Ranking Ian Happ's place among the National League Central left fielders

Left field is one of the best positions in the NL Central from top to bottom, including three very similar players and one young dynamo who, unfortunately, plays for the defending division champions.

As a reminder, we're going through every position across the NL Central and ranking the players at each, and then aggregating the total at the end to see which club is the favorite on paper heading into the season. The positions we've covered so far are below.

1. Catcher
2. First Base
3. Second Base
4. Shortstop
5. Third Base

Let's check out the players holding down left field in the division for 2025.

1. Jackson Chourio, Milwaukee Brewers

Churio is a pretty significant problem for the Cubs and the rest of the NL Central and will be for a long time thanks to the extension the Brewers handed out to him prior to him seeing a pitch in the MLB. At age 20, the Venezuelan did pretty much everything well and rung up a 117 OPS+. He graded out significantly better in right field than left, but Fangraphs is projecting him to start in left so I'll include him here.

Churio leads one of the best young outfields in the league, and projects to be a 30/30 guy down the line. He'll anchor a startlingly deep Brewers lineup in 2024- those prognosticating that the Cubs have a cakewalk division are going to be disappointed by the onslaught of power and speed a healthy Milwaukee club will offer.