Two years later, Josh Hamilton gets his MVP (and right on time)

Josh Hamilton collected 22 of 28 first-place votes in AL MVP balloting (AP).

Josh Hamilton won the American League Most Valuable Player Award on Tuesday, putting an exclamation point on his incredible comeback from the depths of drug and alcohol addiction to the top of the baseball world. It’s a redemption story you’ve probably heard ad nauseum by now, but it’s no less astonishing.

Whether Hamilton truly deserved the award over Miguel Cabrera and Robinson Cano remains up for debate. Many folks would argue that, considering Hamilton missed about a month of playing time due to injury, the sturdy and steady Cabrera and Cano were more deserving. I can’t argue much with that logic, but seeing as Hamilton’s stats were as good as anyone’s and he was such an overwhelming sentimental favorite, those guys was facing pretty steep odds.

But if you know Hamilton’s story, you know 2008 was his breakout season, when he graced the covers of all the magazines and all the feature stories were written about him. Hamilton redemption tales became a small cottage industry in sports writing. We knew everything about him, how he’d been a No. 1 overall pick, fallen in with the wrong crowds while rehabbing an injury as a Minor Leaguer, washed out of baseball after the flunked drug tests piled up, wasted away in the throws of addiction and malnourishment. Then he bottomed out, focused on sobriety, rediscovered Christ, rededicated himself to his family.

But that story climaxed at the 2008 All-Star Game in the now-defunct old Yankee Stadium. Hamilton launched moonshot after moonshot into the black Bronx night, threatening but never really threatening to put one through the window of a 4 Train car. He might have, though, so you were compelled to continue taking in this spectacle. It was like watching the real Roy Hobbs. He couldn’t really put one onto the subway track, could he?

From there, though, he tired in the second half. Nagging injuries mounted. The grind of a 162-game slate — the rigors of which he was unaccustomed, remember — got the better of him. And so, there was no MVP for Josh Hamilton in 2008. The Rangers finished four games under .500 and lightyears behind the first-place Angels in the AL West.

When 2009 rolled around, the Hamilton malaise lingered. There were whispers that he was banged up throughout Spring Training. Then it came out early in the season that he’d had a relapse during the offseason. Unseemly pictures of a night out gone awry surfaced. He played in just 89 games to underwhelming production, his season effectively a washout.

Folks wondered about Hamilton’s durability. Had the years of abusing his body left him in a compromised state?

Well, he did miss about 30 games this season, so that question hasn’t been definitively answered, but the numbers were certainly restored to their first-half-of-2008 glory. This year, 2010, was a confirmation that we hadn’t heard the last from Hamilton, that 2008 wasn’t a fluke.

It’s fitting, in a way, that Hamilton got his MVP two years after his grand arrival. Persistence, more so than timing, has certainly proven to be his stronger attribute.

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