Top 10 Outfielders RIGHT NOW

Centerfield used to be where it all happened. When you listed off the marquee positions in baseball — the biggest stages in the sport — you started where Mays played, where Mantle played, where the Duke and Speaker and DiMag and Junior and Cool Papa played. Centerfield was, well, at the game’s center.

I hadn’t really thought much about how that has changed until ranking the top 10 players at each outfield position.

But it definitely has changed.

Now that Aaron Judge has moved to right field and Mike Trout will probably shift to a corner outfield spot at least part-time so he can piece together a healthy season, I’d say that Julio Rodríguez is the only established all-around superstar centerfielder going. And even Julio has had a bumpy road to the top of the game.

Our centerfield hopes rest with Jackson Merrill and Michael Harris II and maybe some of the up-and-coming kids like Max Clark and Dylan Crews and Jasson Dominguez.

Meanwhile, there’s SO MUCH star power in right field. I’d say there are more full-fledged MVP candidates in right field than anywhere, even shortstop. I mean — Judge, Juan Soto, Ronald Acuña Jr., Fernando Tatis, Kyle Tucker, Corbin Carroll, it’s like backstage at the Oscars out there.

But here’s the striking part: All of these guys, with the exception of Soto, are more than athletic enough to play center. They have the speed, they have the instincts, they have the arms to play center. And yet they don’t (obviously, Judge did, but he’s back in right). I think that’s a very clear choice by teams. It sure seems like they would rather put a defensive jackrabbit in center—think Jacob Young, José Siri, Michael Siani, Brenton Doyle, guys like that—and hope he hits enough rather than risk their biggest stars taking the daily pounding that centerfield demands.

My guess is that a lot of this has to do with Mike Trout.

We all know the Trout story, but let’s review: When Trout first came up, he played all three outfield positions and played them all brilliantly. In 2012, his absurdly awesome rookie season, he played 67 games in left field and four games in right in addition to his time in center. In 2013, he split time again, playing about one-third of his games in left.

But in 2014, something changed. By then, Mike Trout was widely viewed as the best overall player in baseball. And the best overall player in baseball, yeah, it makes sense to have that guy play centerfield. Mike Trout was the new DiMaggio, the new Mays, the new Mantle. Those guys were centerfielders, you know? It was more than a position. It was a way of being. Trout had to be a centerfielder too.

It looked great in 2014. That year, he played 149 games in the outfield, and he played all of them in center. The Angels won 98 games. Trout won his first MVP award.

In 2015, he played a league-high 156 games in center. He was only 23 years old and seemed indestructible. He played 148 more games in centerfield in 2016.

Then, in 2017, he got hurt. It was a fluky injury that had nothing to do with playing center (he tore a ligament in his thumb sliding into second base), but these days we might call that a harbinger. He hasn’t played more than 140 games in a season since, and most seasons he hasn’t come all that close to 140 games.

Has playing centerfield game after game, year after year* exacerbated the wear and tear that has kept Trout off the field? It’s hard to say. You can’t directly connect his many, many injuries — the wrist injury he got fouling off a pitch, the neuroma in his right foot, the torn calf muscle, the torn meniscus in his knee, or his chronic back problems — to playing center instead of left or right. But people have opinions.

You might remember that in 2022, Joe Maddon was the manager of the Angels, and he floated the idea of moving Trout to a corner outfield spot. Trout was less than thrilled—“I obviously love centerfield,” he said—and Maddon immediately backed off.

Trout clearly does love centerfield. He plays the position with great care. He’s played three different seasons without a single error. His .994 fielding percentage ranks third all-time among outfielders with 10,000 innings—behind only Jacoby Ellsbury and Shane Victorino—and he has played a lot more centerfield than either one of them.

That said, fielding percentage isn’t a great measure of outfield defense. It has been quite a few years since Trout has flashed even league-average range. He has never won a Gold Glove, which is kind of stunning for a player as admired as Trout and one who so rarely makes mistakes.

But Trout wants to play center. That matters to him in ways that transcend today’s game. Playing center puts him in that special group of legendary centerfielders.*

I think if Mike Trout was coming up now, though, teams would put him in a corner outfield spot to protect him.

OK, it’s time to compare our Top 10 outfielders , all three spots, against the dreaded Shredder over at MLB Network.

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