Joshymandias, king of kings

You all remember Josh Hamilton. Inspiring comeback story, baseball talent, winner of the 2008 Home Run Derby (no?). Well, here's something you may not know: he's now the best player in baseball. I know, I know - usually it takes more than 1.5 good seasons to get you this title. Don't tell that to Tom Verducci.

Just another night in the life of the best player in baseball went something like this, at least as far as last Friday the 13th:

• Smash four hits all over the park: a single to left, a 440-foot bomb to center, a single and double to right.

• Score from third base on a pop fly to deep shortstop/short left.

• Score from second base on a ground ball to second.

• Make a diving catch on the warning track and a leaping catch against the centerfield wall.

• Cause the third-base coach to halt a runner from scoring from second on an otherwise routine run-scoring single to centerfield.

Verducci's breathless bullet points, not to mention the use of "just another night," suggest that Hamilton does this literally every day. Is Hamilton having a great season? Yes. Is this ridiculous cherry-picking? Also yes. Why, just six days earlier, he went 0-for-4 with a strikeout!

The "score from second base on a ground ball to second" piece is a tad disingenuous; while it was heads-up baserunning on Hamilton's part, it's not like he turned into the Flash - there were two outs, he was moving with the pitch, the ball was a fairly slow roller up the middle which the second baseman tried to throw to first off-balance. Hamilton is hardly the only guy in baseball who could have scored there. His "diving catch on the warning track" also wasn't; Hamilton caught the ball on the run (a good but not insane play) and then fell forward and slid onto the warning track. If you have to embellish what he's doing, was it as great as you want to claim?

• Crush the postgame spread.

Fortunately we determine the best player in baseball by how many cold cuts they can consume in one sitting.

• Throw around hundreds of pounds of iron in a postgame weightlifting session.

• Gulp down a 2,000-plus-calorie protein shake, made with real cream, on the car ride home.

Oh my God... REAL CREAM??? Move over, Albert Pujols! (For the record, this was the point at which Verducci completely lost me. Real cream? Who the fuck cares?)

• Sit down for a full home-cooked meal by his wife. (Yes, for those of you scoring at home, that's the equivalent of three full meals just between the last out and bedtime.)

And for those of you who don't care - i.e. everyone - you might realize how irrelevant this is to the story. I guess maybe it's an attempt to add "color," but Josh Hamilton's eating habits are really just wholly immaterial to the case for why he might or might not be the best player in baseball.

The legend of Josh Hamilton, Texas Ranger, is growing on a nightly basis. There is nobody like him in baseball, and possibly nobody this good, this big, this fast and this unique -- a 6'4", 235-pound sledgehammer of a hitter who can run balls down in center field and fly around the bases and hit for such a high average -- since Mickey Mantle in his prime.

He's really good. He's also 29, injury-prone, and in the middle of only his second good season. Last year his OBP was .315. And if he can fly around the bases, why does he only have eight steals?

Hamilton leads the league in batting (.362), slugging (.634), hits (161) and total bases (282). The rest of the league is playing for second place in the MVP race. He has no contemporaries, especially when you consider that the Rangers, somewhat against their better judgment, have started him 26 times in center field.

Miguel Cabrera is 19 points ahead of Hamilton in OBP and dead-even in slugging. Hamilton leads in VORP because he plays in the outfield and he does play for a better team, which means he probably has an edge in the MVP race. But this isn't that open and shut, Jizzy McFawnalot. His UZR - and just because he has played in center doesn't change the fact that he mostly plays in left, typically viewed as the easiest OF defensive spot - is 5.8, which is positive but hardly superlative. Also, UZR is typically considered to be a stat where you have to look at a three-year span to get anything of value out of it, and in 2008 - when he played mostly in center - Hamilton was a total butcher.

So, he's good, okay? And this year he's having a pretty awesome season. But I think maybe he needs to show he can produce consistently before we anoint him the best player in baseball.

How rare is that kind of skill set? The last three players to have batted .360 and slugged .600 while playing that much center field are none other than Mantle in 1957, Stan Musial in 1948 and Joe DiMaggio in 1939.

Now, are there any more questions about who is the best player in baseball this year?

Sigh. To be fair, Verducci does qualify it with "this year," although his glistening prose throughout the rest of the article doesn't really suggest that he's limiting the title to nothing but the here and now. You can't just hand out a title like "best player in baseball." The yearly title is the MVP; the other is a more honorary title which, right now, clearly belongs to Albert Pujols. (Who, by the way, just hit 30 home runs for the tenth straight season, aka every single one of his career.)

"He's certainly in the discussion," Texas GM John Daniels said. "You rarely see a guy perform at this level for this length of time."

Uh, what length of time? Okay, yes, since June 1 he's been thoroughly ridiculous: .454/.482/.815 in June, .418/.468/.704 in July, .362/.455/.617 in August so far. I don't know that we've seen months like that since Barry Bonds' heyday in the first half of the 2000s (lest we forget, Bonds' line in 2004 was .362/.609/.812 - and that's for the whole season, not two months). With numbers like that, this probably isn't your run of the mill hot streak. But it's still just two-plus months.

