Why Statcast Says Byron Buxton is Just OK in Center Field, and Whether It's Right

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images

It's not always a well-received observation. When the fact that Byron Buxton's defensive metrics have gotten steadily worse over the years—indeed, that he's now roughly an average center fielder, and maybe not even that—came up on the Twins TV broadcast on Opening Day, Cory Provus, Glen Perkins and Justin Morneau practically rolled their eyes out loud. For many people who watch Buxton play every day, it's nigh unfathomable that he's no longer an elite defender. The very notion does more to dent their confidence in the endeavor of quantifying defensive performance than to diminish their faith in Buxton.

I think some of that is simple allegiance, and an unwillingness to see what's really going on. Some of it, too, lies in the fact that even at his best, Buxton was not the same kind of great center fielder as (say) Pete Crow-Armstrong or Kevin Kiermaier. Those two are exemplars of a version of center field defense that relies on an extraordinarily good first step and read of the baseball. Crow-Armstrong sometimes makes near-miraculous catches, but they don't look like the ones Buxton made at his peak. They tend to look a lot like this one.

That line drive was only in the air for 3.5 seconds. Getting to it required anticipation, exceptionally quick acceleration, and the ability to keep moving fast all the way through the point where his arrow-straight route intercepted the ball. At his very best, Buxton sometimes made that kind of play, but his highlights have always tended to look more like this.

This play is from June 30, 2019, when Buxton was 25 years old. He played, back then, like a man furious at any barrier that might dare impede him. He had the speed and the strength and the skills to make plays like this one; it seemed arbitrary and capricious to erect walls and permit hamstring strains. He played defense like a man fighting for his very way of life, because he sort of was. Buxton's ethos, back then, was that you have to be willing to run through a wall to earn your place on a big-league field. Being unable to do that is one thing; being unwilling to is another.

It wasn't all that uncommon to see Buxton take on a wall at full speed. He did it a few times a year. Here's an especially bone-crunching instance, from 2017.

It didn't always end that happily, of course. Here's another ball Buxton chased fearlessly into a fence in 2017, but in vain.

As we all know, collisions like that one also contributed to Buxton's major injury issues throughout those early years of his career. Yet, he kept doing it. As late as 2022, he would still tear across the ground like the Road Runner, leaving clouds of dust and throwing himself into walls when needed.

Since a nagging knee injury forced him to spend all of 2023 as a designated hitter, though, that version of Buxton has been gone. Since the start of 2024, Buxton has only caught one (1) of the 40 batted balls on which Statcast estimated the catch probability between 0% and 25%. Here's that one catch, from last May. 

That's in the spirit of his old specialties, but it came with a bit less risk—and, again, it was in the air forever. It rated so well because Buxton ran nearly 120 feet to intercept it, rather than because he was extraordinarily quick in breaking for it or showed superhuman acceleration.

Buxton has, in fact, never gotten especially good jumps, by Statcast's measurement. Even in 2017, at the peak of his elite athleticism and in what remained the most complete season of his career for a long time, he covered 0.4 feet less than an average center fielder in the first 1.5 seconds after contact. That's a difference so small as to be nearly meaningless, so we can call him average, but bsck then, that was the only average thing about Buxton's defensive game, so it's notable, anyway. He had the speed, explosiveness and acceleration ability to cover a foot or two more than a typical cetner fielder, even in such a short amount of time. He didn't do it, though.

Instead, strategically, Buxton has always been a read-and-react fielder. Knowing that he has some of the best pure speed in the game, he prefers to wait a hair longer before embarking on his pursuit of the ball than most fielders would. He only graded out as essentially average, at his peak, because he made up for that partial beat of assessment within that teeny window. That's how quick and long his strides were.

That's no longer true, though. Buxton can still get up to nearly an elite spring speed, but it takes longer than it used to. Both his knee and his hip have taken enough damage over the years that he now gets underway a bit more slowly, and turns a bit less easily. Last season, Buxton lost 1.6 feet relative to an average center fielder in that first 1.5 seconds of a ball's flight. This year, it's 1.9 feet. He's become one of the slowest center fielders in baseball off the metaphorical block. In fact, only two outfielders have lost more ground in that crucial first instant: Phillies rookie Justin Crawford, and Buxton's teammate, Twins right fielder Matt Wallner.

Crucially, this doesn't mean Buxton is actually a bad center fielder. Part of his defensive decline is a conscious choice. He's been less daring, but another way to say that is, he's been less reckless. He's still presented with the occasional opportunity to plow into the wall; he still has the speed and the sense of how to adjust his body to secure a catch like that if he needs to. He just doesn't do it.

That was a relatively important play in the game, back on the first weekend of the season. The Orioles already led, but catching that ball would have significantly reduced the likelihood of an extra insurance run scoring in the frame. Buston pulled up near the wall, though, choosing to position himself to play the ricochet.

