There are a lot of contenders whose center field situations are a real mess.
As of today, the trade deadline is nine days away. The path that the Orioles are to take has been made clear by the totality of their play over the 2025 season. GM Mike Elias acknowledged in his typical wordy way that the team is heading towards being sellers ahead of this deadline in a radio interview over the weekend. All that remains to figure out is who, exactly, will be sold off, and what the Orioles will get back for these players.
Over the course of this week, I’m looking at one Oriole who’s likely to be traded and teams who are probably going to be in the market for somebody at that player’s position. Yesterday, I started with Ryan O’Hearn. Today, it’s Cedric Mullins.
Back in April, as Mullins was putting together one of the best months of offense of his career and looking like he might threaten to fire off another 30 home run/30 stolen base season, “everyone” was demanding a contract extension for the longest-tenured Oriole. It would have felt good at that time.
Unfortunately for Mullins’s earning potential, since May 1, he’s batted .187/.234/.348 across 54 games, with a short injured list stint mixed in there. He’s now in the negatives in bWAR, though fWAR is more generous at a 0.8. Either way, this makes it tough to contemplate him netting a bonanza of valuable prospects some time between now and July 31.
Teams don’t care that we all have tons of good memories of Mullins, that he is an important part of the team, or any of that. Elias doesn’t care about any of that either. Whether he ought to is a topic for another day. The value that other teams think Mullins will produce relative to what they have now is what will set the market. The 2025 standings are what have set the Orioles on the seller’s path.
There is some good news about this. There are a number of contenders whose center field situations are in dire shape, so much so that even a slumping Mullins probably seems like a better bet than sticking with what they’ve got. Projection systems like ZiPS think that Mullins will finish off the rest of the season at right around his current batting numbers: .235/.307/.404, with another seven homers to come.
That’s not going to be worth anybody’s #1 prospect or probably even anybody from any team’s top 10, but the Orioles ought to be able to get something from one of these teams.
Mets
Of any team that is either in a playoff spot now or within three games of one, no team has gotten worse batting from its center fielders than the Metropolitans. Their CF combined batting line going into Monday’s games: .220/.282/.326. Yowza. The bulk of that damage is being done by Tyrone Taylor, who brought a .572 OPS into Monday. Taylor is grading out better than Mullins in Statcast’s Outs Above Average metric, but not that much better.
The Mets aren’t deeply invested in Taylor here. He’s a 31-year-old in his second year of arbitration. He was fine last year when he was hitting about league average and now the bat has collapsed. Do something to get better, Mets! If Mullins had continued on his April pace, the Orioles might even be able to demand a really good prospect in New York’s Triple-A rotation, of which they have a couple. That’s not where we are. Uneducated guess: Whoever Mike Elias likes better of Blade Tidwell and Jonathan Santucci.
Cardinals
St. Louis appeared in yesterday’s O’Hearn article for 1B/DH messes and they’ve got center field hitting problems too, particularly in the power department. They’ve got some of the weakest hitting (just a .075 isolated slugging) and some of the worst strikeout rates (27.5%) of any team’s CF mix.
Most of that is Victor Scott II, who is slugging just .330 on the season. Pretty bad! Scott is scoring very well on defensive numbers, however, so even with that poor hitting, he’s generated 1.8 fWAR and 1.7 bWAR. This is probably not the best match there is for Mullins.
Phillies
Philadelphia is splitting its center field playing time between Brandon Marsh and Johan Rojas, and this is what it is getting from its CF spot in the lineup: .237/.299/.321. Even worse than what I just said with the Cardinals, Phillies CFs have only hit three home runs on the season, and unlike Scott, Marsh rates quite poorly on defense. With bad defenders in the corners in the form of Nick Castellanos and Max Kepler, they need something better from their center fielder.
Shuffling Marsh aside for Mullins is probably easier said than done for the Phillies. He was a good player the past two seasons, putting up 3+ WAR per year, and he’s only 27. If they want to hold on to their NL East lead, they need to do something about this. Aim for Jean Cabrera, probably settle for Alex McFarlane.
Tigers
It’s funny to find the Tigers on this list since Javier Báez was the starting center fielder for the American League in the All-Star Game, but that’s not actually where Detroit wants him to be. Báez hasn’t played center field since June 4. They’ve got him back on the infield dirt. Prospect Parker Meadows is now playing CF instead, and although he put up 2.2 bWAR in 82 games a year ago, he’s not following that up this year, batting to a pathetic .535 OPS over 33 games.
Also getting some center field time lately is Matt Vierling, who over an even smaller sample of 16 games is batting even worse. The 2023 Orioles are a good example that no matter how good you are – and the Tigers are 60-40 through 100 games – there are always weaknesses you can shore up to help your chances of winning a postseason series. Of course, they might decide they need to improve center field and that Mullins isn’t hitting well enough to help them.
Rays
The Rays are not getting very good offense season-long from their center fielders. However, much of that struggle is Kameron Misner, who is no longer the everyday CF. The pesky Chandler Simpson, who tormented the Orioles this year, is getting the lion’s share of chances.
Players who are batting over .300 are not likely to continue doing this if they can’t threaten to hit the ball hard (Simpson’s slugging just .354) but this team is not likely to shuffle Simpson to the side for Mullins. I certainly wouldn’t. Simpson is basically what Orioles fans are hoping that prospect Enrique Bradfield Jr. can be.