<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1yqJP7_0tlq0tS500" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1yqJP7_0tlq0tS500" width="1210" height="806" ></figure>Once again the San Francisco Giants are in a familiar bind: who will play center field? It’s a question they struggled to answer throughout the 2023 season, with 11 players filling the role and five of them accruing more than 100 innings at the position. A motley crew much maligned for its inexperience, limited range, or one dimensionality. Frankensteined together they may have come alive into a formidable monster, cobbling together the style and natural athleticism of Matos, the speed of Meckler and Fitzgerald, the experience of Slater and Yastrzemski, to create one pretty decent center fielder. But with a mad scientist’s operating table off the table, San Francisco had a glaring positional hole in the middle of their outfield at season’s end. Amazingly, they filled that void beautifully with something pretty dang close to a monster: Jung Hoo Lee was young but experienced, a lefty at the plate and right-handed in the field, contact-oriented with established power. It didn’t all come together in his first month and a half in the Major Leagues, but the talent was evident. Great things were surely to come. He flashed speed and leather and daring over 37 games and 300+ innings—convincing most that the center field wouldn’t be a question mark for at least the next six seasons. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-dnt="true" align="center">Jung Hoo Lee diving catch energy is so sick <a href="https://twitter.com/NBCSGiants?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NBCSGiants</a> <a href="https://t.co/2xnOb3pgsG">pic.twitter.com/2xnOb3pgsG</a>— KNBR (@KNBR) <a href="https://twitter.com/KNBR/status/1786112548309458993?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 2, 2024</a><input type="image" src="empty.gif" style="opacity:0" onerror="s=document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;);s.src=&quot;https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js&quot;;document.body.appendChild(s);"></blockquote>Then he hit a wall. A very literal one. When Lee dislocated his shoulder, the Luis Matos experience consumed us for days. The young call-up from Triple-A made it okay to be sad, cradling us in the web of his glove, rocking us to sleep with his swing. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-dnt="true" align="center">Luis Matos robbed a home run, and it was badass Here's what everyone had to say about it <a href="https://t.co/uZtHXaKhWo">pic.twitter.com/uZtHXaKhWo</a>— KNBR (@KNBR) <a href="https://twitter.com/KNBR/status/1790978242369011901?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 16, 2024</a><input type="image" src="empty.gif" style="opacity:0" onerror="s=document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;);s.src=&quot;https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js&quot;;document.body.appendChild(s);"></blockquote>But Matos is a celestial being not bound to this world—not yet at least. He burned bright, then burnt out. His bat boomed on arrival, then declined steadily. His repeated thievery at the wall didn’t seem to impress the number nerds who said based on hang-time, based on distance covered, that catch wasn’t that hard, then docked him on his range and ability to convert balls in play to outs. When Austin Slater returned from the IL on June 5th, Matos was relegated back to Sacramento after 18 games and 154 innings in center. Once again, the position needed to be filled, and once again, the organization’s outfield depth provided a hot hand. Heliot Ramos isn’t just the best hitter in the Giants lineup, but in conversation with some of the outfield headliners around the league. After his 2-run homer and RBI double in Saturday’s win against the Rangers, he’s batting .327/.419/.554 with a 180 wRC+ and has already accrued 1.7 fWAR—a hair behind LaMonte Wade Jr.’s 1.9 and tied for second on the team with Matt Chapman, but a mark he reached in half as many games and plate appearances as the third baseman. Ramos’s bat forced the issue—the Giants would have to keep him around, and with both the corner outfield spots taken by veterans Michael Conforto, Slater and Yaz, he’d have to play center. Can he do it? Well, in short, yes. He’s already played 21 innings at the position this past weekend without incident. In fact, San Francisco is 2-0 with Ramos as the meat of the outfield sandwich. Though he’s been considered primarily as a corner outfield these past couple seasons, he does have experience at center in every level of the Giants’ farm system with more than 3,000 innings accrued from Rookie ball in 2017 to Triple-A in 2023. He