Cleveland Indians top the American League in left field, because of Michael Brantley

Previous entries in this series:

• Catcher
• Right Field
• Center Field
• Second Base
• Third Base
• Shortstop
• First base
• Designated Hitter

Left field looked very solid heading for the Indians heading into 2014. Michael Brantley had a pretty good 2013 (105 OPS+) and was entering what is often viewed as the the nexus of a player's career, his age 27 season. Some improvement was likely, but man, did he ever breakout in a big way.

He should have played 90% of the teams games in left, but with Michael Bourn making two different visits to the DL, Brantley did play quite a bit in center as well. He did finish with 106 starts in left. The scary part is that Mike Aviles had the second most starts with 17. (Yes, 17.) Ryan Raburn and Chris Dickerson each started 14, Zach Walters and J.B. Shuck had 3 each, David Murphy and Nick Swisher had 2 each and Nyjer Morgan started 1.

That 904 OPS and 160 wRC+ is very impressive. Both figures finished just a skosh behind Carlos Santana and his 1B stats. Dickerson performed very well while playing left as did Morgan in his extremely small sample size. The rest of the players out there pretty much sucked. And Raburn had that one "sparkling" moment in left during Corey Kluber's bid for a perfect game.

Here is the rest of the AL Central:

The Tribe grade out best in the divisions on the strength of Brantley's great season. But as you can see, the rest of the riff raff dropped the team's left field OPS almost 100 points and just shy of 30 points in wRC+. The Indians also graded out as the top AL team in wRC+, with the Orioles second. The Tigers finished fifth overall on the strength of reclamation project J.D. Martinez. The Royals and Alex Gordon finished seventh, the Twins tenth, and the combination of Alejandro De Aza and Dayan Vicieido for the White Sox dragged them down to thirteenth.

The Tribe left fielders finished in the top 5 for homers, RBI, runs scored, stolen bases, and also led the league in doubles with 41. They also finished with the fewest strikeouts.

Fangraphs WAR time ...

Brantley's Batting and Offense components led the Indians position numbers, which did help boost him to third in MVP voting. That Fielding score though dragged down that WAR score to just 4.5, which while surpasses Santana at first, but falls just 0.1 behind Gomes at catcher. The rest of the players out there did not amount to much, netting a -1.0 WAR.

Onto the AL Central totals:

If anyone is surprised by this table, you haven't been paying attention to the defensive prowess by Alex Gordon over the past few seasons. He won his fourth straight Gold Glove and the defensively metrics love him even more than that. His fielding easily made up the hitting gap to the Indians. The interesting stat here is that the Indians finally finished ahead of the Royals on the basepaths and led the AL. The Indians also led the Batting, so obviously they led the league in Offense. There were only four teams with negative WAR, with the White Sox and Twins two of them.

I would love to call for Brantley to meet or best his superb 2014, but I just can't do it. I expect just a bit of a regression, so instead of that 160 wRC+, I'll call for around 130, and hope he beats it. Brantley is signed through 2017 with a very affordable $11M option for 2018.