Doc...you are badly...badly misinterpreting some things when you talk about CF in Safeco.
1) the 2004 Mariner pitching staff was extremely flyball oriented. Seriously...check out the guys on that staff...Moyer, Pin-AIR-o, Franklin, Madritsch, Mateo, Guardado, Villone, Hasegawa...all flyball pitchers in 2004. The team's GO/AO ratio was 0.83 to a league average of 1.04! That's what's causing Randy Winn to have a 2.95 RF in center. Much more than Safeco Field.
PCA picks up on this, BTW, and gives Winn 2.3 defensive wins in center that year (a .280 PCA-BA, .270 being the average fielder)...right in line with the entire rest of his career, including San Francisco and Tampa Bay, neither of which have the CF bias you believe yourself to be observing).
2) Franklin Gutierrez isn't just doing well by RZR like Randy Winn. He's doing RIDICULOUSLY ASTOUNDINGLY well. His .984 (!!!!!) RZR is head and shoulders better than anything Randy Winn could have dreamed about.
3) I see no discernable sabermetric evidence that Safeco FIeld has been pro-CFer in its history...you've got these PCA-BAs for the position since the park became our regular home (2000 onward):
.288, .306, .295, .389 (Cameron's great 2003 season), .280, .272 (Reed), .291 (Reed and Ichiro)...Ichiro himself didn't rate as anything more than a pedestrian good CFer at Safeco...so are you ready to claim that he was only average and that Safeco made him look good? I think not. The Mariners like to get good defensive players in center...the park demands good defense in the outfield and they get it. They also have had primarily flyball pitching staffs since Safeco came into being, perhaps because they know they can get more out of flyball guys than most other clubs. That's the bigger reason Safeco range factors look a little high.
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