The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Bagwell’s path to Hall started at Xavier
Hall of Famer was a noted star on the pitch for Falcons’ soccer team
MIDDLETOWN » Long before Jeff Bagwell was an RBI machine for the Houston Astros, he was a goal-scoring machine at Xavier High.
Before he became the bane of National League pitchers, he starred on the pitch.
Bagwell, the Killingworth product who starred at both Xavier and the University of Hartford, will be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday in Cooperstown, New York. While no one could have predicted such success back in his high school days, some would have thought he’d have a better chance of someday having a ceremony about 25 miles down the road, at the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, New York.
As a senior at Xavier, Bagwell scored at least one goal in every game and finished with 36, which still stands as the school’s single-season record. He was named all-New England and had more offers to play college soccer than baseball.
“He will admit he wasn’t the best soccer player on the team, but his role was to score goals,” recalled David Sizemore, a cocaptain with Bagwell on that team and currently an academic dean at Xavier. “He just had a knack for scoring goals. He was gifted.”
Indeed, Xavier played a threeman front line, and it was the wings — Wallingford’s Jerry Sofocli and Guilford’s Jim Foley — who did most of the work, taking on defenders and chipping the ball in the middle to Bagwell, who was always there, often heading the ball in for a goal.
“In baseball parlance, they got on base, he drove them in,” said Marty Ryczek, Xavier’s soccer coach at the time.
It was enough to draw interest from several colleges. In October of his senior year, Bagwell sat down with Ryczek out on the soccer field and had a one-onone conversation about his future. Major League Soccer didn’t exist at the time, and the North American Soccer League had folded.
“You’ll never make a living playing professional soccer,” Ryczek, who played three years in the Phillies’ system, told him. “If you play baseball, you never know, maybe someday you’ll become a professional baseball player.”
Bagwell decided baseball was the way to go.
“If I ever make it,” he told Ryczek, “I’ll give you half of what I make.”
Flash forward about seven years later, after Bagwell had won NL Rookie of the Year and was in the midst of a 15-year career with Houston that would see him make some $128 million in earnings.
Ryczek and his wife went down to see him play in Philadelphia, and Bagwell couldn’t have been more gracious, signing autographs and asking how everyone was doing back home.
“Baggy,” Ryczek finally said. “Remember that time in your senior year, we were sitting out on the field, talking about what you’re gonna do?”
“You mean when I said I’d give you half of whatever I make?” Bagwell responded, with a smile. “No, I don’t remember that.”
Ryczek jokingly notes he has yet to receive any money.
“And I don’t expect any.”
Baseball, Soccer ... and hoops
So it was baseball all the way for Jeff Bagwell — but not before one season of basketball at Xavier as a senior.
“He always loved basketball,” Sizemore recalled. “He knew he was going to be shifting to baseball in college. I think it was sort of his way of having one more shot of playing basketball.”
The second man off the bench for Xavier, Bagwell had a decent outside shot and “did a lot of the little things well,” according to Sizemore.
Then came baseball season, where Bagwell did things a lot better. He was primarily a pitcher and shortstop but moved all around the infield during his high school career.
Tony Franco remembers making his first start on the mound as a junior. Bagwell, a sophomore, was brought up from JV to play second base. In the bottom of the ninth, Xavier was up 8-1, but the opposing team loaded the bases with one out. A kid hit a hard-hit ball that looked like it was going up the middle. But Bagwell backhanded it behind the bag, stepped on second and gunned it to first for the game-ending double play.
Of course, things evened the following season. Franco, who had gone 6-0 as a junior and would go 8-1 as a senior, walked an East Catholic batter with one out in the 10th inning of a 1-1 game. He was lifted from the game for the first time in his career, and replaced by Bagwell.
Bagwell proceeded to throw consecutive wild pitches to put a man on third, then issued a sacrifice fly that ended the game — the only loss of Franco’s high school career.
Brenden Beckstein was a baseball co-captain with Bagwell as a senior. He was a catcher and remembered one particular Bagwell pitching gem against Notre Dame-West Haven in the state tournament.
“I remember he had a palm ball (change-up) that really moved,” Beckstein recalled. “He really got people off-balance, mixing speeds.”
Still, for all Bagwell’s prowess on the diamond, his stats were probably better on the soccer pitch. It was at the University of Hartford where Bagwell truly blossomed.
