Road to the majors
As part of Hartford’s Crunch Bunch, Bagwell displayed big league acumen in college
HARTFORD, Conn. — Before the Killer B’s, there was the Crunch Bunch.
As the star sophomore third baseman for the University of Hartford in 1988, Jeff Bagwell headlined a quartet of hitters who terrorized Eastern College Athletic Conference pitchers. The late George Smith of the Hartford Courant coined the group’s moniker, now synonymous with Bagwell’s tenure at the school from 1987-89.
They batted third, fourth, fifth and sixth. Three would be drafted, and the other, those connected to the program argue, should have been. At a Northeast school with a losing track record in baseball, they powered the team to a 29-12 mark and advanced to the conference championship before losing to Fordham.
Bagwell was the team’s quiet leader. So lightly recruited out of high school that he received only a partial scholarship to Hartford, he quickly emerged as a force after arriving on campus in the fall of 1986. He batted .413 with 31 home runs and 126 RBIs over his three collegiate seasons, formative years for the Astros legend who will be inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday.
“We’re up there taking batting practice trying to hit it over the trees. Jeff had a professional approach,” said Brian Crowley, Hartford’s right fielder during Bagwell’s three collegiate seasons. “He would hit the ball to right. He’d hit the ball to right center. He’d hit the ball to left.
“If you go to a major league ballgame and you go watch batting practice, that’s sort of what Jeff did as a college player.”
Bagwell, who grew up in Killingworth, Conn., was a two-time conference player of the year and a two-time All-American in his three seasons at Hartford, from where the Boston Red Sox plucked him the fourth round of the 1989 draft.
Retired number
To this day, his No. 27 is one of just two numbers retired by the school. The No. 42 worn by former four-time NBA All-Star Vin Baker is the other. In one corner of the second-floor foyer of the Reich Family Pavilion on campus, the hub of the school’s athletic department, a locker commemorates Bagwell’s career.
Two jerseys — one from his 15 seasons with the Astros and another from Hartford — hang above the top shelf, on which rests a black Louisville Slugger and a sweat-stained black Astros cap. Other mementos include a pair of his old cleats, a certificate acknowledging one of his two years as an All-American, and a 1987 media guide, which lists the 6-foot, 190-pound freshman as the team’s projected starting shortstop.
According to Bagwell, his tenure as a collegiate shortstop lasted one game.
“I hit for the cycle and hit another home run, and I made two errors at short,” he recalled. “The next day I was playing third.”
Bagwell played third base from then on until his first spring training with the Astros in 1991, when he made the switch across the diamond. The partial scholarship from Hartford was the only one he was offered coming out of Xavier High School in Middletown, Conn., where he also starred in soccer. His grades weren’t good enough for the University of Connecticut, he said. Thinking back more than 30 years, he also remembers a letter from Stetson University.
“It was great for me because I was the starting shortstop as a freshman,” he said of attending Hartford. “If I went to Texas or the University of Miami or whatever, I probably would’ve had to wait two or three years (to play), and who knows how my career would’ve changed?”
Bagwell played for two coaches in his three seasons at Hartford. Bill Denehy, a former major league pitcher, recruited Bagwell to the university but was fired in April of his star’s freshman season after making inflammatory comments about a UConn assistant following a game in which the teams brawled.
Quite the quartet
After the 1987 team finished 11-27, Hartford brought in Dan Gooley, who straightened out the program. Gooley hired Moe Morhardt, a former Chicago Cub who pinch-hit in the first game at the Astrodome, as his hitting coach. Under their leadership, the Crunch Bunch took off.
“Offensively, we just mashed the ball,” Crowley said.
Bagwell, Crowley, first baseman Chris Petersen and center fielder Pat Hedge made up the ’88 quartet. In Bagwell’s draft year of 1989, Hedge was a 22nd-round pick of the Baltimore Orioles, Crowley a 30thround pick of the Texas Rangers.
Petersen’s last year of playing was the 1988 season. In 1989, he served as a graduate assistant. He and Bagwell remain best friends. Peterson and his successor at first base for Hartford, Greg Centracchio, will be guests of Bagwell at this weekend’s induction ceremony.
Bagwell, Petersen and Centracchio were also part of a self-proclaimed sub group called the Hawgers (a spinoff of Hartford’s Hawks nickname), who prided themselves on playing an old-school, hard-nosed brand of baseball.
“Being a good teammate is the most important thing to him,” Petersen said of Bagwell. “People say that all the time, and they don’t mean it. He meant it. And he was. You talk to any of his teammates, and they’re going to tell you that: that he was one of the best teammates they ever had.”
Centracchio echoed the sentiment. He transferred from the Community College of Rhode Island to Hartford ahead of his and Bagwell’s junior season in 1989 and played across the diamond at first base.
To illustrate Bagwell’s dominance, Centracchio references an old program with the team’s individual stats from 1989. Centracchio ranked second in batting average that year with a .330 clip. Bagwell hit .429.
“In baseball, you’ve got to believe you’re the best guy on the field, or you’re dead,” Centracchio said. “That’s the first guy I stepped on a field with, and I said, ‘He is so much better a hitter than I am.’ ”
In the post-Bagwell years, Hartford baseball dropped back off until recently. While resurrecting the program, now sixth-year coach Justin Blood, who coached the Hawks to their first 30-win season in 2014 (31-23), has also sought to reconnect Bagwell with his alma mater. Amid seemingly constant turnover, Hartford athletics had somewhat lost touch with its most accomplished alumnus before Blood’s hire.
In mid-May, while in Connecticut to visit his mom for Mother’s Day, Bagwell surprised this year’s Hartford team by stopping by. He watched batting practice, spoke to the hitters and gave a speech. The topic: the importance of teammates.
“To be honest with you, it’s the only thing I care about,” Bagwell said. “If I can leave this game and they think of me as a good teammate, then I did something right. You can have a bunch of numbers and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, it’s ‘Did your teammates respect you, and did they know that you had their back and that you guys were all pushing in the same direction?’ If I did that, then I was successful at what I did.”