Hamilton has natural speed, but he also works to develop it

TODAY’S GAME

Cardinals at Reds, 8:10 p.m., ESPN, 700, 1410

Billy Hamilton walked by the finish of the Flying Pig Marathon earlier this month outside Great American Ball Park and stopped for a minute to admire a different sort of runner. The fastest man in baseball respects athletes who are less worried about the quickness of their first step than the pace of their last steps.

“I love it,” said Hamilton, who ranks second in baseball with 18 stolen bases. “I saw the end of it, how they were coming. Dang, that’s a lot of running. It’s amazing how people can run that long.”

It’s easy to look at Hamilton and say he has a lot of natural speed, and he does. It’s also a speed he’s developed from the time he was a kid.

“All I did was play,” Hamilton said. “Nowadays kids are into video games. They don’t get out and have fun. I was always running, all the time. I would run from my mom when she tried to whip me.”

Hamilton is not a marathon runner. He never ran track. He’s not even sure what his time would be in the mile.

If he could somehow run as fast as he does to first base — he covered the distance in 3.3 seconds this spring — for 5,280 feet instead of 90, he would finish a mile in a world-record time of three minutes, 13 seconds.

However, when Hamilton trains, he doesn’t run laps or run for distance. Every running workout he does is tailored to maintain or improve the speed he needs on the basepaths and in the outfield.

“I do a lot of football stuff: the cones, the ladders,” he said. “My main thing is I get a big (elastic) band, and a guy gets behind me and holds the band around me, and I run and pull him.”

Hamilton does much of his offseason work on the football field.

“I even run routes and catch passes on a football field,” he said. “I run up and down the bleachers.”

Hamilton did not start Saturday in the second game of a series against the Cardinals. Chris Heisey took his spot at the top of the order and in center field. This was as much about getting Heisey at-bats as it was resting Hamilton.

Neither player hits left-handers well, and the Reds were facing southpaw Jaime Garcia, the first of three left-handers they will see in the next five games.

“We’re going to be facing for the first time in a while a rather large cluster of left-handers in this next week,” manager Bryan Price said. “That does give us an opportunity every now and again to spell Billy and get Chris in there. Now that Jay (Bruce) is back, there’s not going to be as much freedom with the lineup to be moving outfielders around and getting our guys in there on a rotation like we were doing when Jay was out.”