Left: 53,054 – 29%
Center: 78,460 – 43%
Right: 52,823 – 29%
Given how strongly the pull effect is on ground balls, it shouldn’t be too surprising that balls in the air appear to skew slightly more towards the middle than the entire population of balls in play. There’s likely some bias in these numbers since center fielders tend to take charge on balls that multiple players could get to, and a ball is more likely to be tagged as being fielded in center if the center fielder catches it, but it’s not going to be large enough to erase the conclusion that center fielders do have more balls hit in their direction than corner outfielders. Not exactly a new finding, but it’s at least good to know that the data supports common knowledge here.
So, now that we have something approximating a distribution spread, we can note that this data suggests that the distribution of air balls to the outfield is something like 30/40/30. And, interestingly, this corresponds almost perfectly to the distribution of putouts as well. Last year, Major League center fielders made about 12,000 putouts, while right fielders and left fielders made just over 9,000 each. So, we have both the distribution of chances and the distribution of outfield putouts coming in at something close to 30/40/30.
With that distribution in mind, we can now at the overall number of opportunities and get a sense for how many more plays a CF might be involved in than a corner outfielder over the course of a full season. Last year, 184,179 batters came to the plate. If we remove all the walks, strikeouts, hit batters, and home runs, we’re left with 127,055 balls that were put in play in some fashion, or right around 70% of the total number of plays. Of that subset of plays, 45% were hit on the ground, leaving us with just under 70,000 balls hit in the air — either classified as a line drive or a fly ball — in 2012.
That’s 2,330 balls in the air per team per season, and 10% of those are infield flies, which leaves with almost exactly 2,100 balls hit in the air to the outfield per team per season. Applying the 30/40/30 distribution, that would make the average chances per outfield spot on a team per season look something like this:
Left Field: 630
Center Field: 840
Right Field: 630
200 more plays per season for a center fielder than a corner guy. That’s an average that can fluctuate based on a team’s strikeout and groundball rates, of course, but it’s a nice number to keep in mind in terms of a baseline. Just based on the distribution of batted balls, a center fielder is going to get one more ball hit his way each game than a corner outfielder. Clearly, playing your best defensive outfielder in center is a good idea.
But, at the same time, it also highlights that the magnitude of who plays where isn’t all that enormous.