He's done this several times over the last two-plus seasons, and make no mistake: it's a matter of self-preservation. However, that doesn't mean it's selfish. Buxton has recognized that he's more valuable to the team on the field than on the injured list, and he's adjusting his risk management accordingly when he gets close to the wall. Here's another instance of the same calculation at work. He used to hurl himself into the wall on such plays; those days are gone.

Some of Buxton's lost value as a fly chaser, then, is a result of a conscious choice that helps the team in one way, even as it costs them in another. That makes it easy to forgive those non-catches. Even if you're predisposed to demand that a player leave it all on the field, we spent a solid half-decade watching Buxton actually break himself on the ground and against the fenses, and at a certain point, he's earned the right to stop doing so—especially because the team needs him on the field, and he can be on the field more often if he eschews those headlong collisions.

What's left is to understand what makes Buxton good, in some ways, even at this relatively late stage of his career—and, in the same moment, to grapple with the real ways in which he's now much less than an elite defender.

No one in baseball is better than Buxton at catching everything within the range he can reach. He's been above-average in getting to balls with a Catch Probability of 90% or lower in every season of his career, save 2025, in which he was exactly average. Meanwhile, he hasn't failed to come up with a ball that had a catch probability over 90% in almost exactly NINE YEARS, since getting turned around on this ball on May 4, 2017.

However, there are balls elite defenders can get to in center that Buxton simply doesn't. Often, they look utterly innocuous. Even the seasoned eyes of ex-players in the broadcast booth don't see them as opportunities, because they (depending on the nature of their experience in the game, or on their relationship with Buxton, or some of each) forgive the slightly late breaks he gets toward the ball, and don't see that if he'd gotten a better one, he could have turned what looks like an inevitable single into a spectacular out. Here, for instance, is a standard-issue hit to center from last April. It looks like nothign could possibly have been done.

However, that play was essentially identical—in terms of the hang time on the ball and the distance Buxton needed to cover, and even in terms of the angle he would have had to diagnose and take—to this play by Crow-Armstrong over the weekend.

There are wrinkles Statcast doesn't perfectly account for, like wind and field conditions and whether the ball left the hitter's bat with funky spin or was hit much harder or softer than it looked based on the swing, and they might explain the differences between any two given plays. However, there are lots of examples like there. Here's Buxton not quite flagging down a sinking liner in the gap in Kansas City.

Here's Kyle Isbel making (as nearly as you'll ever replicate such a thing) the same catch in the same stadium. Both even came off the bat of a left-handed hitter.

The difference is the same in almost any pair of examples you can pull for study: Buxton doesn't get the elite jump off the bat that Crow-Armstrong, Isbel, and several other outfielders do. In fact, he's about as slow to break for the ball as anyone in the league. His routes are better; his body control is better; and he's more sure-handed. Those guys are all, however infinitesimally, more likely to botch a routine play or drop a ball even after they flag it down than Buxton is. It turns out, though, that what they do well is more valuable than what Buxton does well, and when their respective strengths and weaknesses are weighed, the game's top center fielders all come out ahead of Buxton.

One reason, I think, why this has proved hard to accept is that it practically inverts our instinctive experience of Buxton as a defender. When we think of him in the outfield, we see in our minds the grace and the surety and the intelligence in his eyes, his gait and his glove. We see the blazing speed. We think, then, that he must be able to stretch the boundaries of a center fielder's range as well as anyone—that whatever he can't get to was ungettable. But it isn't so. As it turns out, Buxton—the guy who got famous by plastering himself on walls and flying like Super-Man to spear liners in alleys throughout the league—is an average-plus defender, but he derives all of his fielding value from his incredibly sound fundamentals. He's gone nearly a decade without missing a must-have ball, but it's been almost that long since he consistently demonstrated excellent range. He shores up his area gorgeously, but he doesn't extend it. He doesn't turn near-certain hits into outs; he just never turns near-certain outs into hits.

Things might be different if this older, wiser Buxton were a bit less bruised. He might be better at flipping his hips to chase the ball laterally, especially to his right. He might be more willing to run into a wall now and then, and thus take away one or two doubles per year that he's allowed to fall since coming back to the spot in 2024. Because he's doing everything he can to keep his superb bat in the lineup and be there for his teammates more consistently, though, he lets that bit of value leak away, and because he's aging and was never great at off-the-bat reaction, anyway, he can't make up for that value as well as he might like.

This revelation (some of which is new to me, too; I sat a long time with numbers and watched dozens upon dozens of clips to get a sense of how the data and reality interacted) does change some things. I've advocated moving Buxton to a corner spot, in the past. Barring the arrival of a player who shows that remarkable knack for stretching the range of the spot, I no longer feel that's necessary, or even prudent. There's much to be said for a generationally sure-handed center fielder who almost never even takes a shaky route. There's also some reason to doubt that a player who does his best work under high-arcing flies hit a long distance from him will be as good if moved to the corners, where the plays that separate good fielders from bad ones are more often sharp liners.

