Last week the Cincinnati Reds dropped struggling centerfielder Billy Hamilton from the leadoff spot in their batting order. Hamilton, whose batting average was hovering right around the Mendoza line, moved to the 8th spot in the batting order.
The Reds have played eight games since Hamilton was dropped in the batting order. They’ve lost all of them.
* * *
There are two skills about Billy Hamilton that set him apart from the crowd. Those skills are:
1. He is faster than anyone else, and
2. He is a better hitter than anyone who isn’t in the major leagues.
Those are generalizations, of course. Hamilton would lose a 100-yard dash to most Olympic athletes, and I’m sure there’s a few guys stuck in the minors who could out-hit Hamilton if given the chance. But the two points are generally true. Put Hamilton on your slow-pitch softball team, and he’ll be the best hitter on your team. He’s also be the fastest guy in your zip code.
We could look at these skills on a percentile scale. Hamilton, as a hitter, is probably in the 99th percentile, meaning that if you took 100 random people, Hamilton would be a better hitter than 99 of them. As a runner, Hamilton is in the 99.9th percentile: he’d beat 999 out of 1000 to the tape.
What is interesting is the degree that that second skill has shaped Hamilton’s career.
Let’s look back on what Hamilton looked like as a 20-year old in Rookie Ball. Here’s his triple-slash line:
.318/.383/.456
This is not a bad line. Jason Kipnis, another middle infielder drafted three spots after Hamilton, posted a similar line in Single-A that year:
.300/.387/.478
Sure, that was Single-A instead of Rookie-level, so Kipnis should get some extra credit for that. But it’s worth noting that Jason Kipnis was three-and-a-half years older than Hamilton when he put up that line. (Note: Jason Kipnis is still three-and-a-half years older than Hamilton, because his off-season experiments with relativity and near-light-speed travel didn’t pan out.)
What the Indians did with Kipnis was move up to A+, and then Double-A, and then Triple-A, and then the majors. This is what most teams do with second-round picks who have success in the low minors: they move them up until they stop having success.
Here’s what the Reds did:
They asked Hamilton to learn how to hit left-handed.
* * *
I want to segue, briefly, into the topic of exceptionalism.
I’ve never been exceptional. That isn’t a pessimistic statement, just the truth. There’s no sphere in which my abilities have ever held me significantly above my peers, no moment where I’ve felt markedly betterthan anyone else.
Take writing. I love writing, and I’ve spent a significant chunk of my life trying to be a better writer. Writing is what I do for a living: it’s what I spend most of my working hours doing. When I have to fill out a form that asks my profession, I put down ‘writer.’ Sometimes I capitalize it.
That said, I’ve never been great at writing. I’ve never believed that I was a singularly talented writer. I certainly wasn’t the best writer in my high school, or anywhere close to being the best writer. I wasn’t the best writer at my college, and I wasn’t the best writer when I did an MFA years later. I have a PhD now: I’m a ‘doctor’ of writing, whatever the hell that means. I still don’t think I’m much good at it.
This is true in just about every sphere of my interest, and it holds true in every job I’ve had. I love sports, but I’m only a fair athlete: I don’t think I’ve ever been the best player on any field I’ve set foot on. I’ve worked a lot of different jobs, from line cook to addiction counselor to college teacher, and while I’ve done every job competently, I’ve never been the best guy punching the clock. I’ve always been in the middle.
This isn’t an attempt at false modesty: I’m pointing this out to make a larger point.
What I’ve come to realize is that this middle-ness, for lack of a better word, has been extraordinarily useful in giving me a degree of autonomy in my life. Because I’m not greatat anything in particular, I’ve been free to pursue the things that are the most interesting to me, without anyone fretting too much about what I might be giving up. I’ve been able to live something close to the life I want to live, without any nagging concerns about whether it’s the right life. I’ve never felt gifted, so I’ve never had to worry about squandering a gift.
* * *
Which brings us back to Billy Hamilton.
If you read ten articles about Billy Hamilton this year, every single one of them will mention bunting. Every one of them will say a) that Hamilton should bunt, and b) that Hamilton actually hasn’t had very much luck bunting.
