You know what's so fun and captivating about Josh Hamilton? He's an active, living answer to one of those great "imagine if's..." sports discussions. He's a walking testament to what we missed out on as baseball fans early in his career. Yes, you still wonder what it would have been like to see 20-25 year old Josh come up, the stats he'd have, highlights we missed...but I think what makes him pretty cool is that he by and large answered all the questions about what his career would have been like, what his potential was...simply put, when healthy, he's one of the 2 or 3 best hitters in baseball in any given season.
He's absolutely amazing. It sucks that we missed out on those early years, and it sucks that he's going to consistently miss more games than others year in year out because of all the wear and tear he put on his body, but you can't help but marvel at the things he's able to do. He's easily one of the most exciting players on the field today. And it's cool, as a sports fan, to have that answer. I think about other "imagine if's...," and it's usually a case of a career being cut down early, or a trajectory changing injury, basically something that derails a career...A Len Bias type thing, or what would have happened if Nomar's body never broke down, where would Griffey's stats have ended up if he didn't have so many injury plagued years in the middle of his career...They're questions you usually can't answer, but that's not the case with Josh. He's the reverse case of all those guys. He's a guy who got derailed before he ever started, and then somehow hopped back on the track. He's basically the Benjamin Button of sports "imagine if's."
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| It's not really a video, its just bad ass picture |
All that's left now is figuring out where he'll fit in historically. Obviously his counting numbers, the rbi's, the runs, the home runs, they're never going to properly display his talent level due to his delayed start and lingering injury issues that'll presumably plague him as long as he plays. But lets say he plays at a high level for the rest of this season and the next 3 (bringing him to age 34)...He's at 132 HR's right now...lets pencil him in for 30 more this year, and a conservative 30 more each of the next 3 seasons...Now we're up to 252. Now pencil in 3 more years of moderate-to-All-Star production, say 25 hr's each. Put's us in the range of 325 home runs, and I think we're being conservative. Is he a Hall of Famer at that point? He's got a career avg over .300 right now, I wouldn't expect that to dip too much, based on my projections, his 6-7 year peak would make him one of the most dominant players of his generation...I like to think he'd get the benefit of the doubt if that's the case.