It's a joy to watch Buxton in center field. He's no longer elite, or even close to it, but he's an extremely dignified presence in the center of the Twins outfield. At this and all times, dignity counts for something. So do all of those plays between the routine and the spectacular, where Buxton still does great work and finds his own joy in the game.

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[UpstateNewYorker]

Good analysis, thanks. I'd be happy if our other fielders just got to all the catchable balls 90% of the time (as Byron does). 

[ashbury]

The bar is really high in center field.  To be deemed "average," there, is no slight.  An average center fielder who bats in the middle of the lineup is valuable on any roster - it saves you from having to play a light bat, or playing a sub-par glove to gain offense.

[mikelink45]

I enjoyed this.  Good fielding is much more fun to watch than a homerun which gets shown so many times.  It is not time to move Buxton until we get a replacement in CF that can do better than he can. 

[Bangkok Twins Fan]

What's left is to understand what makes Buxton good, in some ways, even at this relatively late stage of his career—and, in the same moment, to grapple with the real ways in which he's now much less than an elite defender.

Relatively late stage of his career ...?! Yikes, I guess that's about right, but it's still a shock to think about Buxton entering the twilight of his playing days. Sure, Buxton ain't a promising young player any longer, but I don't think that means that it's time to contemplate a move to right field or full-time DH. Sure, he's older and has lost a step or two, but I still think he has real value in center field. As Matthew said in the article, Buxton may now be "less reckless" and I can live with that. 

[William K Johnson]

With everything else that is wrong with this team, Buxton is the last thing to worry about.

[mluebker]

The Twins have always been and will continue to be a better team with Byron Buxton on the field and in the line-up. While the statistical analysis is interesting, it’s not relevant to his real value, much of which can’t be measured by numbers, but by the confidence in and respect for him his teammates and the fans have for him. 

[tony&rodney]

38 minutes ago, William K Johnson said:

With everything else that is wrong with this team, Buxton is the last thing to worry about.

This was my exact thought. The article, with videos and comparisons, is excellent. All of the data and defensive statistics can be somewhat useful but we have seen this with our eyes and Byron Buxton is still a good centerfielder, just not elite. The Twins need him healthy.

The problems everywhere else are eye-popping. Sadly, we even see less than stellar fielding from our pitchers. Baseball is a tough game when only one of your nine defenders reaches the average level. 

[IndianaTwin]

It's hard to underestimate the value that comes with Buxton making virtually every 90%+ play. It also feels like he's rarely doing things like throwing to the wrong base or overthrowing a cutoff man. I wonder as well if Buxton's general ability to cover ground allows the corner outfielders to shade a step toward the line.

I don't have opportunity to watch games, but by comparison, bullpen and offense inconsistency aside, it seems like defensive lapses have been the most costly part of the Twins' season to date. Simply having the rest of the team approaching Buxton's ability to make the 90%+ plays would be a huge step forward. 

By now, Rodriguez has gotten nearly as much time in RF this year as he has in CF. Partially that Jenkins' presence, but I have to imagine it's part of a plan to use him in RF in the majors if Buxton is present. Jenkins has played RF in a few games, but has been the predominate CF. I think we'll get a clue of whether moving Buxton to LF is in the cards if we see Jenkins continue to solely play CF. 

[bean5302]

I can't get on board with the "Buxton doesn't need to play well because #intangibles" mentality which seems to come from his fans.

Buxton is an average center fielder at this point since he's made a conscious effort to protect his health rather than recklessly risk it, and since he isn't elite reading the ball off the bat, he'd need to risk his health to be a plus defender. That's totally fine. CF has been roughly the same value as 3B or 2B in terms of position in recent history which means it's a plus value defensive position and he's certainly good enough to play there. His real quantitative value comes from his bat and that's been the case for the majority of his career.

[nicksaviking]

If not crashing into the wall is now the prime directive, it would track that there will now be balls that could be caught that won't be caught to save the player from getting injured.

In any case, until there's another player on the roster that is both better defensively AND deserving of an every day spot in the lineup, this isn't something that bothers me at all.

[Trov]

This happens to all players that were once considered great defender, people think they are always a great defender and do not look at the fact that they lose defense as they get older.  We also see some of the great catches, HR robbed or diving or wall crashing catches, we forget the little "routine" catch of a could be single is more common chance to make the difference. 

He still is the best CF we have on the roster, but assuming Jenkins can defend CF better, he should take it over and move Buck to a corner spot in the future. 

[Greglw3]

Yet another shining example of the ineptitude and misleading nature of a wide array of recently minted statistics.

