Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers has been on the cover of D Magazine and been named the Best Athlete in Dallas. If you care about such things, he’s also won the American League Most Valuable Player award and is one of only 16 Major League players to ever hit four home runs in one game, a feat he accomplished in May.
At that point earlier this season, Hamilton seemed to be far-and-away the best baseball player on the planet. And the Rangers were going to be faced with a difficult decision come this fall: whether to offer Hamilton the megabucks, long-term deal that it will likely take to sign him.
Months later, Hamilton may have made it much easier for the Rangers to let him go in the coming offseason. He’s been mired in an awful, prolonged slump. What’s wrong? Hamilton has been dropping hints. First he made this cryptic remark when he sat out last Saturday’s game:
“The frustrating part is dealing with (the media) and not being able to share everything with you guys,” Hamilton said. “When the time is right, you guys will be right in the loop.”
Then Rangers manager Ron Washington intensified the mystery on a radio show yesterday:
“The issues is something that I think Josh would definitely have to be the one to expose. It’s certainly not physical. It has nothing to do with injuries. Josh is the one that made the statement and got all the inquiries going, and I think Josh is the one that has to put a rest to the inquiries, not Ron Washington. I can just tell you one thing: It is not because he’s hurt.”
If the Rangers hadn’t scored an awesome come-from-behind win last night, their lead over the second-place Angels would have been reduced to a mere two games. (Not to mention the third-place A’s are only a game further back.) The Rangers posted a losing record for the month of July (9-14). At any rate, it looks like it’s going to be a tight race.
Jeff Sullivan of Baseball Nation warns that if the Rangers want to return to the playoffs, they need Hamilton to get his game straightened out, whatever the cause:
We don’t know what the matter is, and while we might in time, and while it might even explain away everything, the entire slump, this is presently a mystery for a mysterious player who’s on the verge of becoming a free agent. What Josh Hamilton has never needed is another question mark. People will wonder enough things about Hamilton without him adding another issue onto the pile. Of course, this isn’t the time for Hamilton to be thinking about his next contract. This is the time for Hamilton to be trying to help the Rangers make the playoffs.
Without knowing what’s going on with Josh Hamilton, we can’t know if that’s the real problem, and we can’t know if and when it could be resolved. As long as Josh Hamilton’s something of an unknown, the Rangers will be something of an unknown, and that’s a team that’s slipping.