“In high school, he was definitely good,” Franco recalled. “But once he entered college, that’s where he really took off.”
‘He absolutely took off’
Shelton’s David Greene was a teammate of Bagwell’s at Hartford. He remembers seeing the new recruit hit for the cycle during a fall ball game in West Hartford, then running to Hawks’ coach Bill Dennehy’s office the next morning and asking, “Where did you find this guy?”
“The ball just exploded off his bat,” Greene recalled.
Franco is one of the few people to have been a teammate of Bagwell’s both in high school and college. He was a sophomore at Hartford in 1987 when Bagwell joined the team.
“We went to Florida on our spring trip,” Franco recalled. “From game one, he was mashing the ball. It was like, ‘Holy Cow!’”
Added Beckstein: “He absolutely took off. He started hitting for power and taking his abilities to the next level.”
Greene remembers Bagwell homering in his very first collegiate game at South Florida. It was also on that trip, according to Greene, that Dennehy decided to move Bagwell over a spot to third base because he was “never gonna be signed as a shortstop.”
When the Hawks went back up north, they faced Dartmouth, with future first-round draft pick (and 14-year major-leaguer) Mike Remlinger on the mound.
Remlinger had no-hit Hartford the previous year, but Bagwell greeted him with a home run in his first at-bat.
Memories of Bagwell’s college days often involve the phrase “the farthest ball I ever saw hit.” Beckstein, who played at Providence, remembered Hartford coming to town for a game and Bagwell hitting a homer “dead-center, over 410 feet, over one of the main buildings on campus.”
That may have been surpassed by a “groundrule double” Bagwell hit at Northeastern, where there wasn’t a centerfield fence.
“It was like an M-80 going off,” Greene recalled. “It hit the Astro turf and must have gone over 500 feet.”
At a New England college all-star game at Fenway Park in 1989, Bagwell put on a show in batting practice that people still speak about in hushed tones. It was enough to persuade the Red Sox to select him in the fourth round of the draft. The Sox, of course, eventually traded Bagwell to Houston in August, 1990, for Larry Andersen — a deal that helped the Sox win the AL East title but hurt them in the long-term.
“If I was the Red Sox, I would have made the trade, too,” Bagwell said last week.
The rest is history: NL Rookie of the Year in 1991, MVP in ‘94, 15 seasons with the Astros, 449 career home runs and, on Sunday, a spot in the Hall of Fame.
“Bags always had great talent,” Beckstein noted. “He was always the best guy in high school, college. But the bottom line is, there are a lot of great players that end up not being successful. Bags took that talent, worked at it and made the most of his chances. Obviously, he did it better than almost anybody who played the game.”
As for those rumors of steroids use over the years?
“I’m an innocent-untilproven-guilty kind of guy,” said Sizemore. “Are there whispers? Sure. But he has, on more than one occasion, said he obeyed the rules. There’s no reason for me not to believe that’s true.”
‘The face of Xavier’
Sizemore and Beckstein will drive up to Cooperstown for this weekend’s ceremonies. Greene’s heading up there, too, as is Franco.
“It’s incredible, obviously,” said Beckstein. “It’s hard to believe that someone you knew fairly well, played with, is getting the ultimate honor in baseball. I took a lot of pride watching him in his career, having so much success. It’s thrilling to see him get to the ultimate heights of baseball.”
“And he did it with class, too,” Franco noted. “He’s a class act.”
But it’s not just former Xavier and Hartford teammates who take pride in Bagwell’s accomplishments. Ray Seward, a left-handed pitcher and first baseman, is heading into his senior year at Xavier. He’s proud to know Bagwell is an alum.
“It really gives our team a lot of motivation to make us work extra hard,” Seward said. “I’d like to follow in his footsteps and get to the same level he did, take it step by step.”
Bagwell’s No. 9 Xavier jersey, retired at a ceremony he attended in January, 1999, hangs in the Xavier basketball gym. Recently, a poster commemorating Bagwell’s impending Hall of Fame induction was put up next to it.
“Everyone knows who Jeff Bagwell is now at Xavier,” said Seward. “He’s like the face of Xavier.”
Not bad for a guy better known for scoring goals than hitting homers while in high school.
“He did it because he wanted it,” said Franco. “He worked his tail off. He’s the epitome of a guy having a dream and not letting anything get in his way.”