Columnist Brian T. Smith on Bagwell’s date with destiny.
Besides Hall, Bagwell and Selig are forever linked by slugger’s statistics during a season ended by labor strife
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — For the rest of his life, he will dream of finishing it.
Jeff Bagwell’s name becomes immortal Sunday. The stage. The speech. A bronze plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and a spot on the same wall as his Astros brother Craig Biggio. But somewhere in the back of Bagwell’s mind — where true athletes never let go of the game that made them — he’ll spend his days reflecting on the greatest season of his career and the strongest one-man offensive campaign in franchise history.
Numbers (.368 batting average, 39 home runs, 116 RBIs, 1.201 OPS in 110 games) that shock 23 years later. A magical 1994 season that was paused by a broken left hand, then tragically ended with a strike that gutted baseball fans and canceled the World Series for the only time in the last 112 years.
What if Bagwell had been allowed to return to the plate, adding to a monumental season that ended with the National League MVP, a Gold Glove and a Silver Slugger belonging to a future Hall of Famer?
What if the Astros, 6649 on Aug. 11 had finished a season that is tied as the fourth-best winning percentage in team history?
“I would have probably had two to three weeks to play (in the regular season),” Bagwell said Saturday.
Then a 49-year-old who speaks softly in public, rarely opening up and showing his true self, offered a baseball confession about the almost untouchable fourth season of a 15-year career.
“It’s tough when you have a year like that because you continue to chase that year,” Bagwell said. “Not many people can get back to their biggest year.”
232-day work stoppage
Bud Selig, who was MLB’s acting commissioner in 1994, will enter the Hall with Bagwell on Sunday. The strike, like the fraudulent stats of the steroid era, will always bear Selig’s name.
Twenty-three years after a 232-day work stoppage that became the longest in baseball history, he spent two minutes discussing a strike that left Tony Gwynn hitting .394, the Montreal Expos at an MLB-best 7440 and paused the Atlanta Braves’ run of 14 consecutive playoff seasons.
“It was very painful. Broke my heart,” Selig said. “I remember the night … after the World Series was off. I spent most of the night just thinking about every World Series that I remembered, starting in 1944, the Browns versus Cardinals.”
He recalled the excitement of attending his first baseball meeting in 1970. Then he entered the room.
“It was an angry, bitter meeting. What was it about? Labor,” Selig said. “And so as I told many people, it never got any better for 25 years.”
By 1994 both sides were so divided the World Series wasn’t played for the first time since 1904. Bagwell’s final game was Aug. 10 against San Diego at the Astrodome. As Darryl Kile faced Andy Benes, Bagwell went 0-for-2 before leaving the game after being hit by a pitch.
“I hope the sucker (strike) lasts three to five weeks, at least,” thenAstros manager Terry Collins said, referencing the amount of time Bagwell was expected to miss.
The strike didn’t end until April 2, 1995.
“This was the eighth work stoppage that we had. This was not a shocker,” Selig said. “Things were troubling. The system was bad — you could see the system was bad. You already had disparity settling in, a word that you didn’t use 10 years earlier.”
Raines misses out
Tim Raines’ White Sox held the fourth-best record (67-46) in MLB when the games stopped in 1994. Eleven years later, he was a first-base coach for Chicago when the White Sox won the World Series by blanking the Astros 4-0.
What if the clubs had met in the Fall Classic in 1994? Even better: What if Raines’ Sox had faced his first team in the Series that year, instead of the defunct Expos becoming the Nationals a season later?
Like Bagwell, the club with the best winning percentage (.649) in Montreal history never got to finish what it started.
“Probably the one thing out of my career that I wish that we could have back. … It’s something that you never forget,” said Raines, who’ll join Bagwell in the Hall on Sunday. “There’s nothing you can do about it. But it’s something that we wish we could have had a mulligan for.”
Signature season
Bagwell led MLB in everything from WAR (8.2) and slugging (.750) to at-bats per home run (10.3) and total bases (300) when the season stopped Aug. 12. Kevin Eschenfelder remembers a scorched ball driven into gaps and a hitter who never missed mistakes. Was it the best year of Bagwell’s career? No doubt.
“It really was a phenomenal run and one at the time that I made myself think about it and go, ‘You know what? You’re going to pay attention to this, because this is not the kind of season that’s going to happen very often,’ ” said Eschenfelder, who worked the pregame for Home Sports Entertainment in 1994 and is an anchor for AT&T SportsNet Southwest.
“I don’t think anybody realized it was going to be the end of the season,” he said. “It was the end of a lot of things. It was the end of the Montreal Expos, for all intent and purposes. I’m curious to see how it would have turned out had the strike ended. … We’ll never know.”
More than two decades later and with a Hall of Fame plaque waiting, Bagwell recalls 1994 as the year when “nothing went wrong” on the diamond. Then he broke his hand, began waiting for it to heal and started thinking of September.
“The thing I remember was the disappointment of being on strike and not having a World Series,” he said. “That was a bad time in baseball. But baseball made it back and it always has.”
Question marks
Selig kept using the word “painful.” But MLB hasn’t had a work stoppage since; Bagwell and Raines are joining the former commissioner in the Hall.
The 1994 season always will be a question mark, and serve as a lasting reminder of the destructive power of greed. It also was the best Bagwell was — his average forever frozen at .368 — and the game has grown so much since the World Series wasn’t played.
“If you love history like I do, you say to yourself, ‘Here it is, 23 years later. … Maybe we almost had to go through it,’ ” Selig said. “There are a lot of baseball people who have said that, to go to where we are today. And I’m pretty proud of that.
“I think people learned something. And I think we all understood that we just couldn’t go on like that. … Maybe that horribly painful, heartbreaking experience was worthwhile.”