Improving Billy Hamilton

Now that football’s officially over for a while, countless sports fans are going to look ahead to the baseball season, with 2015 promising to be The Year Of Mookie Betts. This comes on the heels of 2014, which at one time promised to be The Year Of Billy Hamilton. And, to be fair, it was in a sense The Half-Year Of Billy Hamilton, but then Hamilton fell on harder times, losing a Rookie-of-the-Year race he once had all but locked up. Hamilton is now presumably older and presumably wiser, and he remains a player of unusual intrigue, along with being an important player for a Reds team that steadfastly refuses to tear down and start over.

Hamilton, naturally, has things to improve on. Every player in baseball has things to improve on — Clayton Kershaw has things to improve on — but Hamilton’s things are bigger than Kershaw’s things. Kershaw, for example, might want to polish his changeup a little more. Or maybe not. It’ll cross his mind. Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to not suck at hitting. His own manager has some ideas.

From an article by Mark Sheldon:

Price would also like to see Hamilton take advantage of his speed by hitting more line drives and balls on the ground instead of lifting them into the air. That would include more bunting.

How do you make Billy Hamilton better at the plate? It’s easy to notice the strikeouts being a little high. It’s easy to notice the bunts that didn’t go for hits. But Price touches on something pretty basic. Hamilton is a burner, and he’s not known for his strength. Never will be. Your classic leadoff-hitting burner slaps the ball onto the ground. Hamilton hit too many into the air, and no mathematical gymnastics are required to see that it worked out rather poorly for him.

This image is self-explanatory. Hamilton vs. the league overall, excluding pitchers:

Hamilton, as you might figure, was more productive than the average hitter with the ball on the ground. He was about equally productive on liners, in some part because Hamilton is unusually able to take the extra base. On bunts, Hamilton struggled just a little bit, though it’s worth noting few of Hamilton’s bunts could’ve been thought as having taken the defense by surprise. And then you notice the flies. I didn’t forget to include Hamilton’s data. Look closer. Last year, on fly balls, Hamilton finished with a wRC+ of -1. With a stat like wRC+, you want your symbols to be in agreement.

It isn’t simply that Hamilton sucked on fly balls. Most hitters with his profile suck on fly balls. It’s that he hit so many of them. The average fly-ball rate was just under 35%. Hamilton finished above 37%. For reference, Ben Revere finished at 14%. Nori Aoki, 17%. Dee Gordon, 19%. Elvis Andrus, 21%. When you don’t hit for power, you need to make up for that somewhere else. Often, hitters will do so by trying to maximize their BABIPs. Hamilton isn’t going to do that by hitting the ball with loft. And while Carlos Gomez developed into a powerful superstar after abandoning suggestions to slap and dash, Hamilton doesn’t have Gomez’s frame. Hamilton doesn’t have a malnourished Gomez’s frame. Billy Hamilton as an adult might be Carlos Gomez in seventh grade.

Let’s run a little analysis. Since 2002, 179 players have batted at least 500 times and posted a HR/FB% no higher than 5%. Of those players, 56 have posted speed scores of at least 6. As a group, they’ve averaged an 81 wRC+. Just 15 of them — 27% — have put up a wRC+ of at least 90. Three of them — 5% — have put up a wRC+ of at least 100. No one shows up higher than 106.

If you sort that group by fly-ball rate, you find Hamilton at the very top. That is, he’s hit a higher rate of fly balls than other under-powered speedsters. Next-highest is Kenny Lofton, but Lofton is an obviously bad comparison — he walked, and he seldom struck out. Next on the list is Rajai Davis. Davis makes a lot more sense as a Hamilton comp. He’s always struck out a little too much. He’s always walked a little too infrequently. He’s never hit more than eight home runs, and the batted-ball profile is similar.

Arbitrarily, let’s put a cutoff at 90 wRC+. How did those 15 players get there, with speed but not with much in the way of power? Six of them posted walk rates of at least 9%, which Hamilton seems unlikely to touch. Another three maintained strikeout rates under 15%, which Hamilton also seems unlikely to touch. Of the remaining, four are established groundball hitters. Then you’ve got Joe Inglett and Craig Gentry. Inglett never batted 400 times in a year. Gentry’s never batted 300 times in a year. Both still hit more grounders than Hamilton has.

It’s a difficult situation for Hamilton and for the Reds. What they’d like is for him to finish above last year’s final statistics. Assuming he doesn’t grow into more power, he’ll need to walk more, or strike out less, or hit fewer fly balls. Though Hamilton isn’t a hacker, he’s given little reason for pitchers not to be aggressive with him, so you can’t very well force walks. He’s struck out at a decent clip against all advanced competition, and he’s also shown similar batted-ball profiles. Hamilton didn’t slap the ball on the ground in Triple-A. Nor did he do so below that. What the Reds want him to work on is his very swing. He’s certainly young enough to change it, but that swing is part of his developed game. The Reds want an adjusted swing path, and that’s something very fundamental to Billy Hamilton’s baseball DNA.

Still, there are two other things. For one, last year Hamilton hit .395 on non-sac bunts. Since 2002, in all player-seasons with at least 25 non-sac bunt attempts, said players have bunted for a .472 average, so Hamilton’s bunting should come with real upside. You figure that’s easier to improve than actually hitting, and I’d expect next year’s Billy Hamilton to end up with more bunt singles and errors.

And then there are the other parts of his game. Like Rajai Davis, Hamilton is an obviously valuable baserunner. Unlike Davis, though, Hamilton is also an obviously valuable defender, so it’s easier to tolerate the outs. Don’t forget that, last season, we’ve got Hamilton tagged at 3.5 WAR. That’s while hitting 21% worse than the average player. He still would’ve been all right, even if you were to dock him half his runs saved in the field. It’s not quite clear where the lower threshold of offense is that a team will accept for Hamilton to start.

Yet, you figure, Hamilton won’t have an extraordinary career as long as he has a sub-.300 OBP. That’s where he’ll have to improve. And that’s going to require a very significant change to the core of his game. We’ve already seen some early results from the Billy Hamilton experiment. It’s a while yet before this experiment is going to be published.