Best all-time center fielders in MLB history
Best All-Time Center Fielders #10: Kenny Lofton
“Most of the teams who traded for me or signed me needed me to fill a hole in the puzzle. I feel good about that. You’ve got to roll with it, live your life day-by-day. Tomorrow’s not promised to anyone.”—Kenny Lofton
The most amazing comeback I’ve ever seen in a baseball game happened on August 5, 2001. The game was in Cleveland and the visiting Seattle Mariners took a 12-0 lead after three innings. This was the season the Mariners won 116-games. Everything clicked for them that year. About the only blemish on their record-setting season was this game.
Cleveland scored two in the fourth, but the Mariners answered with two in the top of the fifth to take a 14-2 lead. That’s where it was heading into the bottom of the seventh inning. Then the craziness began. Cleveland scored three in the seventh, four in the eighth, and five in the ninth to tie it. They won it on a Jolbert Cabrera RBI-single in the bottom of the eleventh.
The player who scored the winning run in this incredible comeback was Kenny Lofton. It was the final blow for Lofton in a game in which he had four hits, a walk, and three runs scored. Most of that damage came in the late innings when it seemed like he and Omar Vizquel were on base every five minutes. Not only did Lofton reach base five times in this game, Vizquel did the same. He had four hits, a walk, and four RBI. They were like mosquitoes in their relentlessness in the late innings. The Mariners just couldn’t swat them away that night.
Kenny Lofton was a much better player than you remember him being. Early in his career, he lead the league in steals five straight seasons while also getting on base at a healthy clip in front of the big boppers on the mid-1990s Cleveland Indians. He went to Atlanta for a year, then returned to Cleveland in the late 90s.
From 1992 to 2000, Lofton averaged 106 runs and 51 steals per season while hitting .308/.385/.431. He was a 5 WAR player who made the all-star team six straight years and won four straight Gold Gloves. Except for a 20-game sample with the Astros in 1991 and that one season with the Braves in 1997, Lofton spent these years in Cleveland.
It would be interesting to see how Lofton’s Hall of Fame prospects would have fared had he stayed with Cleveland over the final six years of his career. Instead, he played for the White Sox, Giants, Pirates, Cubs, Yankees, Phillies, Dodgers, Rangers and a final partial-season with Cleveland once again.
Because he moved around so much during this time, it’s easy to forget that he hit .293/.360/.418 and averaged 80 runs scored and 24 steals in 123 games per season during this stretch. He was still a productive player, averaging 2.5 WAR per year from the ages of 35 to 40. He just happened to move from team to team to team.
When Lofton appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2013, he received just 3.2 percent of the vote. He deserved far more. Among center fielders, he ranks 13th all-time in Fangraphs WAR, 8th in Baseball-Reference WAR, 10th in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS metric and 9th in Wins Above Average.
Lofton didn’t hit as well as many of the players on this top-20 list, but only Andruw Jones and Willie Mays had more value with the glove. Any team would like to have a guy like Lofton, a player who could get on base, steal second, and score on a single while tracking down fly balls with the best of them.