That’s a misnomer. We don’t need to project Billy Hamilton overall, that’s why there are projections systems. He won’t have much power, and he has elite speed, we can use his minor league walk and strikeouts and presto, bingo bango: projection.
Here’s the thing. Billy Hamilton has speed like you’ve never seen before. He set the record for minor league stolen bases. The real Billy Hamilton facts are so ridiculous you don’t even need to make up fake ones. The guy he beat out for the record, Vince Coleman, once rode the no-power, inconsistent-walks, too-many-strikeouts train to some seasons that any fantasy player today would love to own — even his first season, when he hit .267 and stole 110 bases (and he had better).
So perhaps, when Steamer projects Billy Hamilton to hit .245, perhaps it can’t account fully for Hamilton’s elite-elite speed. You don’t build a projection system to be right for the two dots way out out on the extremes, you build it for the heart of the bell curve.