In 65 games since June 1, just when the Texas heat is supposed to wilt players, Hamilton has hit .423. He also sets himself apart from other great sluggers because he is one of the game's best base runners and can play Gold Glove-caliber defense in the middle of the field. He has made 14 of his past 24 starts in center field.

Hamilton is listed by Baseball Reference as being one run above average as a baserunner. Baseball Prospectus lists his EqBRR as 2.1, 48th in the majors. He has 8 steals, as mentioned. He's fine. I think "one of the game's best base runners" may be pushing it. And if he were really a Gold Glover in center, why does he not start there every night? If it's because he would get hurt... well, I'm sorry, but you can't tell me a guy is the best at a position he typically can't play because of injury concerns.

Baseball doesn't have official player rankings as does golf and tennis, though its No. 1 player typically has caused little debate -- from Ken Griffey Jr. to Barry Bonds to Alex Rodriguez to Albert Pujols. Pujols' consistency is remarkable, especially measured against Hamilton's career. Hamilton is 29 and only 16 months older than Pujols, but has yet to play 100 games in back-to-back seasons -- minors or majors. But in the snapshot of today's game, based on skill set and production right now, Hamilton is the new BPB -- Best Player in Baseball. At the end of the year he could wind up with the batting title, MVP, Silver Slugger, Gold Glove and All-Star Game election, all for a first-place team.

He means 16 months younger than Pujols. At any rate, this is what I'm getting at - the "snapshot" issue. You can't award the best player in baseball "title" based on a snapshot of 2/3 of a season! (Pujols, by the way, is having his typically ridiculous year, in a manner so consistent that we don't even seem to give him credit anymore. Oh, .315/.409/.586 with 30 homers by mid-August? Yawn.)

As for the rest of it, Hamilton will probably win the batting title barring a total collapse, but so what? It will take some doing for him to finish first in OBP, a more meaningful stat. I doubt he will win a Gold Glove since he mostly plays left; All-Star Game election and Silver Slugger are meaningless. MVP would be nice for him, but it's also pretty meaningless.

Ironically, I suspect that the very reason why Hamilton gets slobbered over so heavily by guys like Verducci is precisely because he hasn't really done it before. The guy is 29 and is playing just his second full season, and putting up great stats. But rather than assume this could be some sort of fluke season, Verducci falls all over himself to talk about how the guy has just become the best player in baseball. Let me throw another age 29 season at you:

Player X, 2005: .335/.418/.662, 46 HR, led league in hits, 2B, BA, SLG, OPS/OPS+ and TB

As you can probably guess if you're a Cubs fan, those numbers belong to Derrek Lee. Yes, Lee is a first baseman, but he's an excellent defender there and he was only a couple runs worse on the basepaths than Hamilton has been this year. Now, while people certainly talked about how good the season was, you didn't see anyone suggesting that Lee was turning into the best player in baseball. In part this was because of Albert Pujols (whose season was about as good overall) and in part it was because this was Lee's seventh full season in the bigs. Anyone who'd been paying attention knew that it was unlikely that he was quite this good. (And, as it turned out, he wasn't, though injuries did him no favors.) But with Hamilton, he's a relative blank slate. When he tears it up for two months, that becomes the story of the man. We don't have five or six years of data we can throw out to show that he's clearly playing well above his typical level. He has no "typical level" yet. So hey, for all we know, this is his typical level! Next year he'll hit 75 home runs and reach base seven times out of ten!

The game last Friday against Boston belongs in a time capsule, so that when somebody who never saw him play wonders what Hamilton could do on a baseball field, just that one game will suffice.

Oh, Jesus Christ. He's not Willie Mays, Tom. Josh Hamilton is going to need to have a lot more games just like that one before it will even occur to historians to wonder what he could do on a baseball field.

"There aren't many days when Josh goes 0-for-4," Daniels said, "but if it does happen there are so many other ways he can help us win a game. Josh can influence the outcome of a game with his bat and glove.

In fact, there have been fifteen such days this year. Sure, that's not many, I guess. It's five fewer than Pujols has. It's also five more than Cabrera has. Whatever. Also, if you go 0-for-4 and don't reach base, I don't know if there are "so many other ways" you can help your team win a game, particularly if you are the everyday left fielder.

"And when he goes from first to third, he's able to turn it on with his head up and without breaking stride and can see the ball or the coach. I was fortunate to see Larry Walker one year in Colorado. He runs the bases like that. He runs with his head up at full speed. He accelerates to full speed quickly, cuts the bases perfectly, and all the while his eyes are where they're supposed to be."

To the tune of one or two runs above an average player whose eyes are flying all over the place.

Walker and Bonds are the only outfielders in the past 50 years to hit .360 with 30 homers -- measurements within Hamilton's grasp. The men to do it before them were Mantle, Musial, DiMaggio and Ted Williams.

Walker played at Coors Field. Bonds was on the juice. So really, Josh Hamilton is the greatest player of this generation! Let's just come out and say it.

