Man in the middle

With move to center field, Biggio takes one for the team

KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- Over the course of a long, long, loooong baseball season, a great center fielder can win maybe a handful of games, just by being a great center fielder. Ask Bobby Cox about Andruw Jones. Ask Ron Gardenhire about Torii Hunter. Ask Tony La Russa about Jim Edmonds.

Craig Biggio is not yet one of those great center fielders. Not by a long ways. Heck, Biggio is barely a center fielder at all.

But when the Houston Astros open their season March 1 at Minute Maid Park in Houston, the 37-year-old Biggio will jog past second base -- maybe he'll stop and reminisce for a moment or so -- before taking his spot in center.

For good, for bad, for in between, that will be the former All-Star second baseman's new home. It's a really big new home, too. With lots of room to roam. And lots of room to get into trouble.

"It's another challenge," Biggio says with a smile that indicates it's a challenge he craves.

Asking Biggio to start over again in the field is a gamble. There's no way around it. But it's a carefully considered gamble, one the Astros absolutely need to take.

Houston is a team that never seems to get enough out of what it has. The Astros had good starting pitching, one of the best closers in the game and a good-enough offense with hitters like Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Richard Hidalgo and Lance Berkman.

But the Astros didn't even make the playoffs last season. And they've never, ever, made it past the first round.

So when the team landed another second baseman in the offseason, signing slugger Jeff Kent to a two-year deal, something had to give. Biggio did. Willingly.

This was not a no-brainer. Biggio has played in the outfield, true, but only for 64 games. Thirty-four of those came in 1990. In fact, he hasn't started in center since July 26, 1990.

And centerfield is no position to mess around with, either. A ball gets past someone out there, especially in a big centerfield like Houston's, and a guy could run until his lungs explode.

In a lot of ways, this is all very unfamiliar territory for Biggio. He's used to squatting down into an infielder's crouch more than 100 times a game, moving a couple of steps to his left, a couple to his right, turning the double play, running down a fly ball behind first base. He's used to 40-foot throws, not 140-footers.

He's played more than 1,600 games at second base, turning the double play, jumping over runners with their cleats flying. He's not used to flying into walls. He's not used to sprinting full speed into the gap and then diving flat out, or running to the wall, leaping and bringing back a home run.

"We tried some of that the other day. That's hard," Biggio said.

"You have to be an athlete," Bagwell needled from the adjoining locker.

Still, given the lack of great center fielders in the league -- really, after Jones, Hunter, Edmonds, maybe Bernie Williams, maybe Johnny Damon, who is there? -- and the fact that the Astros needed to put Kent some place, the move made a lot of sense. For everybody.

If anyone can pull this off, Biggio can. He was an All-Star catcher before moving to second base in 1992, a move that was probably 100 times harder than this one will be. At least now he's used to the ball coming toward him after it's hit.

And after 15 years in the big leagues, Biggio knows what kind of work it will take to make this move pay off. He was running 15-20 miles a week shortly after Kent signed -- something he never used to do -- getting ready for the different demands of center. He's talked to people who have played the position, including Berkman, who played there last season.

Maybe the best thing Biggio has going for him is his enthusiasm. He's taking fungoes at practice and takes dozens of real fly balls at batting practice every day. That way he gets a read on the spin of the ball that he doesn't see with fungoes.

He tracks the balls against the high skies at spring training, fights off the winds here in Florida and works on stepping into the catch to make a strong, quick throw to the cutoff man.

"I think center field is one of the easiest areas to play. You see everything right in front of you," said the Braves' Jones, owner of five consecutive Gold Gloves. "He's a good athlete. He'll probably make the adjustment pretty good."

Said Damon: "As long as he can cut down the angles, maybe work it so where he has some shorter throws, he'll be fine. He knows the pitching staff, so he knows how to position himself. I don't think he's going to give center fielders a bad name. He's a solid player."

This whole thing could have turned out so much differently. Biggio is a seven-time All-Star. He's played more games for this franchise than anyone ever has. He could have raised a huge snit.

Instead, he 's excited to play a position that Jones and Hunter and a lot of other players he has admired play, guys with speed and style and so much talent that they can sometimes take your breath away -- though Biggio will tell you he's nowhere close to those guys.

"Anyone who's seen me play knows I'm not a big style guy," he says. "I'm just going to try to make sure it goes in my glove."

That will be good enough for the Astros this year. That will work.

That, right there, could make the team's gamble pay off.

John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com.

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