Your Billy Hamilton Factoid of the Day
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:
| # | Name | PA | wSB |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Carlos Gomez | 550 | 4.1 |
| 2 | Eric Young | 549 | 3.5 |
| 3 | Jean Segura | 619 | 3.2 |
| 4 | Hunter Pence | 646 | 2.9 |
| 5 | Carlos Gonzalez | 436 | 2.7 |
| 6 | Everth Cabrera | 435 | 2.3 |
| 7 | Daniel Murphy | 651 | 2.1 |
| 8 | Juan Pierre | 319 | 1.8 |
| 8 | David Wright | 465 | 1.8 |
| 8 | Billy Hamilton | 9 | 1.8 |
Our hero, Billy Hamilton, is tied for 8th in the NL in stolen base runs. He made his major league debut two weeks ago. He started his first big league game yesterday. He has come to bat just nine times. And he’s already tied for 8th in the NL in runs added through base stealing. He’s got a pretty good chance at finishing the season in the top five.
Billy Hamilton, man. I don’t know if he’s ever going to hit, or how well he’ll defend center field, but on the base paths, he is something that this sport hasn’t seen in several decades. He might not ever be a star, but he’s going to be one of the most unique players of his time.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
I heard before his call up that he played center well. I haven’t been able to watch any Reds games, so I am curious: Does anyone know how he has looked in CF?
Yeah, all the minors reports made it sound like his defense was good but the Reds haven’t given him much time there. I’d be interested in this answer
He looked good last night. His range, of course, is superb. His arm is probably about average for CF. I’ve heard varying reports on his instincts and jumps on balls, but you gotta figure that those will improve with experience.
Overall it seems like he has a ceiling of a well above average defensive CF. Combined with the baserunning, that provides substantial value even if he’s a bad hitter.
I watched him in Louisville at a grand total of one game this year and it was about what you’d expect. Crazy range and several bad breaks. Word from a friend with Bats (Louisville AAA) season tickets was that his defense improved by leaps and bounds this summer which is plausible since he was a SS up to recently.
*meant to say that the game I saw him at was early this season, headed down there to see Cingrani pitch.