There are so many frequently quoted and frequently worthless or very misleading statistics out there.

How many of the people revealing these shocking "truths" actually watch every game? Yes, for any student of the game and its history, the eye test IS valuable. The human brain is a wondrous thing!

It started for me when someone said that advanced defensive metrics showed Carlos Correa as a below average SS, when he was having a spectacular defensive season, from range to extremely low errors, to a cannon arm that recorded myriad outs that would not have been outs by any other SS. I’ve watched shortstops from Ozzie Smith all the way through til today and it was clear that Correa was performing as a SS at a level very close to Ozzie Smith, the best defensive SS of my lifetime. Many other veteran observers marveled almost daily about Correa’s defense, including Roy Smalley, who is one of the most knowledgeable people alive about the game of baseball.

So, someone says Correa is below average and the brilliant fielding (that year for sure) Gio Urshela is below average too. I read on Twins Daily that for the year that Correa was staggeringly great, Outs Above Average had him in the 18th percentile (higher is better). Total and complete nonsense.

The original case, hotly debated in Twins Territory, that made me sour on one newer statistic, WAR, was the 2019 Eddie Rosario case. The year he hit 31 or 32 homers, had 109 RBIs, besting Nelson Cruz on his own team, and around a .274 batting average. He also threw out runners, including one that won a game at the plate. So, I hear a lot of folks saying that Eddie Rosario was a below average left fielder. My first reaction was, "that’s crazy".

I did some research on WAR and the first thing I  found that blew me away was that two prominent statistical sources had him a full WAR win apart!. What kind of a statistic is that?

I’d never heard from one outlet that Rosario had 90 RBIs and another outlet that he had 120 RBIs.

A statistic is supposed to measure something empirically quantifiable. Strike 1.

Then I discovered that Rosario’s WAR had been calculated as 3.1 by one of those outlets but that with his defense considered, it was 0.9. There is no way that a player can play defense at a level that takes away 75% of his stellar value from being a premium offensive player, and definitely not Rosario circa 2019. Strike 2.

Then I read a very thoughtful, logically built out and well explained article in November of 2021, by none other than Bill James, which systematically showed with examples and calculations that he and the rest of the SABR pioneers, though curious and well intentioned, had missed badly with WAR. He said it should be renamed WAG, for Wild Ass Guess. WAR had little to no value. Strike 3. The response I got on Twitter was not, OK, I’ll read the article with an open mind and see if it has value, but "Bill James is a bitter old man".

On what basis were these claims made? Advanced defensive metrics, which as far as I know, have never undergone the scientific method of a hypothesis, comparative z-test or t-test at 95% confidence on the bell shaped curve, statistical critique and peer review, etc.

There has never been any proof that any of these relatively newly minted statistics  have any validity at all yet people put blind faith in stats such as WAR, OPS+, Outs above average (pure garbage stat), zone rating and on and on and on.

Does it take advanced statistics to know that Michael Jordan was a great player? No, almost all of the talk of him as GOAT is based on the eye test. 

The eye test and watching every game a player plays beats all these counter-intuitive stats, in my opinion.

I have some criticisms of Buxton’s game, mainly chasing too many pitches, which leads to some pretty brutal slumps but he always seems to come out of them and get ridiculously hot.

I’ve watched every game except being blacked out in Nashville from Reds games (huh?) where I listened and I see Buxton making diving catches and routinely running down balls in the gap that most cf would not get to. I think he may have lost a smidge defensively but the analogy would be geez, Jordan has averaged 30 points a game for his whole career and now, at age 32, he’s only getting 28.7 ppg.

The 66th percentile for Buxton, that was brought up on the broadcast justifiably got guffaws. From all the Twins baseball I watch, I’d say 95th to 98th percentile.

 

 

[Greglw3]

34 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

I can't get on board with the "Buxton doesn't need to play well because #intangibles" mentality which seems to come from his fans.

Buxton is an average center fielder at this point since he's made a conscious effort to protect his health rather than recklessly risk it, and since he isn't elite reading the ball off the bat, he'd need to risk his health to be a plus defender. That's totally fine. CF has been roughly the same value as 3B or 2B in terms of position in recent history which means it's a plus value defensive position and he's certainly good enough to play there. His real quantitative value comes from his bat and that's been the case for the majority of his career.

Buxton is way above an average center fielder at this point, if for no other reason that he is still as good as anybody in baseball at running down would be hits in the gaps. Still in the 99th - 100th percentile.

[rdehring]

Very interesting and informative piece, Matt.  Thanks.

Had two thoughts.  First, seeing all those clips from 2017 made me realize how long Buxton has been doing this for the Twins.  Second, I for one enjoy watching this young man play center field for the Twins every night and look forward to him doing so for another five plus years.