The second point is true: Hamilton has been almost shockingly unsuccessful at bunting for base hits. Whereas speedsters like Dee Gordon and Jose Altuve have a reasonably good batting average when bunting, Hamilton’s been terrible. He’s attempted to bunt 14 times this year, and has two hits for his efforts.
You see the trap, right?
Billy Hamilton is super-fast, so it stands to logic that he should bunt. But he doesn’t actually get many hits on his bunt attempts, so what are you going to do?
If you’re the Reds, you drop him in the order, and tell him to keep bunting. And you keep your fingers crossed that he can figure out one little dimension of the game, so that he doesn’t waste his big-and-shiny ability to run around the bases faster than anyone else.
* * *
To my mind, the most fascinating thing about Hamilton is the way in which his one singular talent has influenced the entirety of his career. His career has not been allowed its natural arc because his team has tried to utilize his One Great Skill as much as possible.
To the Reds credit, one of these efforts actually worked. The Reds moved Hamilton to centerfield, imagining that his speed and agility would translate to a Gold-Glove caliber defender. This is exactly what happened: if Juan Lagares wasn’t in the NL, Hamilton would be a strong candidate to collect defensive hardware.
But the other decision hasn’t worked. In asking Hamilton to learn to hit left-handed, the Reds were hoping that Hamilton would take advantage of the shorter distance to first base. He hasn’t, and I don’t think he will. I think the Reds damaged Hamilton’s chances of being a competent major-league hitter by asking him to switch to the left side.
His platoon splits aren’t demonstrably different. From his natural (right) side, Hamilton has a career batting line of .262/.289/.396. This isn’t good, but it’s a little better than his batting line as a left-hander: .239/.288/.336. Hamilton walks a little bit more as a left-handed hitter, but he gets more hits (and shows more power) from the right side.
This matches the eyeball test. I’ve watched a lot of Hamilton’s at-bats, and he looks more comfortable from the right side. He seems to read pitches better, and he doesn’t seem as focused on working the count.
As a left-handed hitter, Hamilton’s approach seems more patient: while I can’t find the exact splits, it seems like he takes a lot of first-pitch strikes from the left-side, and ends up behind in the count. I don’t know that this quite works for him….I think Hamilton isn’t a naturally patient hitter, and I don’t know that he’s improved by trying to be patient.
A lot of this is speculation: I have no idea, for instance, what the internal conversation are within the Reds organization, and I don’t know much about how the decision to have Hamilton switch-hit was made. It is entirely possible that Hamilton asked to make these changes, and I don’t want to imply that the Reds have strong-armed Hamilton.
I also don’t fault the Reds organization for asking Hamilton to switch-hit. I only mention this decision because it illustrate the problem of talent: if you are exceptionally skilled at one thing, anyone who has any say on your life will steer you towards making the most of that skill. If you score an 800 on the math SAT’s, your parents are going to leave that application for MIT next to your cereal bowl every morning. If you’ve mastered Liszt’s Eroica, your piano teacher will set up that interview at Julliard. And if you’re a three-sport athlete who can get down the line in under 3.7 seconds, the team that drafts you is going to do everything they can to cash in on that ability.
* * *
While we’re on the subject of exceptionalism, it’s worth mentioning that the Reds are blessed with two exceptional players. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t mention Joey Votto for a moment.
Joey Votto’s singular talent is that he never pops up baseballs. In a major league career spanning 4200 plate appearances, Votto has exactly fourteen infield pop ups.
He is also an on-base machine: Votto led the NL in on-base percentage four consecutive seasons, and he has the highest lifetime mark (.416) of any active player. He is an exceptional at getting on base as Hamilton is when he’s on the bases.
And the Reds don’t exactly know what to do with Votto, either.
At the start of the season, they had Votto hitting second, right behind Hamilton. This has a satisfying logic: if you have the fastest guy in baseball batting leadoff, it’s a good idea to follow up with a guy who has tremendous plate discipline, and can take a few pitches.
