Sliding Billy Hamilton: The Life and Times of Baseball's First Great Leadoff Hitter

by Roy Kerr

Billy Hamilton, whose major league career spanned 1888-1901, holds the all-time record for runs scored in a season (196 in 129 games), number of consecutive games scoring a run (24), and career runs scored per game (1.06); he shares records for most triples in a game (4) and sacrifices in a game (4); and his average of one steal every 1.74 games bests Ricky Henderson's. Despite these records, and his 1961 induction into the Hall of Fame, little has been written about him. This biography covers Hamilton's entire life, including his major league career with the Kansas City Cowboys, Philadelphia Phillies, and Boston Nationals, as well as his later career as a minor league player-manager and bench-manager, team owner, major league scout, and plant foreman. The author exclusively uses primary sources for all information dealing with Hamilton's career and personal life.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fine biographical work from Kerr, this time of a boring and deadly efficient Victorian boy scout-type player. Rich with contextual detail about the New England minor league scene and the early 1890s NL yet brief enough to finish in an afternoon, Sliding Billy traces the life and times of the Craig Biggio of the 1880s and 1890s (Hamilton, like Biggio, was a great-but-not-great player who topped various leader boards, had an amazing mid-career peak, and then vanished into thin air, only to reappear in the Hall of Fame years later).