Josh Hamilton has set some very lofty goals for himself this season. Actually, “lofty” isn’t the right word. Absurd? Ridiculous? Delusional? Any of these adjectives work just fine for the fantastical target that Josh Hamilton has set for himself of a .300 batting average, 30 homers and 100 RBIs in 2015.
Josh, however, believes those goals to be entirely within reach. He even said so himself:
Those are very attainable. I’ll go back to my old school thoughts about setting goals for myself.
No, those are not “very attainable.” To say that those goals are “very attainable” means that it an easy goal to achieve, as in easy enough to achieve that it isn’t even a good goal.
It turns out though that the .300/30/100 line that Hamilton has set his sights on is very difficult to attain. In 2014, only two players (Jose Abreu and Victor Martinez) cleared that bar. Hamilton, meanwhile, posted a .263/10/44 line. So close!
In his defense, Josh has achieved this goal two previous times in his career, but the most recent occurence was four seasons and hundreds of whiffs ago for Hamilton.
But as Josh said, “everyone needs goals” so let’s humor him and see if these goals are even remotely attainable individually.
Josh theoretically could hit .300. He’s done so twice in his career and has a .292 career batting average. So far so good. The problem is that he hasn’t sniffed .300 in his two seasons with the Angels having hit .263 in 2014 and .250 in 2013.
When Josh had his .359 batting average season, he did that on the back of a .390 BABIP, which is fairly insane, but maybe if he lucks into another sky high BABIP he could inflate his average, right?
Yeah, not so much. Hambone actually did luck into an unsustainably high BABIP in 2014 at .350 and he still could only manage to hit .263. I’ll spare you the math and just say that for him to turn his average last season into a .300 batting average, he’d need a BABIP that is not achievable by mortals.
The reason Hamilton can’t even BABIP his way to .300 is that he can’t, you know, actually hit the ball a lot of the time. He struck out in 28.3% of his plate appearances last season. When you strike out that much, there is just no way to hit .300. Hamilton didn’t use to strike out so much, so perhaps he could reverse that trend and save his average. I’m not going to say that is impossible, but it would mean reversing a three-year trend in a big, big, big way.
Alright, fine. The average doesn’t look to be on the table. How about homers? Josh Hamilton used to hit a lot of homers. Even when he stunk in 2013, he smacked 21 and he hit 43 two years ago even as his decline was beginning. Of course, those 43 homers came with Josh playing all of his home games in Arlington. As Hamilton showed us last season, it is a lot harder to hit homers in Anaheim where Josh hit exactly zero dingers.
It isn’t just the stadium though, Josh Hamilton just hasn’t been knocking the cover off the ball the last two years. Much was made of it when Hamilton’s average flyball distance fell to 273 feet in 2013. He did manage to “boost” that up to 275 feet in 2014, but that’s still a far cry from the 300 feet he averaged his last year in Texas. I know the marine layer can be a real sonuvabitch, but it isn’t 25 feet worth of sonuvabitch.
The final of the three goals for Josh isn’t just absurd, it is a bit embarrassing, really. 100 RBIs? C’mon, Josh. Nobody cares about RBIs anymore. I’m sure if you just went upstairs and asked your GM about the importance of RBIs and lack thereof, he’d gladly explain it to you. But he’d probably also humor you, so I’ll do the same. I’m willing to pretend like RBIs are in some way a measure of performance, just for you.
Like his other goals, Hamilton has pulled this one off before. Three times he’s bested the century mark in RBIs. As always, they were all done during his days in Texas.
The Ballpark in Arlington actually has very little to do with it though. It has a lot more to do with the lineup a player is in and where he bats in that lineup. You can hit like garbage and still rack up ribbies, lest we forget the season when Tony Batista hit .240 with a .272 OBP and still drove in 110 RBIs. This is a very exciting precedent for Josh Hamilton.
What helped Batista in his dubious achievement was that he was hitting in the middle of the order of a very potent lineup. The Angels were one of the top offenses in all of baseball last year, so all Josh needs is for Scioscia to continue writing his name in at clean-up and Josh can make a real run at this thing. Finally, Scioscia and his stubborn adherence to batting struggling sluggers in key lineup spots because “veteran” is going to pay off!
The problem is that this isn’t 2004 anymore. The offensive environment is much different and much less prolific. As I said, the Angels were a top offense last season and they only had two 100+ RBI players with Trout at 111 and Pujols at 105. There just aren’t that many runs to go around anymore. That’s why there were only 12 players in all of baseball to drive in 100 or more in 2014.
Even with that in mind, Josh Hamilton at least has a chance at 100 RBIs if he stays on the field. That definitely won’t be a prob-
Oh, right. Hamilton is made of glass. Even if he did find the fountain of youth and start hitting at a .300 average, 30-homer pace, odds are that he won’t be able to log enough plate appearances to be able to drive in 100. This is a guy coming off a season that was cut short by a mysterious rib injury that to this day nobody actually knows how or when he suffered it. And, oh by the way, the season has been over for three months and Josh admitted in the same article above that he STILL feels jabs of pain from his injured ribs from time to time.
I realize that I just wrote 1000+ words pointing out how painfully obvious it is that Hamilton’s goals are terrible, awful and stupid and I know that you all know that. What worries me is that somehow Josh Hamilton doesn’t seem to know that. He honestly believes that he can still reach those numbers and that is the exact problem with Hamilton.
Josh doesn’t view his poor performance as an Angel as obvious signs of his physical and mental decline but rather him “not being himself” and needing to be “positive.” He isn’t taking a look in the mirror and thinking about adjusting his game to fit his declining skillset, he’s still under the delusion that he just needs to change his mental outlook and tinker with his toetap and he will suddenly return to MVP form.
The sooner he gives up the ghost on this absurd pursuit of .300/30/100 and sets his goals around more practical targets like reducing his strikeouts and hitting more balls to the opposite field, the sooner he can transform his game, not unlike what Torii Hunter did the last few years, and become a consistent, above average producer instead of a disappointing fading star.
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