 Doyle in yellow, 2010 Carlos González in red (this was the best season ever by a Rockies center fielder by WAR), and 2018 Charlie Blackmon in brown.

The upper left quadrant represents players who were good offensively but lacking defensively — maybe the result of the Rockies taking a corner outfielder and seeing if he’ll stretch out to center, as they did with Blackmon and González. We’ll call the top left the Blackmon Quadrant. Bottom right is the opposite: above-average defense at the expense of offense. This is the Doyle Quadrant. The bottom left comprises players who were below-average both offensively and defensively; at the risk of being unkind, let’s call this the Old Ian Desmond Quadrant. This has happened quite a bit, as the Rockies have generally had the player procurement and development commensurate with a team that’s only good once every five years.

Players in the top right are above-average both offensively and defensively. This is the Griffey Quadrant. In 43 individual seasons, the Rockies have gotten here just four times: 2003 Preston Wilson, 2007 Ryan Spilborghs, 2009 Carlos González, and 2014 Drew Stubbs. Only one of those seasons — Wilson in 2003 — involved a player who qualified for the batting title, and as you can see, none of those players were very far above average either offensively or defensively.

In general, the Rockies have chosen one of the extremes — Blackmon on offense, most notably, but also Ellis Burks, who in 1997 hit .290/.363/.571 with 34 home runs and got credited with 1.6 WAR for his trouble. The 1990s were wild, man. On the other end are a bunch of slap-hitting fast guys: Juan Pierre, Tom Goodwin, Garrett Hampson, Alex Cole, Willy Taveras. (Stubbs was a shrewd gamble, I think — an excellent defender who had huge holes in his swing but enough power to make it count when he did make contact.)

But Doyle is more than just a Willy Taveras who isn’t old to understand that I’m rushing to finish this article before 5 p.m. because I have tickets to see the Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service show tonight. THE ZOOMER MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE IMPORTANCE OF HEARING TRANSATLANTICISM AND GIVE UP BACK-TO-BACK AT THE SAME CONCERT! WE WERE MORE HEARTSICK IN 2003 THAN YOU CAN FATHOM!

Where was I? Right, so: Here’s every season of 300 or more PA by a center fielder since 2014, league-wide, 366 in all. Once again, Doyle is highlighted in yellow:

So Doyle isn’t just a defense-heavy outlier by Rockies standards; he’s doing something that we haven’t really seen in the past decade. Here’s another way to express how wild Doyle’s season is: Measuring the difference between his offensive and defensive value. I wouldn’t recommend using this as any sort of large-n predictive stat, but for this bit of trivia, it’ll do.

I’ll start by going in the other direction, because the center fielder with the greatest gap between offensive and defensive value is very funny:

This just looks like a list of the best center field seasons in the past decade, because while it’s possible to be 50 runs or more above average offensively, you’d need to be prime Willie Mays but, like, a centaur in order to get 50 runs in the green on defense alone. To wit: 2022 Aaron Judge is the most offense-heavy center field season in the past 10 years, and he was actually a slightly above-average defender. See also Bryce Harper, who got on this list in his walk year, when he rated out as such a bad defender that people were worried about his ability to play the field in his late 20s.

Let’s flip that table upside-down and see the top 10 on the other end:

Doyle isn’t just no. 1 on the list; he’s first by more than eight runs. His value is not only skewed more toward defense than Bradley, Kiermaier, Billy Hamilton, or Jake Marisnick, but he also makes those guys look like an aging Matt Kemp.

If this half-season actually reflects Doyle’s true defensive talent, this could be the start of a substantial major league career regardless of whether he ever learns how to hit a breaking ball. Either way, while we’ve seen players like Doyle before, nobody has ever been this Doyle.