Certain he’d scouted special player, Mooney persuaded Astros to pursue him in trade
LENOX, Mass. — Not much gets Tom Mooney off the golf course these days. The 63-year-old retired longtime professional baseball scout embarked on this year with a goal of playing 200 rounds. He’s not only the senior champion at the Country Club of Pittsfield in his hometown in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts but also its overall champion.
A conservation about Jeff Bagwell does the trick, though. On a late afternoon in June, with 18 holes already behind him, Mooney bypassed another round to recount his nearly three-decade-old memories of scouting the Astros legend, who Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., will become the 55-year-old franchise’s second Hall of Fame inductee.
As an Astros area scout for New England, Mooney filed the reports that prompted then-general manager Bill Wood to hold out for Bagwell in trade negotiations with the Boston Red Sox in the summer of 1990. As Wood told Mooney in January after the former slugging first baseman earned election to the Hall: “There would have been no Jeff Bagwell in Houston without Tom Mooney.”
Mooney, also the Seattle Mariners scout responsible for signing 2016 Hall of Fame inductee Ken Griffey Jr. as the top pick in the 1987 draft, was bullish in his opinion of Bagwell after following him in the Eastern League in 1990. Even during a cold, damp spring, Bagwell squared up balls and smoked line drives to the gaps “like a machine,” Mooney recalled.
Bagwell, then a third baseman, had only four home runs that season in Class AA for the Red Sox’s affiliate in New Britain, Conn., which played in a cavernous ballpark. His swing at the time produced a lot of topspin, which made for a lot of sinking line drives. It wasn’t until he played for the Astros and worked with hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo, Bagwell says, that he learned how to create backspin.
Despite the underwhelming Class AA home run totals, Bagwell had 34 doubles and seven triples with New Britain. He hit .333, just narrowly missing out on the Eastern League batting title, and drew 73 walks against only 57 strikeouts.
Years before Bagwell would produce nine seasons with 30 or more homers, including three with 40-plus, Mooney forecasted elite power potential. The first time he scouted Bagwell, in 1989 during the player’s junior season at the University of Hartford, he marked down a rare 70 on the 20-to-80 scouting scale under the future power column of his report.
“Any time a player can hit the ball on the screws that often, the other stuff will come,” Mooney said. “You’ve got to go with your gut, go out on a limb and say it’s going to happen.”
Bat beyond question
Mooney’s first report that year was far from perfect, he pointed out. On his first look, he vastly underestimated Bagwell’s overall athleticism. After the first game he saw of Bagwell’s, in a tournament in Florida on March 28, 1989, Mooney marked down 30s for baserunning and fielding. He questioned whether Bagwell could stick at third base, as did others.
But while not even Bagwell could have predicted 449 career homers, Mooney had no doubt the bat would play. In ’89, he compared Bagwell’s righthanded power stroke to that of Steve Balboni, another New Englander who by then had slugged 20-plus homers in five straight seasons for the Kansas City Royals. Bagwell “can really excite you with his pop,” Mooney typed in the summation of his first report.
However, Mooney’s overall assessment still wasn’t strong enough for the Astros to draft Bagwell that June, when the Red Sox took the Boston native (who moved to Killingworth, Conn., when he was a year old) in the fourth round. After seeing him in the rookie-level Gulf Coast League and the Florida State League to finish the ’89 campaign, Boston regarded Bagwell highly enough to assign him to Class AA for his first full pro season in ’90.
Scouting Bagwell the following fall during Boston’s instructional league in Winter Haven, Fla., and especially that next summer in the Eastern League only improved Mooney’s opinion. The extended looks allowed Mooney to develop a better sense of Bagwell’s innate baseball instincts and his revered work ethic. When Wood phoned him that summer for a rundown of the prospects in New Britain, Mooney recommended Bagwell.
“Tom was very firm in his conviction about this being the individual that he endorsed and recommended that we acquire,” said Dan O’Brien, the Astros’ scouting director at the time. “He never wavered on that.”
Mooney lauded Bagwell’s “off the charts” makeup. His first dealings with the future National League MVP came during the pre-draft process when they spoke on the phone. As the story goes, the Astros scheduled a workout with Bagwell in Connecticut, but he didn’t make it because the engine of his Mazda blew out on the side of the highway.
A day or two after his call with Wood, Mooney arrived at the Red Sox’s Class AAA ballpark in Pawtucket, R.I., for his next stop on the scouting trail. He stopped in the press room, where the ticker reported the Astros had acquired Bagwell from the Red Sox for relief pitcher Larry Andersen. He rushed to a pay phone to call his office.
“It sounds like prehistoric times,” he joked in his retelling of the story.
Among the players on the Red Sox’s two upper-level minor league teams, the Class AA affiliate scouted primarily by Mooney and the Class AAA affiliate scouted primarily by the late Stan Benjamin, Mooney’s reports on Bagwell stood out. Wood, the Astros’ GM from 1987 to 1993, recalled that based on the reports filed by the two scouts, Bagwell was “clearly the best prospect on those two ballclubs.”
“If he was pitched in, he would pull it to left. If they pitched him away, he’d hit a line drive to right center,” Mooney said. “Always on balance. Always in control.”
Done deal
Wood and then-Red Sox GM Lou Gorman completed the trade on Aug. 30, 1990, a day before the deadline for traded players to be eligible for postseason rosters. While Andersen joined the Red Sox for their playoff push, Bagwell was too late to catch the minor league season. The Astros sent him to instructional league in Kissimmee, Fla., where the organization’s coaches fell in love with him.
Mooney, who scouted for the Astros until 1999, developed a friendship with Bagwell as the years went on. They would catch up annually in spring training when the team’s scouts descended on Kissimmee for meetings. Mooney, who retired last fall after 34 years of scouting, most recently for the Milwaukee Brewers, cherishes a baseball Bagwell signed for him on which the slugger wrote: “To Tom, Thanks for all your help!”
“I owe him a lot,” Bagwell said last week.
The spring when Mooney first saw Bagwell was his first season scouting for the Astros. He spent 1984-88 scouting the Midwest for the Mariners, for whom he scouted and signed Griffey out of Moeller High School in Cincinnati.
Last July, Mooney spent a weekend in Cooperstown celebrating the induction of Griffey, whom he hadn’t seen in at least a decade. This weekend will make it two induction years in a row for him, a feat he downplays as being in the “right place at the right time.”
“The Astros passed over (Bagwell) as an amateur. My reports weren’t that strong coming out of the University of Hartford that year. We liked him, but he went in the fourth to Boston,” Mooney said. “So it’s not like I’m the greatest scout that ever lived. But the more I got to see him play and the more I got to know him, the more conviction I had that this was a special guy.”