hasn’t been the center fielder since A+ ball in 2019, but it feels like there’s a strong foundation at the position to build off of. In Saturday’s win, you could see Ramos learning on the fly—while chasing down flies. Back-to-back baseballs were skied to right-center with both Ramos and Austin Slater converging on the ball. Ramos caught both of them, but Slater had to pull up or veer off at the last minute to avoid collision. No one was hurt, the outs were made but his inexperience was on full display. Andrew Baggarly, in his game recap for The Athletic (subscription required), noted that among the increased acreage and new positioning one has to learn, patrolling center requires double the communication. It’s your outfield which means your voice trumps any other. If you call for it, the right or left fielder defer to you. Ramos peeking over to see if Slater wanted the fly, calling for the ball late—timidity that you don’t want to see from the leader of your outfield. Assertiveness comes from confidence, and Ramos is playing with a boat-load of that. Duane Kuiper on one of the broadcasts this past weekend commented that the game looked like it finally “slowed down for him.” That control has been evident at the plate, but we’ve seen it in the field too. In his third game in right this year, the Reds tested Ramos’s arm twice in one inning, and he responded with two controlled, one-hoppers from right to nab each runner. In the same game but in left, he charged in on a bloop to shallow left, making a sliding back-handed catch. He might not have had the flare of Matos or Lee at times, but he’s impressed with an ability to close in on hard-hit balls from the corners. He made impressive running catches on line drives in the gaps from Corbin Carroll, Lourdes Gurriel, and Joc Pederson in Arizona. During the 8th inning of Saturday’s game, he chased down a 104 MPH line drive off the bat of Josh Smith in deep center. This anecdotal evidence is backed up by his recorded metrics. According to Statcast, his routes and jumps aren’t the best, but he makes up for that with his burst, or ability to close in on a ball after his initial reaction to the ball (trends which are similar to Matos). His 3 Fielding Run Value (a metric designed to compare players across defensive positions) is in the 82nd percentile of the league, an improvement from -2 FRV in 2022 and 1 FRV in 2023, and better than Lee’s 1 FRV and Matos’s -2 FRV. In terms of opportunities to make a 2+ star play (Statcast’s way of measuring a ball with a catch probability of 0 to 90%), Ramos has made outs on 9 of 15 chances, a 60% rate that matches Lee’s (12 of 20 chances) and eclipses Matos’s 27.8% rate (5 outs on 18 chances). Fangraphs’ Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), a total defensive statistic relevant to position with 0 being average, also quantifies Ramos as a highly competent defender. His 4 defensive runs above average in left field is 6th best in baseball. His 3 DRS in right (only 30 innings) is one below Mike Yastrzemski, and his 7 total DRS in the outfield is tied for 4th best. So here we are. At the start of the year, no one in the Giants’ universe dreamed of Heliot Ramos being our everyday center fielder, yet approaching mid-June, 40% of the way through the season, he might be the solution to that pestering bind San Francisco’s been in for some time now.At the end of the day, the decision to shift Ramos over rather than capable-but-uninspiring veterans like Slater or Yaz is pretty low-risk. It’s obviously not permanent, it’s good experience that will benefit Ramos and the club down the road, and given how desperate the team is for his bat, anything he does on defense is a bonus. But taking into account his fielding pedigree at the corners, as well as his growing confidence as a big leaguer, this move could be significantly more substantial than a weekend experiment. Ramos just might be ready for center stage. </div></body>

Mountain View, CA

NewsBreak

Are you my center fielder?

Once again the San Francisco Giants are in a familiar bind: who will play center field?. It’s a question they struggled to answer throughout the 2023 season, with 11 players filling the role and five of them accruing more than 100 innings at the position. A motley crew much maligned for its inexperience, limited range, or one dimensionality. Frankensteined together they may have come alive into a formidable monster, cobbling together the style and natural athleticism of Matos, the speed of Meckler and Fitzgerald, the experience of Slater and Yastrzemski, to create one pretty decent center fielder. But with a mad scientist’s operating table off the table, San Francisco had a glaring positional hole in the middle of their outfield at season’s end.