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Player Value Posts
To avoid spamming the general blog page with the Player Value posts for each season/team, this blog page will serve as a separate listing of all of the Player Value posts for each season/team. These posts will be less detailed, mainly just listing out the top players each season and including the necessary files.
Well, by "all-time", I really mean from 1912-2021, as that is currently the span of years that I have the data for. As the headline suggests, these rankings are according to my Player Value metric as of the date listed above. You can read my initial Player Value post here and its addendum here. Since then I have used Retrosheet play by play data to better fine tune the run value weights of the various events, but haven't been able to write up a post detailing them yet. Rather than listing them out again in this post, you can view them towards the top of my latest Hall of Fame post here. When we're discussing positional rankings, there's a couple of ways we can decide what a player's primary position was. One approach is to do it based on games played, which is the easiest but results in guys like Pete Rose and Ernie Banks being first basemen. I instead elected to take the approach of using the position that a player accumulated the most Player Value at. This way, Rose is a left fielder and Banks is a shortstop. I still list out their main position by games played in the data files below, but that's not what I went off of. There's also the matter of if we should take a player's total Player Value for their career and then just group them by their main position, or should we only use the Player Value that a player accumulated at this specific position. This choice is a little trickier, so I've gone ahead and listed out the top rankings for each option. So, without further adieu: Top 25 Centerfielders From 1912-2021, Based On Total Player Value At All Positions
Center field has less nuance than catchers and first basemen when it comes to Player Value, especially on the fielding end, so I have less need for commentary on justifying the rankings you see above. I think they are pretty believable, but I will make the following notes:
Top 25 Centerfielders From 1912-2021, Based On Total Player Value As A Centerfielder
Carey drops here, as he had almost 90 in value at LF. Granderson falls out of the top 25 due to having about 39 in value at RF, while Damon falls out of the top 25 due to having almost 63 in value at LF. Top 25 Centerfielders From 1912-2021, Based On Batting Value At All Positions
Terry Cashman's "Talkin' Baseball" mentions Willie, Mickey, and the Duke, all 3 famed centerfielders for New York teams in the 1950s. I think most people think of Mays and Mantle as contemporaries, and they do rank 1st and 3rd all-time overall, but there is somewhat of a decent gap between them. When we just consider batting, however, they are much closer. This is also true for the batting piece of WAR. Duke is much lower at 18th overall, but jumps up to 9th for batting. So really these 3 guys were similar New York 1950s centerfield batters, but Mays was clearly the best overall due to his superior fielding and baserunning. If you just look at their joint seasons in the 1950s, Duke fares better and Mantle actually has the highest WAR. Top 25 Centerfielders From 1912-2021, Based On Fielding Value At All Positions
Top 10 Centerfielders From 1912-2021, Based On Baserunning Value At All Positions
From the span of 1912-2021, I have just 468 players that contributed most of their value as centerfielders. This is very interesting, considering there are 8,646 total position players in this span. If you go based off of games played, however, there are 920 centerfielders in this span. This makes sense, as any centerfielders that were negative for their careers would have been assigned to a different position, based on value. So to be in the top 1%, a player would have to be among the top 9-10 centerfielders during this span. To be in the top 1.18% (the general Hall of Fame mark), a player would have to be among the top 10-11 centerfielders during this span. There are currently 24 centerfielders in the Hall of Fame, but that includes the mainly pre-1912 players Billy Hamilton and Hugh Duffy, as well as the Negro League players Oscar Charleston, Turkey Stearnes, Cristobal Torriente, Cool Papa Bell, and Pete Hill, whom we don't really have Player Value for. Jocko Conlan was primarily a centerfielder (by games played) during his playing career, but was inducted as an umpire. So if we want to actually match the Hall of Fame numbers, that leaves us with 17 centerfielders to work with. If we look at the top 17 centerfielders according to Player Value, just 10 of them are in Cooperstown. The