The big secret isn’t much of a secret. As a base-stealer, Billy Hamilton has seemed automatic — but he did get thrown out in the minors. In fact, he got thrown out a whole mess of times.

Since debuting in 2009, Hamilton was thrown out stealing in the minors on 84 occasions, and his overall success rate was right around 82%. Granted, that’s excellent. Granted, maybe Hamilton has improved his ability to pick spots and read pitchers. Granted, who knows the contributions made by minor-league umpires or minor-league field conditions? But Hamilton had been thrown out stealing before. Plenty. It was going to happen to him eventually in the majors. That was inevitable. Major-league players are better than minor-league players.

But most people didn’t expect Hamilton’s first caught-stealing to come on Sept. 25. No one would’ve expected the opposing battery to consist of Daisuke Matsuzaka and Juan Centeno. Hamilton’s first steal came against Yadier Molina. People don’t even know who Juan Centeno is. More people know about him now. Centeno is the first big-leaguer to throw out maybe the next generation’s best base-runner, and Centeno himself might not be long for the big-league spotlight.

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Monday night, Rays manager Joe Maddon pinch hit James Loney for right-handed Sean Rodriguez. After a foul knubber to the right, Loney went all walk-off on Tommy Hunter.

But as much as pinch-hit walk-off home runs are the soup of Hollywood executives, they are the rarest of meats in the MLB reality. In fact, pinch hitting is most often a choice between lesser evils — a choice between a bad wOBA or a terrible wOBA.

A closer look at the last five seasons of pinch hitting reveals success has not between distributed evenly, and the effectiveness of of some pinch-hitting efforts may be a product of systematic choices rather just tough breaks.
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Joey Votto is the major-league leader in walks, by counting and by rate. He’s always been a guy willing and happy to take a free base, and I should note that the very term “free base” is disrespectful to the base on balls, as if walks don’t require work. Anyway, Votto is also the National League leader in on-base percentage. The point: Votto doesn’t make many outs, relative to the rest of his peers, because he’s disciplined about when he swings, and his swing is productive on contact.

Nevertheless, Votto slugged 37 dingers once, driving in 113 runs, and as such some people are displeased with his current standard of patience. Some people with “Reds” on their paychecks think Votto should be more aggressive, especially with runners on, since he’s paid to be a run producer. He is a run producer, but not in a way that makes everyone happy. Votto, some people say, isn’t good enough, considering what he allegedly could be.

Monday against the Mets, Votto came to the plate five times. He reached first base five times, all on walks. He drew a walk in the first, a walk in the second, a walk in the fourth, a walk in the seventh, and a walk in the ninth. The last batter to draw five walks in five plate appearances was Mike Baxter in August 2012, but that game was started by Edinson Volquez so it hardly counts. In all, we have a record of 33 games in which a batter walked all five times he hit. This is an unusual and exceptional performance, and I thought it ought to be examined through the lens of the Joey Votto Passivity Index. Could Votto have put balls in play, or were pitchers just not giving him anything?

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Typical  Billy Hamilton story outline: Ordinary introductory paragraph noting Hamilton’s speed when running the bases. Reference to Hamilton’s record-breaking stolen-base numbers in the minor leagues. Note regarding Hamilton’s immediate base-stealing success in the majors. Cautionary remark pertaining to Hamilton’s limited offensive potential at the plate. Renewed appreciation of footspeed. Statement that Hamilton could be one-of-a-kind, at least for his generation. Explanation that — while base-running scores tend to be close to zero — Hamilton looks like an actual valuable weapon. Insert joke that Hamilton is so fast he’s already finished reading this article.

Run-of-the-mill paragraph pointing out how slow Jose Molina is. Note that Molina is perhaps the game’s slowest runner. Obligatory reference to Molina’s high-quality pitch-framing. Joke that Molina slows the game down in more ways than one. Acknowledgment that no one expects catchers to be able to run; decent speed is just gravy. Acknowledgment of Molina’s relatively advanced age. Note that this is not intended as a criticism. Statement that this is just a fact, to which Molina would certainly admit without shame.

Predictable musing about how Hamilton and Molina might compare.

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Here’s a fun little game. Go to the top of the page and click on leaderboards, then use the league drop down box to isolate just NL players. Now, click on the advanced tab so that you can get to the two components of our baserunning metric, wSB (stolen base runs) and UBR (baserunning runs besides SB/CS). You’ll see them on the right hand side of the page, between BABIP and wRC.

Now, before you sort by wSB, go to the min PA drop down. Instead of picking a minimum, you need to set this to zero, because the hero of our story doesn’t yet meet the lowest playing time threshold on the drop down box. Now, once you’ve done that, you’ll have a leaderboard consisting of 543 names, because the lack of a minimum playing time requirement means that our net is huge and catches everyone who has appeared as a hitter or runner for an NL team this season.

