Stats Insight of the Day: The Centerfield Free Agent Class

With Michael Bourn signing with the Cleveland Indians yesterday, the four major centerfield free agents this offseason (Angel Pagan, B.J. Upton, Shane Victorino) have all now signed. Here is a look at how this group did last season in their contract years:

Leaders in each category are highlighted

As you can tell, Victorino clearly had the worst year of the bunch, especially considering his salary. Upton had the best power numbers (home runs, RBIs) but both Pagan and Bourn led the pack in run production with Pagan excelling in batting average. Using our 2013 BSports baseball projections, we can actually look ahead to what we see from each of these players in 2013:

We project pretty similar numbers to last year for these players, but the key difference here is that each of them are on new contracts, so let’s take a look at their projections per million dollar of salary to see their true value in this upcoming season, subbing in hits for batting average this time:

From the looks of this analysis, it seems the Giants got the most value on their re-signed centerfielder, Angel Pagan, who leads four of the categories by a wide margin and is a very close second in the other three.