Cubs contacted Tampa about Crawford...

And don't say, "Well, he could play CF because he's fast." Tampa Bay could have done that in 2005 when Rocco Baldelli went down. Nope, they played some mope named Damon Hollins in CF most of the year.

Incidentally, Jacque Jones, once installed in CF on June 30, hit .328/.370/.460. Note, I am NOT saying Jones is better than Crawford, because he isn't, but Jones did a credible job for half a season.

That said, the Cubs' CF next year will very likely be Felix Pie, unless he plays his way out of the job.  

The manager of that team was Lou Piniella. I think he knows pretty well what Carl Crawford can and can't do, and he doesn't fill any real need that the Cubs have.

BIS's Zone Ratings for Crawford are available here. They're (in my opinion) more reliable than the STATS, Inc. ones, and at any rate, they're at least broken out much more clearly, so we can do better analysis of them.

Crawford's RZR in CF:

.877, 2004
1.000, 2005
.677, 2006

So, what do those numbers tell us?

Almost absolutely nothing. You can't aggregate Zone Rating between seasons, because Zone Rating isn't a rate stat, it's adjusted to league norms and thus isn't consistent year to year. And none of those years approach a sample size large enough for those Zone Ratings to tell us anything particularly meaningful. 65 balls in zone for '04, 17 in '05, 3 in '06. You need at least 100 balls in zone before you can be confident that your Zone Rating is much more than just noise.

And straight zone rating without at least mentioning the positional norms and the run value of an out at each position isn't exactly reliable anyways. You need to put the numbers in a context where they have meaning.

To be clear: I'm not convinced that Al's right here. Tango's work on the defensive spectrum tells me that a guy like Crawford could probably be an average-to-good defender in center, given his ZR in left field (an actual good sample size), unless there's a specific tool that Crawford is deficient in.

But he's not a baseball robot, either, and you'd have to see how a prospective move to center would affect him, and how capable he is of learning a new position in-season, before you could have any confidence in that.

I just don't want to see Zone Rating abused - it's the best readily-available defensive metric we have, and getting it to replace Fielding Percentage in the standard discussion of defense is as important as getting OBP into the idiom of the average baseball fan was.