Billy Hamilton's season was predictable

<div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=hamilbi02,hamilbi01&utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=hamilbi02,hamilbi01&utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" rel="nofollow" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Billy Hamilton</a></strong><span style="font-size: small;"> began the season with a lot of pressure to fill some pretty big shoes worn by his Reds' center field predecessor. Hamilton gave the Reds everything they could have asked for with his glove and his legs in the field. He ranked first among all center fielders in defense according to Fangraphs.com. Unfortunately, his offense did not live up to the fielding. The sad thing was that the offensive season for Hamilton was predictable.</span></span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I <a data-mce-href="http://passion4baseball.blogspot.com/2014/02/billy-hamilton-better-hit-280-or-higher.html" href="http://passion4baseball.blogspot.com/2014/02/billy-hamilton-better-hit-280-or-higher.html" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">wrote a piece</a> before the season began that for the experiment of letting Choo go via free agency so that Billy Hamilton could lead off was fraught with problems. I wrote at the time that Hamilton would need to bat at least .280 to give his team some sort of offensive boost. He did not. Hamilton did not even come close.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let's put his offensive season in perspective. There were 75 batters in Major League Baseball in 2014 that came to the plate more than 600 times. Billy Hamilton was 73rd among those 75 in times on base (walks + hits + HBP). For further perspective, Jeter, in his swan song season was belittled all season for batting second while hitting so poorly. Jeter got on base fourteen more times than Billy Hamilton.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Choo, who had a vastly disappointing season with the Rangers, only played in 123 games compared to Hamilton's 152 games and Choo got on base four more times than Billy Hamilton did. Among all center fielders in baseball, only <strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/u/uptonbj01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/u/uptonbj01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" rel="nofollow" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">B.J. Upton</a></strong> put up a worse offensive runs rating.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Billy Hamilton got on base 176 times in 152 games. But that's not the worst of it. While Hamilton did steal 56 bases, he was thrown out an MLB leading 23 times. While that is a 71% success rate, those 23 times caught meant that Hamilton was only available to score not 176 times, but only 153 times.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When Hamilton was available on base, then he had a good rate of scoring as he scored 72 times or 47% of the times he was available on base. If say, he could have been available on base 200 times, he would have scored 94 times.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If the season would have ended at the All Star Break, then Hamilton would have exceeded my "goal" for him before the season started. At the All Star Break, Hamilton had a triple-slash line of: .285/.319/.423. His 109 OPS+ at the time would have made him (when combined with his fielding) just as valuable as Choo was the year before.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Unfortunately, Hamilton fell off the tracks after the break and went: .200/.254/.257 the rest of the way. Coincidentally (or not), his drop off coincided with the Reds' collapse as the team was 51-44 at the break and 25-42 after it.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You would expect that someone with Billy Hamilton's speed would have a better BABIP than the .304 he compiled in 2014. But it is easier to understand when 37% of his batted balls were fly balls and a third of those were popups to the infield. His ground ball rate is somewhat inflated since he had 52 bunt attempts (with a .326 success rate) and led to a 1.11 ground ball to fly ball rate. Hamilton's speed would seem to benefit from hitting more ground balls.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, Hamilton's strikeout rate of over 19% means that almost twenty percent of his at bats cannot get him on base at all. His plate discipline improved to a 28.8% O-swing rate and you should expect him to get better with that rate as he continues on in his career.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fangraphs.com and Baseball-reference.com vary greatly in the value assigned to Billy Hamilton's season. B-R gave Hamilton a 2.5 rWAR and Fangraphs.com came in a full win higher at 3.5. That one win means a great deal when a win is worth about $6 million on the open market. Baseball Prospectus splits the difference with a 3.1 WARP.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no doubt that Billy Hamilton helped the Cincinnati Reds greatly in the field and made him a valuable player despite his total lack of offensive contribution. The Reds left Hamilton in the lead off spot despite his putting up numbers that made him unsuitable for that position. The trouble is that the only good on-base guys for the Reds are their three best hitters, Votto, Frazier and Mesoraco. You want those guys in the middle of the lineup. The Reds were 14th of 15 NL teams in team on-base percentage.</span></div><div style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Billy Hamilton's final offensive season was not dramatically different than his Triple-A numbers in 2013. Perhaps this is who he is. The Reds will need to think about that and make some decisions. Hamiton's fielding make him worth having out in center field every day. But with his offensive production, he should be batting eighth in the lineup. Those decisions and the outcomes make 2015 an interesting season in the career path of Billy Hamilton.</span></div>

