A little more than a year ago, I wrote a post about Josh Hamilton. It was June 2nd, and he'd played in just 35 of his team's first 50 games, hitting an ugly .240/.290/.456 in the games he did play, and he was about to go in for an(other) MRI. Here's (part of) what I wrote:

I love Josh Hamilton. I just want to see him hitting baseballs a long way for many more years. I know I'm not exactly alone in that sentiment, but I just don't think you can deny that the world is a slightly better place when Josh Hamilton is playing baseball (and playing well). He's 28 years old. I would like to see him smiling and having fun and making the game look easy for another ten years or so. Given all he's put himself through and all he's done to pull himself back, that doesn't seem like too much to ask.
But why do I get the feeling that Joe Sheehan is dead on when he says this: "Hamilton is overrated by dint of storyline, because his body doesn't appear to have what it takes to play regularly at a high level in the major leagues"? I mean, really, we're talking about 15 missed games and five bad weeks. So is that crazy?
[...]
So maybe I'm just preparing myself for what seems inevitable. That just seems like part of the story, like how Roy Hobbs (the movie version; I read the book, but have forgotten most of it) was fated to have his brief moment in the sun before injuries and age took the game away from him again. The plotline calls for a tragically brief flash of brilliance, not ten years of stardom.
Real life doesn't usually work that way, of course, and I get the hunch that he'll have healthy stretches, this year and for the next bunch, where he just looks unstoppable, but that he just won't be able to stay in the lineup on a regular basis. Like Shane Mack, I suppose, and Jim Edmonds, and Larry Walker, and Pete Reiser...but more interesting somehow.
Or am I reading too much into one nagging groin (and a whole bunch of other nagging things two years ago)?

Hamilton stayed down for a little more than a month, then played more or less full-time until missing most of September. Ultimately, he played in a little over half of his team's games, and didn't improve a whole lot from how he'd started, hitting .268/.315/.426 (90 OPS+), good for a WAR of just 1.4 [note: I've decided I'm going to ignore the discrepancy and just use FanGraphs' WAR, unless I have some special reason to use both], and that because his defense looked a little fluky, with a 4.3 UZR in center after a -15.4 there in 2008. Most troubling is that Hamilton, who a year earlier had hit 28 prodigious home runs in about 15 minutes, managed to knock just ten out of the park in all of 2009. Even when he hit well in August (.342 with a .392 OBP), he managed just one home run despite playing half his games in the best hitters' park in the AL.

If I had revisited this post in the offseason, I'd have been more convinced than ever that Joe Sheehan and I were right. It almost seemed more likely that he'd hit less than 25 homers in the remainder of his career than that he'd hit 25 or more in 2010. And the projection systems were only slightly less pessimistic: even Bill James' notoriously rosy forecast foresaw only 23 HR, and true to form, nobody else (among Marcel, CHONE, ZiPS and PECOTA) was as high.

And, well, there's a lot of time left, this year and every year, for him to break down and prove us right all over again. But for right now, man, is he ever proving us wrong. After a fairly strong start (.281/.335/.500 in April and May), Hamilton has hit escape velocity in June, with a 5-for-6 on Sunday giving him a silly .474/.500/.846 line with 7 homers in 19 games. For the year, he's already got 16 homers (putting him two shy of ZiPS' preseason projection). Most importantly given his history, Hamilton has played in 67 of his team's first 69 games, twenty shy of his total for all of 2009, and the only two games he's sat out were halves of Ranger doubleheaders. They've stuck him mostly in left or right field, which seem much better fits for both his health and his talents than center, and he's responded by putting up a UZR near 4 at those two positions (though plus/minus disagrees and still puts him a touch below average). In all, he's been good for a WAR of 3.1, better than twice his 2009 total and, thanks to the better defense, not all that far off from his celebrated 2008 season (3.8). He didn't make my All-Star ballot, but he would have if I'd filled it out a few days later.

I haven't even seen much of the Rangers this year, but I feel exactly as I did last year: baseball is just a better thing when Josh Hamilton is doing what he's capable of doing in it. His body may still be a ticking time bomb for all we know, but just doing what he's done so far has surpassed my expectations, and a lot of others'. I'll be catching Rangers games a lot more often, and (unless MLB has decided it doesn't like publicity or money anymore) Hamilton's return to the Home Run Derby will be the only thing that makes me watch the thing (and I'll be excited for it). Let's enjoy it while it lasts, and hope it lasts for a really, really long time.