Giants give Hamilton chance to show he can do more than run
First basemen are known to have some of the most interesting conversations on the baseball field, but their creativity seems to disappear when Billy Hamilton stands alongside them.
Hamilton said they all give him the same line.
“When are you going? Which pitch are you going to go on. I’m like, I don’t know yet,” Hamilton, a former Dayton Dragon, said. “But it’s something like that. It’s like, I know you’re going so it’s like, just hurry up and get going so I can get back a little bit.”
The outfielder best known for his tenure with the Cincinnati Reds is in Giants camp as a minor league free agent trying to win a job this spring.
How does a 29-year-old with 299 stolen bases in just seven major league seasons end up without a guaranteed contract during the prime of his career?
For those who have followed Hamilton’s life in baseball, his status as a low-profile pickup this offseason wasn’t entirely surprising. His career on-base percentage of .297 tells the story.
Free-agency may not have unfolded as Hamilton once envisioned, but when one tool — in this case speed — is so loud and so elite, there will remain a market for a player’s services. Hamilton may not have had suitors all over baseball, but the Giants see how a special talent can remain a lethal weapon and they’ve crafted plans to maximize his abilities.
“We know that groundballs are good for Billy Hamilton but we know that line drives are better for him,” manager Gabe Kapler said. “We’ll keep our focus on mid-level line drives to the middle of the field. We know there’s a lot of grass out there as well.”
The Giants weren’t ready to commit to a full season of Hamilton with a major league deal this offseason, but the front office did spend part of the offseason thinking about ways to take advantage of the type of rare skills he brings to a team. Executives dreamed up a pitch and made it easy for Hamilton to hit.
“I was talking to Gabe and a bunch of the guys from the front office,” Hamilton said. “They gave me like, ‘Billy, we’re not just going to give you a spot, but we want you to come over here and be able to compete.’ And that’s kind of what I was looking for this offseason, coming off the year that I had last year and how I could help the team toward the end of the year, coming in, baserunning, stuff like that.”
There are two reasons Hamilton is optimistic he can provide more value to his team in 2020 than in previous seasons. The first: Playing home games at Oracle Park, where a vast outfield will allow him to roam on defense and take extra bases on offense. The second: A new MLB rule that expands rosters to 26 players.
In the past, a roster crunch might have forced a club in the Giants’ position to cut Hamilton at the end of spring because it needed roster space for everyday players. This season, the Giants will give Hamilton a chance to earn consistent opportunities, but they also see potential value in having him on the team so he can provide late-game help as a defensive substitute or pinch-runner.
With a player who has stolen at least 50 bases four times in his career, the Giants think they may not even need to wait until the late innings before deploying Hamilton on the basepaths.
“How creative can we be about getting him into games in the most important moments?” Kapler said. “He can start games for us, he can come off the bench and pinch-run for us maybe earlier than you might expect and then stay in the game and capitalize on the great defense.”
There’s so much to like about Hamilton’s fit in San Francisco, but there are no certainties he takes an at-bat with the Giants this season. The organization is determined to audition inexperienced outfielders with more to prove such as Steven Duggar, Mike Yastrzemski and Jaylin Davis in center field and any at-bats that Hamilton takes will cut into the playing time of others who could play significant roles for future Giants clubs.
Hamilton understands the Giants are a team in transition, but he also believes he hasn’t quite found the right situation for him to thrive. Even if he knows what his best asset is, Hamilton thinks he’s more than a baserunner. This spring, the Giants plan to give him a chance to prove it.
“Oracle, especially if the ball is in the gap — those gaps, it’s going to be great for me just to run balls down,” Hamilton said. “Not even just the defense, even the offense, those balls that you can get in the gap, you can’t play as shallow as you can in some other parks. So you might get more hits out of a bigger field than you would like a normal like Cincinnati field. I feel like Oracle Park is going to be really nice for me.”