Cincinnati Reds Outfielder Billy Hamilton Running Wild

Cincinnati Reds speedster Billy Hamilton is finding his groove at the plate after a slow start.

He’s struggled offensively at the beginning of his major league career, but Cincinnati Reds outfielder Billy Hamilton has been doing exactly what his promise made people think he could do. Is this real, or just a hot streak?

Those who play in fantasy baseball leagues have noticed in the last few weeks that the league member in their league with Billy Hamilton on his roster has shot up the standings. Hamilton overtook the MLB stolen base lead on Tuesday after Milwaukee’s Jonathan Villar had led the league for nearly the entire season. However, Hamilton isn’t just stealing bases. Let’s take a look…

Hamilton’s background

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Hamilton was a 2nd round pick of the Cincinnati Reds in the 2009 draft out of high school in Mississippi. He had blazing speed from the word “go”, stealing 48 bases in 69 games in 2010 in short-season ball. In his first year of full-season ball in 2011, he stole 103 bases. 2012 was his peak season, however, as he broke the minor league stolen base record, stealing 155 bases in 132 games across two levels in the Reds system.

While Hamilton absolutely has blazing speed, his defense at shortstop left plenty to be desired, as he had committed 89 errors in roughly 375 games, or roughly 35 errors per 162 games. The Reds moved him to center field to take advantage of his incredible speed, and he was up to the major leagues in the next season as a pinch runner and defensive replacement for a Reds team that was chasing the playoffs.

He took over in 2014 as the regular center fielder, and while he’s stolen now 164 bases since that day, there have been a lot of concerns about his hitting, as he’s had a career mark of .246/.294/.334, leading to plenty of jokes about not being able to steal first base. His defense is exceptional, and that has allowed Hamilton to post 5.6 bWAR since opening day 2014 in spite of his sub-replacement hitting.

Recent surge

Hamilton has been on a surge since putting up an 0-4 on July 4th against the Cubs. He returned the next day with a single, double, and a walk along with three stolen bases the next day. For the speedster, it was his first 3-steal game of 2016. He’s had 6 such games now in 2016 starting with the 5th of July. In that time, he’s hit .286/.356/.319. While he’s had no power, he’s been on base at a much better rate than he’s been able to sustain. In that time, he’s played 30 games and stolen 32 bases while only being caught 3 times.

Can he keep it up?

Hamilton has shown some interesting trends in his recent streak. His BABIP is normal (for him); his slugging is even a bit low. However, his walk rate has been 9.78 percent and his strikeout rate has been 18.05 percent over that time. That is a huge improvement over his career 6.22 percent walk rate and nearly a half percent better rate of striking out than his career 18.47 percent rate.

Hamilton made a concerted effort for this entire season to focus on his hitting to maximize on using his speed, and he had been successful in that, going from a guy who had a 37 percent fly ball rate and around a 41.5 percent ground ball rate. With his speed, he can beat out a ton of ground balls, and he’s used an adjustment made this season to bring down his numbers to a 31 percent fly ball rate and increase his ground balls to 46.4 percent. In turn, his ground ball to fly ball ratio has gone from 1.12 in his first two seasons to 1.49 this season!

I think if he can keep up his walk rate along with his focus on keeping the ball on the ground, Hamilton will find himself as extremely valuable on offense as well as defense.

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Here’s a few videos of Hamilton for some “speed porn”:

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