Detroit Tigers: Nick Castellanos could succeed in the outfield

Detroit Tigers third baseman Nicholas Castellanos could move to the outfield if the team wants to get newly-acquired prospect Jeimer Candelario into the lineup.

The biggest prospect name the Detroit Tigers received back in this year’s trade deadline moves is Jeimer Candelario, formerly of the Chicago Cubs. The young switch-hitting third baseman is said to be major league ready, but the Tigers don’t have an immediate spot for him on the diamond.

Nick Castellanos and Miguel Cabrera are holding down the corner infield positions and Victor Martinez is entrenched as the designated hitter. And all three are under team control through (at least) the 2018 season so the Tigers are looking at a year and a half until a position opens up naturally.

It would be a surprise if the club doesn’t look to get Candelario onto the major league roster in earnest for the bulk of the 2018 season, so they’ll probably take a more active approach to finding him a spot.

The way I see it, they have three real options in the upcoming offseason: (1) they could trade Castellanos, (2) they could release the struggling Martinez, or (3) they could move Castellanos back to the outfield.

Options one and two would be tough to swallow. We just saw that the trade market wasn’t particularly good for position players and Castellanos’ middling bat and poor infield defense isn’t going to be immediately attractive to rival teams. The Tigers would be looking at very little return unless his bat heats up fiercely in the second half.

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Releasing Martinez would allow Miguel Cabrera to play more designated hitter (and hopefully keep him healthier) and Castellanos to play some first base (which might be his long-term position). That sounds alright on paper — Martinez probably doesn’t project to be more than a replacement level player in 2018 — but next year’s Tigers will be a fairly poor club with fairly limited depth.

Cutting ties with a big-name player without having a slam-dunk better option in the fold wouldn’t be good for ticket sales. The Tigers want to commit to younger players, but they really don’t have many that are pushing to the major leagues in the immediate future.

The best (and easiest) move would be to experiment with Castellanos in the outfield again. The Tigers tried him in left field for 38 innings in 2013. The results weren’t good. Castellanos looked stiff and slow and had difficulty tracking fly balls. But Castellanos is a more mature player now than he was in 2013, and he’s gotten much more athletic.

Anthony Fenech of the Detroit Free Press quotes Castellanos saying that he’d be open to trying the outfield again and that things might be better this time around.

"“I think that with the shape I’m in right now and the way that I’m running and everything, I think if I got to choose, if I didn’t play third, I would play right,” he said. “Before, when I was younger and they moved me to the outfield, it’s not that I didn’t really want to do it, it’s just that I didn’t really know how to work and I’m nowhere near the shape I’m in now. So I think it would be a completely different animal, going in with the mentality and the drive to want to be good defensively than it was when I was younger.”"

The stats back this idea up. We don’t have direct sprint speed data from 2013, but we have StatCast data from 2015-2017 and they show that Castellanos’ dedication to athleticism in the offseason has paid off.

Castellanos’ running speed this year has been measured at 28.0 ft/second. That’s a good bit better than the MLB average of 27.0 ft/second and it makes him the fourth-fastest third baseman in MLB this year (tied with Jose Ramirez). Castellanos’ sprint speed in 2016 was measured at 26.6 ft/second and in 2015 it was 26.4, so his improvements this season look very real.

The average sprint speed for corner outfielders in 2017 is right around 27.5 ft/second. Castellanos’ 28.0 mark would put him above the average at the position and tie him with the likes of Mookie Betts.

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It’s important to note that these numbers are actually baserunning speeds, but they do show that Castellanos is in better shape now than he was earlier in his career. He’ll still have to learn the nuances of the outfield — there’s more to it than speed — but there’s reason to hope that he will be better now than he was four years ago. He’ll still probably be below average, at least in the short term, but he could be playable at the position.

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