Billy Hamilton's season was predictable

Billy Hamilton  began the season with a lot of pressure to fill some pretty big shoes worn by his Reds' center field predecessor. Hamilt...

+ Read more »

Billy Hamilton better hit .280 or higher

<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;"><strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=hamilbi02,hamilbi01&utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=hamilbi02,hamilbi01&utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Billy Hamilton</a></strong> played thirteen games at the Big League level in 2013. And yet the accumulated 19.4% of the Cincinnati Reds' stolen bases for the season. So I get why the Reds are excited about having the rookie leading off and creating havoc for the other teams. The question is whether he will get on base enough to make that big of an impact.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;"><strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/choosh01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/choosh01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Shin-Soo Choo</a></strong> got on base an incredible 300 times last season (162 hits, 112 walks and 26 HBPs). And while I believe Choo had a career year (read: outlier), of all the projections for Hamilton I have looked at, the highest projected number of times on base for Billy Hamilton was by ZiPS at 192 times.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">And even with ZiPS being the most generous of the systems with times on base, that system only gave him an on-base percentage of .319. Such a low on-base percentage simply is not high enough.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">Let's look at it another way. Of all the times the Reds got on base last season, 34.4% of those base runners scored. Choo's rate was higher at 35.7%. If we apply even Choo's higher rate (by the quality of the hitters behind him), then if Hamilton gets on base 192 times, he will score roughly 69 times, or 38 times less than Choo did a year ago.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">The cast around Hamilton for the Reds is pretty much the same as what was in their lineup a year ago. <strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/frazito01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/frazito01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Todd Frazier</a></strong> and <strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/phillbr01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/phillbr01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Brandon Phillips</a></strong> might have better years. Or they might not. Even if they do, it will be difficult to make up for 38 less runs scored from the top of your lineup.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">Billy Hamilton played 502 games in the minor leagues. For the sum total of those games, he batted .280 which gave him a .350 OBP. That would definitely work for the Reds if he could do that. The one problem is that he stumbled at the highest level of Triple-A. In 504 plate appearances in Triple-A, his OBP was .308. That definitely will not cut it for the Reds. I believe that is what troubled the projection systems the most. Well...computers are not troubled, they just spit out stuff based on past history.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">Of course, baseball is not just about hitting and scoring runs. There is also preventing runs scored by the other teams. The news is much better there concerning Billy Hamilton. Everyone acknowledges that Choo was miscast as a center fielder last season and his defensive numbers showed the problem.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">According to the defensive numbers, Choo cost his team between 1.5 and 1.9 wins last season. Hamilton could go as high as the positive number above replacement. In other words, his defensive could mean a three-win swing over Choo just by chasing down outs in the outfield.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">Comparing Hamilton to Choo of last season is probably not fair. Choo had such a good year that most lead-off batters would pale in comparison. Choo was worth 4.2 rWAR or 5.2 fWAR (whichever your preference) while the most generous projection for Hamilton is a 2.5 WAR. In other words, his defense will not make up for the lack of offense.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">Billy Hamilton will make things exciting on the base paths. He will have spectacular moments there and in the field. The question here is not any of those things. The question is whether he will get on base enough times to be the lead-off batter.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">The problem for the Reds is that there is no one else to bat at the top of the order. The team's best on-base guys are <strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/v/vottojo01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/v/vottojo01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Joey Votto</a></strong>, and to a lesser extent, <strong style="color: black; line-height: 1.5;"><a data-mce-href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/bruceja01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/bruceja01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.flagrantfan.com" style="color: #743399; line-height: 1.5;" target="_blank">Jay Bruce</a></strong>. You want those two guys batting third and fourth. Nobody else on the team gets on base nearly enough.</div><div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 24px; text-align: justify;">Projections are often wrong and Billy Hamilton could be a break-out star. But for that to happen, he needs to bat .280 and get on base at a .340 clip at least. Either way, it will be one of the most fascinating things to watch this season.</div>

