Last week, we received a mail bag issue with Jacob Young, named David. Actually, this is a multi-part question, and the third sub-question is particularly interesting: Are we in the era of Central Field’s defense now? It seems like every team has a midfielder who can get it.
My intuitive response to this question is simple: Yes, we may be in the era of peak-center defense. I doubt the races may have entered that era more frequently than ever before, and that peak has been rising. I saved David’s other sub-questions for this Saturday’s mailbag, but for this particular mailbag I think it might be fun to think about and dig deeper into the mailbag than I did.
First, let me explain my gut reaction. More important than any other position, the midfield rewards pure athleticism, and athletes keep improving. Players’ pools continue to expand, players (and humans in general) are getting bigger, stronger, and faster. All of this means that the standard of getting it into the Grand Slam is much higher. I also have baseball-specific reasons. The league is positioning defenders who are more likely to enter, allowing them to make them more advanced in talent. And, because we get better at accurately measuring defensive contributions, we are able to recognize and reward defensive value better than ever before.
After saying all of this, though, I have to admit the obvious thing: the answer is not known for sure. We have valuable data on the reaction times of Ty Cobb’s Sprint Speed or Duke Snider. Until this century, we have to continue playing field-by-game data when evaluating defenders. Sean Smith analyzed the data to create a defensive metric called “Total Zone,” which is why the defensive ratings on the rankings until 2002, until 2002, when more advanced defensive metrics such as UZR, DRS and FRV take over. Today’s indicators are far from perfect, but take a moment to stop and think about how far we have gone. Statcast can tell you how much time each outfielder must reach, how far each ball must reach each ball, how far they go, how fast they run, how efficient the route is, and how quickly they react as the ball comes out of the bat. Inferred from the field-by-field data, there is still a long way to go.
I realized that David didn’t have to ask about the overall quality of the midfield game, but whether we were living in a time when we had a particularly good number of defenders. It feels like that, right? Think about you now classifying all the field players at the center as very good defenders. My list will certainly include Young, Pete Crow Alstrong, Denzel Clark, Ceddan Rafaela, Victor Scott II and Jose Siri, nor will I argue with anyone including Byron Buxton, Julio Rodriguez, Jerrio Rodriguez, Jack Meyers, Jerer Isbel, Kyle Isbel, Michael Harris II, Dilton Valsey Palcison, or Harrles Dadson. I’m not sure what happened to Brenton Doyle, but we’ll put him on this list ahead of the season. Suddenly, we played halfway through baseball with an elite midfield defender.
Maybe there is always this feeling now. Just for a hat-trick date, if you go back to 1999, you get defensive outstanding figures like Andruw Jones, Mike Cameron, Carlos Beltrán, Steve Finley, Darren Lewis and Kenny Lofton. If you go back to the 1950s, in the same city, you have Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider. So I decided to see what I could do with the available numbers.
Even if we can’t know the answers exactly, we can have some fun in the data we can use. We have all these different numbers – TZ, UZR, DRS, DRP, OAA, FRV – but none of them match perfectly. They all work on different data sources. They all use different approaches based on different philosophies. They are looking for different eras with different styles of playing. They all score on different curves, judging players based on league averages for a particular year, which makes it difficult to compare players from different eras. It’s a glorious confusion, but it means we need to consider some other ways to analyze things.
First, consider how the center field players earn game time. If you play poorly and you’re not doing well, you probably won’t stay on the field. If you do it well, you can escape in another situation that does it better. Now look at the blows from the center field players since 1900.
The picture is everywhere, but has been on this trajectory since the beginning. This season, the league’s WRC+ in midfield totaled 92. If held, it will be the lowest mark ever. However, midfielders are not worse than ever. This is a graph showing the defensive running values for every 600 disks. This is just the DEF column you’ve been seeing on the right side of our main rankings. Before you look, let me warn you that I will cheat by showing you it.
That’s how I cheat. Not everyone is playing the midfield all the time. It just shows the players who list the main position as the center field. We stopped using the total area of these numbers in 2002, so more and more numbers are based on a completely different formula. However, the significance of the overall trend has reached a clear meaning. In the first half of baseball history, that number says midfielders aren’t necessarily excellent defenders, but changed in the late 1950s and then consolidated themselves in the late 1980s.
However, this is an important reason for cheating because these numbers include position adjustments. You probably know if you do this, and position adjustments provide more honor to tougher defensive points and gain credibility from easier people. If you look at midfield defense metrics for a year, they should tend to be more left and right. What a high bar, there will be good, average and bad midfielders who will cancel each other. The figure says that the column changes higher over time compared to other locations on the site. It’s even more obvious if you look at the same image containing the corners.
This is not necessarily my convincing argument. After all, I did not correct the numbers, but decided on my own position to adjust. I just show you the impact they have on how we value the outfielders’ defense. However, the conclusion is obvious when you look at it with the WRC+ reduction of the center field hand. Defense has never been an important part of the job, and the gap between the defensive center field and corner has never been more high.
Knowing all this, what made me say at that moment might be the midfield defense? For beginners, players are much faster these days – and I don’t mean faster than the 1950s. We have 11 years of Statcast data tracking the average sprint speed for each player. Every year, I calculate the average center guard’s sprint speed and represent it through innings (and ignore any player who doesn’t have enough players to register for sprint speed). During the first three years between 2015 and 2017, the average center guards sprinted at 28.4 feet per second. Over the past three years, the average was 28.6 from 2023 to 2025. This seems to be a small change, but it also happens in a very short period of time. Honestly, the midfielder today is much faster than it was just 10 years ago! It is not difficult to make timely inferences and further inferences.
If we stretch our eyes to the entire era of the court, we can see that the ball is not falling like it did in the past. The following figure dates back to 2008 and shows the average of hits for each ball classified as a line driver or fly ball hit directly (excluding home runs). It starts at .393 and ends at .346. The average point of nearly 50 points has just disappeared into the gloves of the center’s live hand.
This is very clear, but even the picture is somewhat different. This is the same picture, but now also includes Woba. The new red WOBA line is steeper than the blue line. Central field players not only robbed more batsmen. They also better get batsmen to singles and prevent extra hits. Reduced by nearly 60 points.
I think this is certain. Since 2008, there has never been a worse time to hit the ball to the midfield. As far as we know, defense has never been a big part of the midfielder’s job, and center field players have never been much better than Corner Outfielders. Overall, we may be defending at the peak center right now. We might stay there.