Votto stated in multiple interviews that he was happy about this: he cited Hamilton’s presence on the bases as offering him ‘protection’: pitchers had to come to the plate quickly, and they had to throw fastballs.
Intellectually, this seemed like a great solution. One of the troubles with Hamilton in 2014 was that he tried to steal early in the count, figuring that he had to get to second before the next batter was too deep in the count. Votto is the rare hitter comfortable in deep counts.
And Votto liked hitting behind Hamilton. This isn’t talked about enough, but a lot of batters don’t like hitting behind a speedster. Dwayne Murphy hated hitting behind Rickey Henderson, because he hated having to watch good pitches go past so Rickey could be Rickey. The Reds didn’t have this problem: their best hitter wanted to hit behind their speedster, and viewed it as an advantage.
Here’s Votto’s triple-slash line for the 82 plate appearance where he was hitting 2nd behind Hamilton:
.328/.451/.657, 1.108 OPS
The Reds, deciding to cash in on Votto’s resurgence, dropped him to the #3 spot in the order. Here’s what Votto did in his next 82 plate appearances:
.243/.317/.324, 641 OPS
These are small sample sizes, but they at least suggest that Votto enjoyed hitting behind Hamilton more than he enjoys hitting behind some combination of Cozart, Marlon Byrd and Brandon Phillips.
* * *
You remember bullpen-by-committee, right? Left without an obvious closer one year, the Red Sox decided to use relievers according to what the game dictated, instead of picking a true ‘closer.’ The results were a disaster.
The lesson of that experiment, in my opinion, is that teams tend to underrate the importance of routine. The bullpen-by-committee didn’t work because no one knew their role: when the bullpen phone rang, they didn’t ever know if it was ringing for them.
I think the same thing applies to the Reds this year. They’re not a great team, but they’re not horrible, either. Through the first fifteen games of the season they were 8-7, which is about where you’d expect them to be.
Just my opinion, but I think the Reds, as a team, started to spin out when they moved Votto from second to third in the order. It destabilized the rest of the offense: someone had to come and fill in for Votto in the #2 slot, and Frazier was suddenly hitting fourth. Mesoraco was out, and Cozart was hitting….things started to shift.
The team didn’t really spin out: they went 10-8 over their next eighteen games, putting across about the same number of runs as they had when Votto was hitting second. The team didn’t sputter out, but Votto did decline.
When the Reds moved Hamilton to eighth, I expected the move would backfire. I knew that the guys they were replacing Hamilton with (first Cozart, now Phillips) wouldn’t be significantly better at getting on base, and I knew they wouldn’t be as effective as Hamilton on the bases. I did not realize how much it would affect the offense.
Going back to last season, here’s how the Reds offense has performed in three lineups:
|
Lineup
|
Games
|
Runs
|
RPG
|
W-L
|
|
BH2, then Votto
|
31
|
137
|
4.42
|
16-15
|
|
BH2…Votto
|
49
|
202
|
4.12
|
26-23
|
|
Votto..Hamilton
|
8
|
21
|
2.63
|
0-8
|
The first row is how the Reds have fared with Hamilton and Votto hitting 1-2. The second row is how the Reds have done with Hamilton leading off, and Votto further down the order. The last line is the currently skidding Reds, where Hamilton is hitting 8th or 9th.
* * *
I don’t usually write columns that end with me telling a major league front office what to do, but I’ll make an exception here. I think the Reds should go back to what was working at the start of the year and stick to it. Tell Hamilton that he’s back in the leadoff spot, because as dreadful as his on-base percentage is, he more than makes up for it when he’s actually on the bases.
And maybe think about letting him have a few at-bats against righties as a right-handed batter. The 0.1 second advantage that Hamilton gets by being closer to first base probably isn’t that useful, and it’d be nice to see if he can turn into a hitter from one side of the plate.
Finally, tell Votto that he’s going back to the #2 slot in the lineup, where he can look forward to a steady diet of fastballs from nervous pitchers.
Or continue shuffling the batting order like deck chairs on the Titanic, because that seems to be where the Reds are heading right now.
David Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.