Stick Wyatt Langford in Center, Cowards!

During an introductory press conference for outfielder Brandon Nimmo this week, Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young somehow expressed both confidence and uncertainty about his newest acquisition. Nimmo, he said, would handle right field for the Rangers in 2026, though he didn’t sound too sure about it.

“We’re not 100 percent committed to [Nimmo in right],” Young told reporters on Monday. “I think it’s likely where he’ll play, but [those are] conversations that we’ll have with Brandon, with [manager] Skip [Schumaker] and with Wyatt [Langford], and really making sure that we understand all aspects of this and where they’re most comfortable. I do think we have three very good, talented, very talented outfielders. At the outset, I think it’s likely Brandon plays right, but I think that’s a further conversation.”

There are a number of considerations here. Nimmo, at this phase of his career, is almost certainly best in left field. His knees are jacked up; his arm is noodle-adjacent. Evan Carter nominally profiles as a center fielder, but injuries have kept him off the field for much of the last two seasons; it’s possible a corner could be the best way to ensure his availability. Langford’s known right field experience is limited to a single game for the 2022 Peninsula Pilots of the collegiate summer Coastal Plain League.

In my view, there’s only one way to sort this mess out: Commit to playing Langford in center.

There’s potential downside here, of course. Increasing his defensive obligations could hinder his offensive development, and his experience in center has been somewhat limited thus far in his young career. But if it works out, the upside is huge. There’s perhaps no easier player to build around than a superstar center fielder, an important consideration as the Rangers enter a period of roster transition, albeit a shorter one in which they’re still attempting to contend. And from what I’ve seen, Langford is more than capable of handling the position.

The idea of Langford as a full-time center fielder would’ve been unthinkable as recently as a few months ago. All the public prospect writers praised Langford’s major league-ready bat in the spring of 2024, but they were similarly skeptical of the state of his glovework. Even Langford’s most optimistic evaluators thought he was destined for left field. Baseball Prospectus noted that “his routes and reactions are not good at present,” though the publication acknowledged that his plus-plus speed could portend well for his future development. On the 20-80 scale, FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen gave Langford a 30 future value fielding grade.

“Even though he has the speed for center and has played there a little bit, his feel for the position (and for playing outfield defense in general) is very poor,” Eric wrote in February 2024. “He’s simply not comfortable out there, but his pure speed gives him a shot to be an impact defender if he can find his footing over time.”

While the bat has been a slight disappointment — he’s been 15% above average in his short career, prone to taking a few too many pitches while posting good-but-not-great power numbers — the defense, once thought to be the only hole in his profile, has been excellent.

The Rangers eased Langford into major league action following his meteoric rise through their system — he made the Opening Day roster in 2024, after getting drafted fourth overall the previous June — primarily DHing him for the first couple months while he worked on improving his defense away from game action. Around the summertime, they took off the training wheels; from then on, Langford surprisingly graded out as a plus defender in left.

He was even better in his sophomore campaign. Largely confined to left field as a rookie, he expanded his responsibilities in his second year, handling 45 games in center between Carter’s injuries and Leody Taveras’ ineffectiveness. He came away looking like one of the better outfielders in the sport. His +9 FRV (fielding run value, a Statcast measurement) landed him 11th among all outfielders; his +16 DRS was even better, tying him for fourth in the same sample. He was equally good in both left and center, putting up +5 Outs Above Average (OAA) at each position.

The more sophisticated defensive models agreed with these metrics, grouping him alongside the league’s best ballhawks. One of those models — called Situational Fielding — was created by Vivienne Pelletier, a public analyst who also works for an undisclosed major league team. Unlike FRV, which is context-neutral, the Situational Fielding model uses changes in expected win probability to credit (and debit) outfielders for their performance in high-leverage spots. (Check the link above for a more detailed explanation.) By Vivienne’s model, Langford ranked as the fourth-best outfielder in the sport, behind only Ceddanne Rafaela, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and Victor Scott II.

Langford’s foot speed — 89th percentile in 2025 — was never a problem. His issues upon promotion, it seemed, were his route-running ability and jumps. This season, those woes were squared away. I watched every single play assigned to Langford where the catch probability was graded by Statcast to be at least 5% and less than 95%, and the weaknesses were few and far between. Let’s look at some mistakes first to get a sense of what he still has to work on, beginning with a couple of soft liners:

As you can see, he lets both balls drop instead of charging hard for them. With more experience, he’ll gain more confidence in his reads and turn these hits into outs.

And like any outfielder, he can be haunted by the elements. Somewhat unfairly, he lost nearly two FRV on a couple of plays graded at 99% catch probability. The first one can probably be chalked up to the poor lighting at Sutter Health Field:

And the second to a super bright Kansas City sun:

He also, hilariously, lost 0.9 FRV on a play where Sam Haggerty truck-sticked him on a deep fly ball that he was otherwise in position to catch:

You might notice that all these oopsies occurred while Langford was in left. For my money, center field is where Langford is best suited. His arm isn’t particularly strong, but he can cover huge swaths of space in the blink of an eye. Also, he might have an easier time getting correct reads in center, where he won’t see the same sharp hooking or slicing angles off the bat as he does in the corners.

Below was my favorite of his catches from last season, a 30% catch probability grab on a ball Corbin Carroll drove 400 feet into the gap. Langford homes in like a heat-seeking missile, making it look easy:

His ability to go gap-to-gap is a key feature of his center field play. Watch him cover 73 feet in 4.3 seconds to chase down this J.T. Realmuto liner, a ball with just a 40% chance of being caught:

Sorry, Zach McKinstry — that’s not getting down:

And while he failed to come up with those soft liners from Jarren Duran and Luis Robert Jr. above, he did not struggle with these type of batted balls in a broader sense. His best-rated catch of the season came on a Xander Bogaerts line drive with some nasty topspin; the Statcast model gave him just a 5% chance of getting to it, but an insane jump allowed him to slide just under the ball to corral it:

He can do it in center, too. Watch him slide and snag a José Ramírez laser to keep it from hitting the ground:

A 115 wRC+ is boring in a corner, but in center, he starts to look like a star, a Julio Rodríguez for the greater Dallas-Forth Worth metropolitan area. In all likelihood, Langford’s bat will take a step forward in his age-24 season; Steamer expects a 124 wRC+ from him in 2026, and ZIPS is even more bullish, projecting him for a .259/.347/.452 slash line with 23 home runs, a 134 OPS+ and 4.8 WAR. If a position change stalls that growth, the Rangers would have to decide if they’d be better off moving him back to left and giving his bat a chance to reach its full potential, but I think regardless of where he plays in the field, his offense will continue to improve.

It’s true that the Rangers are in a bit of a transitional period — they hired Schumaker to replace Bruce Bochy as manager, non-tendered Adolis García, and traded away Marcus Semien — but they are also only two years removed from winning the World Series. Their roster as currently constructed is still capable of contending, and Nimmo said he “needed to know that the Rangers were committed to trying to win a World Series” before he agreed to waive his no-trade clause. As Nimmo said, Young assured him that “we would be competing for World Series titles, year in and year out.” If that indeed is the case, and the Rangers are still in win-now mode, then it’s time for them to throw caution to the wind and stick Langford in center, no matter the developmental risk. He is their best option to man the most important outfield position.