Thumbs up for Hamilton.
Thumbs down for I’ll Have Another.

ZIPS has him ending the season with a line of .330/42/124 in 133 games, which sounds reasonable to me, having banked what he has so far. That would give him a reasonable chance to make it. And that’s with WORSE than his career numbers going forward, plus only playing 75% of the remaining games.

Oh yeah, and the ENTIRE part where I mentioned he can’t stay healthy and rattled off his complete inability to do so by listing how infrequently he plays more than 100 games.

Reedin kompreehenshun iz gud.

But the same small-sample-size caveats apply. I think it is easy to fall in love with a player who does well at the beginning of the season, and not really notice when the rest of his season does not match. Everyone was sure that Bautista would be the MVP last June; then he fell of a cliff. Eventually guys like Cabrera, Pujols, Teixeira, A-Rod, Bautista etc will turn it on, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of them outpace Hamilton when the season is over. But they will do it without the fanfare since it will be a steady climb from their early season hole.

Again, Hamilton is great and I hope he does it, because hey, triple crown! Dan Szymborski seems like a smart guy. Perhaps he could use his powers for something greater than running 100,000 projections based on 6 weeks of baseball. It’s just too early for this to mean too much, especially for a guy with as many variables as Hamilton.

I wonder what would happen to those 100,000 simulations, if you took even his best year, MVP 2010 year, and subtracted out his best six-week stretch from that year, and used the remaining numbers to project a likely outcome for the rest of this year, rather than (inflated) career norms…

Sophistry by numbers.

As for “Can we please just enjoy Hamilton’s play here in May?”, what do you think I’m doing? Knowing that Hamilton’s chances could be around 16% doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of Hamilton’s play at all. If anything it increases it, because now I feel like I’m already watching a Triple Crown chase, and that’s fun. Why would knowing anything about his odds of winning the Triple Crown get in the way of enjoying his play?

And the fact that some other person used some other data to make some other projection about some other player in some other sport is relevant how, exactly? That’s like saying “TV has too many weathermen who dabble in numbers, but fail to understand the weather. Another guy I saw on TV recently proclaimed that I should invest in Greek bank stocks, which is idiotic.”

Since you “understand the game”, don’t suppose you’d be willing to demonstrate your understanding by making some predictions so we can see how they play out?

That’s having him miss something like 20 more games this year.

Talking about anyone having a realistic chance at the Triple Crown this early in the season is moronic, especially with a guy with injury problems. Can we please just enjoy Hamilton’s play here in May and let things play out? If he’s still a Triple Crown contender in August we can revisit this issue.

The hardest part about the crown is the RBI count, usually because the guys who have a combined high average with a ton of HRs are patient hitters who don’t expand the zone & are willing to take a walk.

The fact Hamilton is so aggressive & so willing to go out of the zone chasing hits makes him uniquely qualified to get those RBIs some triple crown candidates never would.

Add in the fact that he’s on a team with a ton of guys getting on base in front of him, one that turns the lineup over more than most teams (getting him more ABs) and he becomes even more likely a candidate.

BUT in the end it always hinges on health with this guy. And that is a bet you’ll probably (and sadly) lose because he ravaged his body with some hardcore stuff over the years & now his immune system and ability to heal has been shot to utter shit at an early age.

Seriously though, he’s been a beast in that lineup, a modern day true murderer’s row.

Also, it has been an awesome 6 weeks, but that is all it has been. Lots of guys have 6 awesome weeks, but in the beginning of the season it looks particularly awesome.