At Home with Hamilton

[rog]

I'm not endorsing signing Billy Hamilton, but I did want to point out that if the Giants truly need to build their team around speed and defense, Billy is the man.  There are few if any players in the game with a more dominant combination of speed and defense.

I'm curious as to the feelings of those who want to build the Giants around speed and defense in order to take advantage of their park.  Where is Boly when we need him!!!

[klaiggeb]

Sorry, Rog, but IMHO, no he isn't.

And it's not even close.

Billy is fast; really fast, and he's an outstanding CF...

But his career .298 OBP is pathetic!

No. It redefines pathetic!

It also shows me he's stubborn or stupid or both, because he's NEVER made any adjustments to play to his strengths.

[rog]

You pointed out just what I thought about today, Boly. A team in a ballpark that deadens power needs to build around speed and defense, but it also needs to build around guys who get on base.

You mentioned speed and defense, and now you've completed the building package with OBP. Even on a team with power it's important to have guys who get on base and don't make many outs, but on a team with no power, it can take two or three or four hits to score even one run, so the team had better get those guys on base and around them before they use up those precious three outs.

I didn't endorse Billy, but if one wanted to build a team around ONLY speed and defense, he has them in about as much abundance as anyone.

As for redefining pathetic, I don't think he has done that. He has merely exemplified it. Forty years ago Omar Moreno was considered to be a pretty good center fielder. Like Billy, he was a terror on the bases. But he wasn't the defensive player Billy is, and at .306, his careeer OBP was only slightly better than Billy's.

I mentioned Omar in another post as a very close comp for Billy. Through their age 27 seasons, which Billy just completed, Omar is Billy's #1 comp, and Billy is Omar's #1 comp. Because we know how to better value players, Billy was non-tendered after his age 27 season, while Omar was just one season removed from a 15th place MVP finish and still thought of highly. In fact, because he had just stolen 96 bases, he was considered VERY highly.

We've learned a lot about how to value a player in the four decades since.

Maybe we should look at it as a three-legged stool. Speed, defense AND the ability to reach base and avoid making outs. Kind of like the three-legged stool of areobics, flexibility and muscle for the body. While it is important, speed is likely the third-most important leg of the player stool (gosh, that sounds bad!), just as muscle is for the body.