Kid Tetris

On an awful sports show they attempted to talk about "the best" outfield in baseball. They only mentioned the Braves, Reds, Twins and Cardinals. They completely ignored the Mariners and a few other teams that probably deserve mentioning. But I'll just include the Mariners since they are most obvious exclusion.

First, let's get the offensive side of this out of the way, since historically outfielders have been lousy fielders and good hitters. I'll use OBP, since it does an immeasurably better job of measuring runs produced than BA.

Atlanta (Simple average = .406)
A. Jones .369
Sheffield .439
C. Jones .409

St. Louis (.402)
Pujols .453
O. Palmeiro .366
Edmonds .388

Seattle (.369)
Cameron .386
Suzuki .368
R. Winn .354

Cincinnati (.366)
Dunn .335
Guillen .370
Kearns .392

Minnesota (.335)
Hunter .340
Jones .333
Mohr .333

Next, the fielding statistics.

Outfield Fielding Percentage*
Seattle .992 (3rd in MLB)
Atlanta .989 (8th)
Minnesota .985 (13th)
St. Louis .984 (16th)
Cincinnati .961 (30th, last)

Outfield's Range Factor - (PO + A) per 9 innings
Seattle 2.70 (1st)
Minnesota 2.61 (2nd)
Cincinnati 2.45 (7th)
St. Louis 2.44 (8th)
Atlanta 2.02 (24th)

A digresstion: GB/FB ratio of team's pitching staff (lower number = more flyballs = more outfield chances = more outfield putouts and assists, so Range Factor has extreme biased)
Seattle 0.96 (1st)
Minnesota 0.99 (3rd)
St. Louis 1.16 (9th)
Cincinnati 1.25 (14th)
Atlanta 1.44 (27th)

Outfield's Zone Rating (percentage of balls fielded by a player in their zone)
Seattle .932 (1st)
Minnesota .893 (6th)
St. Louis .885 (11th)
Cincinnati .875 (15th)
Atlanta .862 (20th)

Basically, no matter how you slice it, Seattle's defensive outfield can put any other team's to shame. And offensively, they can hang with any of the team's mentioned. They just lack power (overall team home run rankings: Atlanta (2nd), Cincinnati (4th), St. Louis (7th), Seattle (16th), Minnesota (17th)). Atlanta and Cincinnati don't field especially well (28 and 29 unearned runs, respectively, compared to Seattle's 14), but they hit home runs (92 and 88, respectively, compared to Seattle's 63). So they end up on highlight reels more often.

* - [ START RANT ]Fielding percentage is a pretty bad statistic, since it depends on an "error" being made which requires someone to say that a fielder "should have" made a play. It's really a moral judgment. And for an error to be made, a fielder has to have a chance at making a play, so he's done at least one thing correctly - put himself in the position to make a play on the ball. The way to get an extremly high fielding percentage is field only the easiest balls hit right at you and run away from everything else. It's perverse incentives. It was developed 150 years ago when they didn't even have gloves and the only balls that a fielder had a chance at were ones hit directly at him - the fields were bumpy and uneven. It may have served a purpose then, but it doesn't really serve much of one now. Aside from that, people argue about errors all the time, so the aggregate could be argued about and the derivative statistics are thus in question. [ / END RANT ]