The Rise Of Center Field

by
September 14, 2009

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but there are a lot of really good center fielders in baseball right now. There is so much talent in center field that we could be seeing the dawning of the greatest group of talent to ever play the position at the same time. Seriously, just take a look at the current crop of players manning the position.

Established All-Stars: Grady Sizemore, Carlos Beltran, Torii Hunter, Curtis Granderson, Mike Cameron

Breakout Stars: Matt Kemp, Franklin Gutierrez, Denard Span, Shane Victorino

Potential Stars: Adam Jones, Colby Rasmus, BJ Upton, Josh Hamilton, Andrew McCutchen, Dexter Fowler

Flycatchers: Nyjer Morgan, Rajai Davis, Ryan Sweeney, Michael Bourn, Coco Crisp, Brett Gardner

Solid Players: Nate McLouth, Marlon Byrd, Jacoby Ellsbury, Kosuke Fukudome, Melky Cabrera

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

That’s 26 players with some real value to their teams. Twenty-Six, and I didn’t even include guys like Chris Dickerson or Chris Young. Usually, you expect to find 10-15 pretty good players at any given position, some others guys who fill a need for a while, and then a bunch of old guys at the end of their careers. But this crop of center field talent is just unbelievable in its depth and youth.

Sizemore, Beltran, and Granderson aren’t exactly old men, but they’re the elder statesmen of this group that is overflowing with young stars in the making. There’s so many good players roaming CF right now that you could state that a guy like Adam Jones is a below average player for the position this year. And Jones went to the all-star game, and his place as one of the game’s best young talents is not in question.

I’m not sure I have ever witnessed this kind of influx in talent at a single position before. This is the golden age of center field.





 

Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

121 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
lexomatic
16 years ago

This makes me more depressed to be a Jays fan

1
jw
16 years ago
Reply to  lexomatic

Exactly what I thought.

0
Matt
16 years ago
Reply to  jw

At least you dumped Alex Rios on my White Sox.

0
Matt B.
16 years ago
Reply to  jw

Sad…

0
RollingWave
16 years ago
Reply to  lexomatic

Yeah, since Wells is paid like the Beltrans but is (significantly) worse than the Melky Cabreras

0