Baseball is in a bit of a down cycle for center fielders.
Several of the game’s all-time greatest players have roamed center — Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays — but their modern counterparts pale in comparison.
The best center fielder of the past five seasons, according to my rankings, was Brandon Nimmo of the New York Mets. Not exactly a name to make you forget Cobb, Mantle, etc., etc.
These position-by-position rankings, you may recall, are determined solely by overall base value (OBV), which measures a batter’s ability to accumulate bases through hits, walks, hit batters, stolen bases, and sacrifices.
OBV specifically compares a given hitter’s number of bases against the number that an average big leaguer would have attained under the same circumstances.
Nimmo, for example, reached 1,389 bases between 2020 and 2024, while a typical hitter would have totaled 1,171 in the same number of plate appearances. Nimmo’s resulting surplus of plus-218 is his OBV, the highest among center fielders.
That may sound like an impressive number, but the leaders at seven other positions posted higher values. Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, and Freddie Freeman, for instance, all accumulated five-year OBVs in excess of 500.
Today’s rankings are confined to players who made at least 1,400 plate appearances in the 2020-2024 period and spent more than half of their games in center field. (Their statistics, however, encompass their full records at all positions.)
Nimmo is followed by Byron Buxton of the Twins at plus-187 and Cedric Mullins of the Orioles at plus-170.
Scroll down to see the half-decade’s 10 best center fielders in the OBV rankings. Each is followed by parenthetical stats for 2020-2024 — games, home runs, runs batted in, and batting average — capped by his overall base value.
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1. Brandon Nimmo (G 601, HR 79, RBI 268, BA .264) — OBV +218
2. Byron Buxton (G 379, HR 95, RBI 208, BA .251) — OBV +187
3. Cedric Mullins (G 626, HR 82, RBI 263, BA .258) — OBV +170
4. Julio Rodriguez (G 430, HR 80, RBI 246, BA .277) — OBV +154
5. Luis Robert Jr. (G 467, HR 88, RBI 245, BA .267) — OBV +121
6. Jarren Duran (G 353, HR 34, RBI 142, BA .272) — OBV +109
7. Michael Harris II (G 362, HR 53, RBI 169, BA .285) — OBV +86
8. Riley Greene (G 329, HR 40, RBI 153, BA .267) — OBV +58
9. Brandon Marsh (G 472, HR 41, RBI 191, BA .256) — OBV +56
10. Cody Bellinger (G 555, HR 85, RBI 309, BA .244) — OBV +37