Billy Hamilton better hit .280 or higher

Billy Hamilton  played thirteen games at the Big League level in 2013. And yet the accumulated 19.4% of the Cincinnati Reds' stolen base...

+ Read more »

Just another strange game at Minute Maid Park

<div style="text-align: justify;">The visiting Cincinnati Reds beat the Houston Astros in one strange and long game yesterday. It took the Reds five hours and eighteen minutes to do so. The game featured the coming out party, if you will, for <strong><a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=hamilbi02,hamilbi01&utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.blogger.com" target="_blank">Billy Hamilton</a></strong> who stole four bases in his first MLB start. Despite those four stolen bases and the fact that he was on base five times in the game, he scored only twice. That was the kind of game it was. Hamilton did, however, score the winning run.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The final score of 6-5 makes it sound like a high scoring game. The two teams combined to use fourteen pitchers. None of them were much to write home about. And yet, the score could have been ten runs or more higher.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For example, <strong><a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/h/hoovejj01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.blogger.com" target="_blank">J.J. Hoover</a></strong> pitched an inning and a third. Of the 26 pitches he threw, only twelve were strikes. He did not give up a run. On the Astros' side, <strong><a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/player_search.cgi?results=fieldjo02,fieldjo03&utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.blogger.com" target="_blank">Josh Fields</a></strong> pitched an inning and threw 22 pitches and only six were strikes. He did not give up a run.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The two teams were a combined seven for 41 with runners in scoring position. That works out to a .170 average. The two teams combined for twenty walks in the game and 22 hits. There were also two wild pitches, an error and two hit batters. That is 45 combined base runners and only eleven of them scored. And this was despite the two teams combining for nine doubles and ten total extra base hits.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The two teams combined to strand 31 base runners. This despite the two teams' pitchers combining to throw only 57.6% strikes in the game.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/phillbr01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.blogger.com" target="_blank">Brandon Phillips</a></strong> did not have a good game at the dish. He went zero for seven with seven total runners left on base.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/l/ludwiry01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.blogger.com" target="_blank">Ryan Ludwick</a></strong> had arguably a worse night. He went zero for six and left nine men on base all by himself. He did drive in one run with a sac fly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><strong><a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/krausma01.shtml?utm_campaign=Linker&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=linker-www.blogger.com" target="_blank">Marc Krauss</a></strong> went hitless in the game (he did walk once) and stranded six runners all by his lonesome. He was the Astros' DH. The two designated hitters--a position meant solely for offense--combined to go zero for twelve with fifteen men left on base.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This was one strange game that had to be brutal to watch. Well, it would have been more brutal if not for the coming out party of Billy Hamilton. Just to wash out the bad taste of it all, I will leave you with the highlights of his steals. Enjoy.</div><br /><br /><iframe frameborder="0" height="224" src="http://wapc.mlb.com/shared/video/embed/embed.html?content_id=30742753&topic_id=32862096&width=400&height=224&property=mlb" width="400">Your browser does not support iframes.</iframe>

Just another strange game at Minute Maid Park

The visiting Cincinnati Reds beat the Houston Astros in one strange and long game yesterday. It took the Reds five hours and eighteen minute...

+ Read more »