Now that you’ve done that, click on wSB to make it sort in descending order. You are now looking at the NL leaders in runs added through base stealing. For those who didn’t play along with the instructions, I’ll create the table for you, just without all the other things on the advanced tab:

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According to the best data I can access, so far this year there have been 425 pitches thrown at least 100 miles per hour. Andrew Cashner‘s got one. Nathan Eovaldi‘s got one. Matt Harvey‘s got two. Bruce Rondon‘s got 104. Aroldis Chapman‘s got 196. To set a cutoff at 100 is arbitrary, but it feels natural, and 100 definitely has the feel of a magic number. A fastball at 100 is, officially, a fastball in the triple digits. Within the realm of 100+ mile-per-hour fastballs, Rondon and Chapman, combined, have thrown more than twice as many as everybody else. The next-highest total after Rondon’s 104 is Kelvin Herrera’s 45, and there’s long been talk that the PITCHf/x in Kansas City is miscalibrated.

What Chapman’s got over Rondon is peak velocity — Chapman, this year, has topped out at 104. What Rondon’s got over Chapman is consistency — 24% of Rondon’s pitches have reached 100, against Chapman’s 19%. Rondon has the harder average fastball. If you isolate only those fastballs thrown at least 100, Rondon and Chapman tie with an average velocity of 101. Clearly, these are the game’s premier flame-throwers. But while they both throw similar heat — similar, virtually unparalleled heat — the results have been considerably different. We’ve been seeing two types of 100 mile-per-hour fastballs.

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Watch enough baseball and you’ll start to think of yourself as something of a scout. You’ll think that you’re an attentive observer — that you can pick up on things, individual strengths and weaknesses. In my younger days, I thought I was pretty good about identifying hitters who struggled with low, away sliders. You know the types, and you know the swings. In truth, everybody struggles with low, away sliders. Some struggle more than others, but righties have trouble with low, away sliders from righties, and lefties have trouble with low, away sliders from lefties. Executed properly, it’s almost the perfect pitch. It breaks away late, so it looks like a strike, often in a defensive count. Yet swinging is virtually futile — if you don’t swing through the pitch, you’ll put it in play pretty weakly. A well-thrown low, away slider is a ball, but usually, it’s a strike, or an out. There’s no hitter in baseball who can resist it on a consistent basis. It’s too potent a weapon.

What follows is the story of a Yasiel Puig home run.

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“I didn’t send him out there to paint,” Dusty Baker would say. “It was no secret.”

One of the things about strategic maneuvers in baseball is that they’re usually evident ahead of time. There aren’t many equivalents to, say, a corner blitz. If a manager goes to the bullpen, the other team sees the new reliever first, and can get ready to hit him. If a defense shifts for a hitter, the hitter can observe the shifted positioning, and think about how he wants to adjust. If a manager inserts a pinch-runner, the other team can figure that runner might be running. There’s little sense in a pinch-runner otherwise. Much about baseball can be surprising. The same cannot be said for much of baseball strategy.

Billy Hamilton made his major-league debut Tuesday night, in a scoreless game between the Reds and the Cardinals. He made it not as a starter, but as a runner, having recently come up as a September promotion. Hamilton ran for Ryan Ludwick with none out in the bottom of the seventh, and it didn’t matter that the opposition had Yadier Molina behind the plate. I mean, it did — of course it mattered — but Molina’s presence wasn’t going to stop Hamilton from trying to do what he was going to try to do. Everybody understood why Hamilton was in the game. He wasn’t out there to paint.

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As I’m writing this on Wednesday night, the Reds are clobbering the Cardinals, 9-0. All those runs, incidentally, were charged to Adam Wainwright, which means both Wainwright and Felix Hernandez imploded on the same day. Joey Votto, so far tonight, has batted three times against St. Louis. He’s drawn three walks, as Votto is wont to do. He walked with two on in the first inning, and later scored a run. He walked with one on in the second inning, and soon thereafter scored a run. He walked again in the fourth, but the bases were empty — and that’s not what this is going to be about.

If you haven’t read the arguments, you’ve probably at least heard about them. Votto has been a polarizing player for the Reds, because he’s drawn a ton of walks in run-scoring situations. With runners in scoring position, he’s walked more than a quarter of the time. The end result is that Votto has an underwhelming RBI total, and he’s supposed to be in the lineup to produce runs. In theory, run-producers are supposed to swing the bat. Run-producers like Brandon Phillips. One’s instinct is to think this is absurd — and it is pretty silly — but we might as well dig in for a few minutes. Are people warranted to be frustrated by Joey Votto’s patient approach?

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One time, and one time only, has a pitcher had the nerve to make Joey Votto pop up twice in the same game. One time has a pitcher simply looked like he had Joey Votto’s number. Back in September 2008, the Reds played the Marlins, and when Votto faced Ricky Nolasco the first time, he popped out. Later, when Votto faced Nolasco a second time, he popped out again. Later still, when Votto faced Nolasco a third time, he clubbed a dinger. Votto wouldn’t face Nolasco a fourth time.

By now, you must be aware that Joey Votto simply doesn’t hit infield pop-ups. We’ve written about it here a few times before, and other people have written about it in other places. People have asked Votto about it directly, and Votto has given thoughtful responses, as is his way. There might be something to be written about batted-ball data taking off like that, just as a sign of the times, but there’s no time for that today. Because yesterday, Joey Votto hit an infield pop-up. Facing Jeff Samardzija, Votto had his first official 2013 moment of weakness, relatively speaking.

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