Bagwell calls Hall experience ‘surreal’

Register columnist Chip Malafronte is glad that Jeff Bagwell is finally getting his due. He adds that it’s unfathomable that it took seven tries for him to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Imagine the hullabaloo if the Discovery Channel said Michael Phelps actually beat the computergenerated shark.

Encouraged by the recent ratings bonanza, the Discovery Channel announced next year’s Shark Week featured event will be a 200-meter land sprint between Usain Bolt and a great white shark at the Penn Relays.

• Jeff Bagwell is finally getting his due. It’s unfathomable that it took seven tries for him to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Today, they’ll make it official in Cooperstown.

Bagwell’s career numbers are bonkers. He stacks up well against the best first basemen in the history of baseball, in traditional statistics like home runs, RBIs and batting average, and new analytics like OPS and WAR.

On those outstanding Astros teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s — Houston lost in the NLCS in 2004 and reached the lone World Series in franchise history a year later — Bagwell was the centerpiece.

Yes, those Astros teams were loaded with talent. They were also built around Bagwell, who arrived with no big league experience in 1991, on the winning end of one of baseball’s most notoriously lopsided trades.

Craig Biggio, also there for the long haul, certainly played a big role in Houston’s long-term success. But Biggio, who earned his place in Cooperstown a few years ago, wasn’t the franchise player. That was Bagwell, a fixture in the middle of the order, the guy blasting home runs into orbit for a decade and a half.

• The case against Bagwell’s inclusion isn’t much of a case at all. He was big and burly and belted a lot of home runs in the steroid era. Yet his name never appears on any of the long list of accused PED users.

Suspicious naysayers point to the fact that Bagwell only hit six home runs in the minor leagues, ignoring the fact that he only spent one full season there, at the DoubleA level in 1990, when he should have been a senior in college.

They also neglect to understand Bagwell’s incredible power is what drew hordes of scouts to watch him at the University of Hartford.

In time, few will remember it took this long for Bagwell’s election. That’s a good thing. Because there’s no reasonable argument against his place among the game’s greatest.

• Fun with the NL West standings: as of Saturday morning the Giants had 40 wins on the season; the Dodgers were 41 games over .500.

• Michigan football is suddenly culling some of Connecticut’s top high school prospects. Hamden Hall’s Luke Schoonmaker will give the Wolverines four state players in the past two years. Michigan defensive coordinator Don Brown, a former Yale and UConn assistant, played a big role in getting Schoonmaker to Ann Arbor.

• UConn was among the 20 or so college programs that offered Schoonmaker a full scholarship. Corey Edsall, the Huskies’ tight end coach, made the offer after a scouting trip to Hamden. Schoonmaker, a quarterback at Hamden Hall, made up his mind shortly after visiting with Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh in Ann Arbor.

• The biggest story line of the Yankees’ walk-off win on Thursday night wasn’t Brett Gardner, the man who hit the winning homer, but Aaron Judge losing a tooth while celebrating. These are strange times.

• Chris Sale is playing the part of Cy Young Award favorite, but the Red Sox need to figure out how to win during the four days he’s not on the mound.

• But the real problem in Boston is in the clubhouse. David Price’s dustup with team broadcaster Dennis Eckersley was juvenile. Reaction from some teammates — who reportedly applauded Price’s silly tirade — and manager John Farrell’s indifference, paints them all as unlikable and spoiled. The dysfunction is beginning to resemble the chicken-and-beer Sox of a few years back. Not good.

• Not only could the Red Sox use David Ortiz’s bat, they need his clubhouse presence.

• By all accounts, Farrell is a player’s manager. But when a leader doesn’t know when or where to draw the line, it’s only a matter of time before the inmates are running the asylum. Barring a miraculous run to the World Series — not impossible, by the way — Farrell’s time in Boston is surely done come October, if not sooner.

• Bagwell attended the University of Hartford on a partial baseball scholarship. Even as he established himself as one of the most feared college hitters in New England, his scholarship was only elevated to 75 percent for his junior season in 1989. That same year, teammate Greg Centracchio was bumped to a full scholarship, a fact that irked Bagwell’s father, Bob.

In 2014, Jeff Bagwell told me that Centracchio bumped into Bob Bagwell and, jokingly, apologized for Jeff being passed over.

“Can we just bury the hatchet on this deal?” Centracchio told Bob Bagwell. “It’s not my fault that I got a full scholarship.”

• And to all the Little League parents with dreams of grandeur, college baseball scholarship money isn’t any easier to come by in 2017.

KAREN WARREN/HOUSTON CHRONICLE Jeff Bagwell rides with his wife, Rachel, in the back of a truck during the National Baseball Hall of Fame parade Saturday.