exceptions are Duke Snider (18), Larry Doby (21), Andre Dawson (31), Hack Wilson (39), Earle Combs (41), Edd Roush (44), and Lloyd Waner (72). Snider as previously mentioned was part of a legendary NY CF trio in the '50s, supporting his induction; he's also right on the edge at 18th, with 3 guys ahead of him that are either still active or still on the BBWAA ballot, so his induction is fine. Doby is close to the border as well, and had to spend his first 4-5 professional seasons in the Negro Leagues, in addition to missing a year due to war. He also has the cultural distinction of being the 2nd player to break baseball's color barrier after Jackie Robinson, and the first to do so in the American League. Even with his great MLB numbers, Doby still had to get inducted by a Veteran's Committee. With the exception of Dawson, the rest of the remaining players were also inducted by a Veteran's Committee. Dawson didn't reach 500 homers or 3000 hits, but came close to both. He also has solid Hall of Fame accolades, with an MVP, 8 All-Star games, and 8 Gold Gloves; even then, it took him 9 years on the BBWAA ballot to get inducted. Wilson has some uniqueness in being the single season record holder for RBI, with 191 in 1930. Roush and Combs don't have as much going for them, but they still had solid careers. The real unworthy player is Lloyd Waner, whom Bill James has also stated doesn't deserve to have been inducted. Lloyd's brother, Paul Waner, was a better player in RF and had already been inducted, which may have helped his cause. Mike Trout, Jim Edmonds, Carlos Beltran, Fred Lynn, Bernie Williams, Andruw Jones, and Chet Lemon should presumably be in Cooperstown as they are the seven top 17 centerfielders not in the Hall of Fame. If you want to throw out Trout since he's still active, as well as throw out Beltran and Jones since they're still on the BBWAA ballot, then the next 3 would be actual Hall of Famer Snider, Kenny Lofton, and Mike Cameron. So it appears that around 10 or 11 of the 17 Hall of Famers are justified by Player Value. Of the 920 centerfielders in my dataset based off of games played, 17 are in the Hall of Fame. That's 1.85%, larger than the "top 1%" idea that many people think of the Hall of Fame as, as well as the top 1.18% that the Hall actually operates at. This is a lower induction rate than first basemen and shortstops, but higher than catchers, second basemen, third basemen, and leftfielders. Based on this, there should either be less center fielders in Cooperstown if we think 1.85% is too lenient (which I don't think it is), or there should be more players inducted at other positions so that this 1.85% rate holds across all positions. Below you can graphically see how all of our centerfielders compare in terms of Player Value, along with the black line denoting which players provided positive value, the gold line denoting the Hall of Fame mark, and the blue dots denoting the actual Hall of Fame members: Our two obvious non-Hall of Famers above the gold Hall of Fame line are Edmonds and Trout. The Hall of Famers with the extreme Fielding Value on the far right are Ashburn and Carey. The Hall of Famer with the extreme Batting Value in the top left is Mantle. The non-Hall of Famer with the most Fielding Value to the right is Willie Wilson, who played more games at CF despite providing more value in LF. The non-Hall of Famer with the least Fielding Value to the left is Samuel Byrd; Duke Snider and Hack Wilson are Hall of Famers that are among the worst defensive centerfielders in history. The lowest Hall of Famer here is Waner, with ~100 in Fielding Value and ~0 in Batting and Baserunning Value. Again, an egregious induction. I'd replace him with Edmonds, Lynn, Williams, Lofton, and more every day of the week. Below you can graphically see how the top 25 centerfielders compare in terms of Player Value: There's almost two calibers of greatness that we can see here, even among the 25 best centerfielders in history. The top 9 players stand out more than the rest, and while one of those is the active Trout, the other is Edmonds who got voted off the BBWAA ballot. Below is the dataset of primarily centerfielders from 1912-2021, as determined by which position the player provided the most Player Value at. There are 468 players in this dataset.
Below is the dataset of primarily centerfielders from 1912-2021, as determined by which position the player played the most games at. There are 920 players in this dataset.
Thanks for checking out this centerfield rankings post. I plan to update it whenever I develop new Player Value iterations, and hopefully we'll get closer and closer to some rankings that we can more firmly support. I'd say the main takeaways for now should be:
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