Not much more than a year ago, Josh Hamilton, the first overall pick in the 1999 amateur draft, was a living warning about the dangers of caring too much about character when it comes to teenage athletes. On the day he was drafted, a Tampa Bay scout told reporters, “I think character may have been the final determining factor.” As a perhaps apocryphal legend has it, the team picked Hamilton over the draft’s other top prospect in part because that player called owner Vince Naimoli by his first name, showing himself to be a supposedly disreputable sort. That prospect’s name was Josh Beckett.

A Roy Hobbs type out of high school, who could throw the ball 97 miles an hour and hit it 500 feet with ease, Hamilton essentially broke under pressure, turned to drugs and the rather Gothic tattoo habit of someone who wants to erase himself from the world, and washed out of baseball for five years amid a series of suspensions. In late 2006, the Chicago Cubs nabbed the purportedly clean and sober Hamilton in the Rule 5 draft and sold him to Cincinnati. Despite not having played a meaningful number of games since 2002, he hit like Ken Griffey Jr. in his prime for 90 games. Sensibly selling while the selling was good, the Reds swapped him to Texas for Edinson Volquez, an inconsistent flamethrower who presently has a 1.32 ERA and has struck out 91 batters in 75 innings. Hamilton, meanwhile, is in serious contention for the Triple Crown, leading the American League in home runs and runs batted in while placing fourth in average.

All of this on its own should be enough to make you roll your eyes at anything you read today about the character of anyone who was taken in yesterday’s amateur draft, not because there’s no such thing, but because there’s no way to tell what it means. In retrospect, Beckett’s attitude looks a lot less like nerve and a lot more like what’s made him the best big-game pitcher of his generation; had he blown his arm out at 20, there would be those who would blame it on his being a jerk. Hamilton’s sterling character didn’t seem to have borne out when he found himself with habits he couldn’t kick; now that he’s blossomed into a monstrous player without having had the benefit of actually playing the game for half a decade, it clearly has. In both cases, character seems more like a convenient way to explain away how little we know about why people succeed and fail than anything else.

Take another player, Hamilton’s teammate, Milton Bradley. He’s having an arguably better season — Hamilton may be in contention for the traditional Triple Crown, but Bradley is third in batting, first in on-base average by 26 points, and trailing Hamilton in slugging average by just 13 points, giving him a shot at an even more significant trifecta. This is the same Bradley who is, at 30, on his sixth major league team; who was suspended for spitting gum at an umpire in the minors; who once publicly accused teammate Jeff Kent of being a racist; who once threw a ball of bags and bats into the stands after getting into it with an umpire, and who once almost went into the stands after being hit with a bottle, a true human highlight reel of moments of vicious, unrestrained temper.

Perhaps Bradley’s success — he’s shown hints of this kind of enormous talent before, but never harnessed it for a full season — is evidence of newly found good character, proof that he’s mastered his passions in a way he never could before. Or perhaps he was just misunderstood, as he’s claimed all along. Or perhaps his character is simply irrelevant now that he’s dominating the league rather than alternating displays of baseball genius with long funks and periods lost to injury. Or, just maybe, he’s still who he always was, but now enjoying some good health and Arlington’s hitter-friendly environment.

Any team, knowing what we know now, would have taken Hamilton and Bradley in the amateur draft, and stayed with them through all their failures. And had either stayed healthy and displayed the full range of his talent from the time he was drafted, they would likely never have earned much more than a reputation for eccentricity or gall or having a taste for the nightlife — none an indictable crime in a player capable of making any kind of run at a Triple Crown of any kind.

If character, as judged by some odd combination of humility, social grace, competitiveness, and deference, doesn’t tell in a fully grown man, and can, without changing, explain both how a man can fritter away Hall of Fame talent and how he can channel it into a completely unprecedented resurrection, there’s no way it tells a thing about ballplayers who aren’t old enough to drink. Great and greatly talented kids who were chosen yesterday will fail; most likely some truly miserable people of lesser talent will make millions upon millions of dollars in the majors. And no one, despite what anyone says, really knows why.

tmarchman@nysun.com