Billy Hamilton!

Interestingly, after Sliding Billy, the next best player born on February 16 is probably Eric Byrnes. Quite the dropoff.

Hamilton would be 144 today, and that would be some kind of record. Hamilton's .344 career batting average is still 8th all time. His .455 OBP is 4th all time, and his 912 stolen bases are good for third.

Now, it's true that the league batting average for his time was .286 (compare to .264 during Willie Mays' career, or Cobb's .273), and that in 1894, when Hamilton hit .405, his was the third-best batting average in the Phillies' starting outfield (fellow Hall of Famers Ed Delahanty and Sam Thompson both hit .407), and that they didn't keep track of caught stealing back then, so for all we know Hamilton could've had 100 CSes to go with those 111 steals in 1889 (though of course we can assume that if he ran so much more than everybody else, he was probably pretty good at it).

But nonetheless. Hamilton was, as this very interesting-sounding book notes, the game's first great leadoff man. He led his league in on-base percentage four times, batting average twice, walks and steals five times apiece. He led the league in runs four times and scored 192 of them in that 1894 season (a brilliant baserunner getting on base at a .523 clip in front of two other .400 hitters is a good thing -- who knew?), still an all-time record. No one has ever come within 15 runs of that record, and no one has come within 40 runs of it in the last 80 years. His 1690 runs scored are still twenty-fifth all-time, despite the fact that he lasted less than 14 seasons, and he's third all-time among players whose careers ended before 1901.

Here's what I can't decide: is Hamilton a player who is forgotten because he played in the last decade of the nineteenth century rather than the first of the twentieth, or does that help him somehow? On one hand, the cartoonish nature of some of his numbers make him seem like a product of his era that really can't be moved (though, as the interview with the author of that book linked above notes, his skills weren't the kind that were really appreciated in that time either). On the other hand, while he's no Ty Cobb, his style of play may have fit in well with the fast-paced, get-the-one-run-at-all-costs style of the twentieth century's first two decades. This is a guy who certainly deserved to be a superstar, and I have to think that in Ty Cobb's era, he really would've been.

Here's the most interesting thing I've found about Hamilton: in 1891, he led the National League in walks for the first of his five times (with 102) and in hits for the only time (179). As you might imagine, doing both in the same year is awfully rare; a high hit total tends to be the mark of one who doesn't walk enough. In fact, I'm not nearly certain of this, but in my brief check I can find only three NL'ers who have ever led the league in both in the same year.

Weird thing? All three played centerfield for the Phillies when they did it:

Hamilton, 1891: 179 hits, 102 walks
Richie Ashburn, 1958: 215, 97
Nails Dykstra, 1993:194, 129

I might have missed one (or more), but unless the one I missed is another Phillies CF, I probably don't need to know...