Colorado Rockies Countdown: Top Five Center Fielders

Coors Field’s notoriously massive outfield coupled with its extreme hitter-friendly environment asks a lot of out any big leaguer unlucky enough to roam its pastures. Center field is a particularly laborious predicament for any Rockies player.

As a part of Rox Pile’s ‘All-Time’ series, we’ll examine the best Rockies to ever call Coors’ center field home. In our last countdown, we featured the Rockies’ greatest left fielders, which of course featured some of the best power guys in Rockies club history. Now shifting a spot over to center, we find some of Colorado’s best multi-tool athletes ever.

To compile our rankings, Rox Pile used Fangraphs‘ list for career Wins Above Replacement (fWAR), which serves as a great guideline for positional players. The fWAR statistic allows one to evaluate a player’s contribution over time with a specific team. Therefore, fWAR allows us to completely negate what a player has done in their career while not wearing the purple and black.

Also as a general rule, this list consists of players that have at least 500 plate appearances with the club. The 500 PA rule approximates to about 1.5 years of service time and gives a large enough sample size for accurate evaluation. As an added stipulation, the players on our list needed to have played a majority of their innings in the field at the position being evaluated.

Luckily, the “majority rule” doesn’t exclude any player from this list who would have been on it otherwise. Without further ado, here is Rox Pile’s list of the top-five center fielders to ever sport purple pinstripes. Let us know in the comments section what you think!

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