Also, Bonds and Walker did it twice each. So did Williams. Mantle, DiMaggio and Musial all had at least one other .350/30 season. Can we stop pretending that Hamilton is in the same class as those guys because he's having a big year?

Hamilton is nothing more than a breathtaking comet for the moment. He has no real career to speak of and no certainty to his future. He threw away his early years in baseball because of drug addiction, endured an alcohol-related relapse last year, and his years trying to remain clean have been marred by injuries. He has played fewer major league games than Billy Butler, the 24-year-old Kansas City first baseman.

And yet... he is the best player in baseball, a title he took over from Kevin Maas.

New Rangers owner Chuck Greenberg would love to lock up Hamilton this winter to a contract extension that buys out at least one year of free agency. (Hamilton is under Texas' control for two more arbitration-eligible seasons.) But what kind of length could be guaranteed when his body of work, however great, is so checkered? His value is complicated, too, by the oddity of not earning free agent rights until he is 31 years old. Remember, age matters in baseball now. There is not one player today in his age 36 season or older who is healthy and has an OPS better than .800.

Ladies and gentlemen, the BEST PLAYER IN BASEBALL! He has a "checkered body of work" and it's doubtful he can sustain his production for five more years! Would you ever see a paragraph like this written about Albert Pujols? No, you would not.

Just for argument's sake, you could draw a faint comparison to Kevin Youkilis, another rare late bloomer, who signed his extension with the Red Sox in 2009 at age 29 -- Hamilton's age now -- and with two arbitration years remaining and coming off a year in which he finished third in MVP voting. He signed for $41.125 million over four years. Here's how Youkilis' numbers then match up with those of Hamilton now:

Kevin Youkilis vs. Josh Hamilton
Player Age G HR RBI AVG/OBP/SLG OPS
Youkilis 29 553 66 314 .289/.385/.472 .857
Hamilton 29 447 87 311 .310/.370/.541 .911

Hamilton will have bigger numbers and more awards on which to bargain. He will lack the bigger body of work. The Rangers briefly discussed a contract extension with Hamilton in spring training of 2009, shortly after Youkilis signed, but the club hit a financial downward spiral that eventually led to bankruptcy and Hamilton played only 89 games while spending two stints on the disabled list. Both developments put extension talks off to the side.

Those numbers aren't that different, by the way. They also mask the fact that while Hamilton had more eye-popping stats, Youkilis was far more consistent.

In the meantime, the Rangers will do the best they can to keep Hamilton healthy, which is why they need center fielder Julio Borbon to hit. If Borbon doesn't hit, the Rangers have to play Hamilton more in center field than they would like, with David Murphy in left field and Nelson Cruz, when he recovers from a hamstring strain, in right field. They also need to give Hamilton a few more days at DH while resting Guerrero.

Am I the only one confused by the seeming idea that the Rangers aren't sure how to handle the playing time of the best player in baseball? Shouldn't "not being made of porcelain" be a valuable quality for such a player as well?

"It's hard to take Josh out of the lineup," Daniels said.

Yes, I imagine that would be true if he were the best player in baseball. Or even if he were pretty good.

Who knows how long Hamilton can keep up this pace? He already has dealt with tendinitis in his right knee this month. But for now, the sight of a guy built like an NFL strong safety crashing into walls, blasting long home runs, flying around the bases, and chasing a batting title with a 22-point lead on Miguel Cabrera is something to behold. There is nothing like it in baseball.

As Winston Wolf would say, let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet. Hamilton is having a great season. But is there really nothing like it in baseball? He's a good outfielder (this year) and a good baserunner but he isn't the second coming of Willie Mays and Rickey Henderson rolled into one. The fact that he's "built like an NFL strong safety" is irrelevant. Joe Mauer had an offensive season not unlike Hamilton's last year, from the more valuable catching position. Joey Votto is tearing it up this year (albeit from first base). Both of those guys are multiple years younger than Hamilton. Hanley Ramirez has 30-homer power, 50-steal speed, and has won a batting title by hitting over .340, plus he's three years younger than Hamilton and plays shortstop (albeit not well). Carlos Gonzalez is 24 years old, has played the outfield better than Hamilton over the past three years, has a better EqBRR, and is hitting .321 with 25 homers this season. But I guess he doesn't look like Troy Polamalu, so therefore he sucks.

Josh Hamilton is having a great year. But can we please rein it in? Let's at least see him stay healthy enough to do it a second time before we anoint him the greatest talent in a sport that's clearly full of equally good players right now.

(One other thing I should probably mention: Hamilton plays in Texas, where the ball flies out of the yard, especially during the hot summers. Of his 26 homers, 18 have come at home. His road OPS is a pedestrian .887; at home, it's 1.196. His home BABIP is .424, for crying out loud. For that matter, his overall BABIP is .398, aka exceptionally lucky. Pujols', by comparison, is .301 or almost exactly league average. Ted Williams' career BABIP was .328, so you can't possibly claim that Hamilton is just that good. It's a FLUKE, people.)