Jeff Bagwell was a Miracle. You must be one to enter the Hall of Fame. If you’re a first baseman, your bat must be especially wonderful to reach Cooperstown. Bagwell scored .297/.408/.in 15 years with the Houston Astros, he scored 449 goals, won an MVP in 1994 and also won Rookie of the year in 1991. So, yeah, pretty good.
But even if Bagwell had not been one of the leading sluggers of his era (or any era), he would have been worthy of observation. That’s because his Attitude was amazing. I use the word in the most literal sense: if you had never met Jeff Bagwell and had his striking position, you would never believe it was real. He looks like a drunk man trying to fend off a seagull. Poo.
Either way, Bagwell could lift his forefoot, jerk it off again, enter a half-stand, and then use his hips to guide his upper half and hit his racket through the strike zone at speed. The way he did it regularly enough not to scratch 500% of the time is foreign to me. His attitude was the beginning of a barely completed industrial process, each time on the verge of disaster. But, as Bagwell’s career numbers show, disaster tended to happen to the pitchers he faced instead.
Teammate Craig Biggio claimed Bagwell ruined a whole generation of hackers with his nonsense, but the squat worked perfectly. And in fact, there was something strangely compelling in all the rooms that were just to make baseball scream on the left wall. It was like watching a delightfully strange Rube Goldberg machine do a ridiculous and inevitable stunt.
Except … not inevitable. Even a hitter of Jeff Bagwell’s caliber was often out. And while some of these outs seemed relatively normal, in that Bagwell looked “normal” on the plate, in some of them things went wonderfully wrong:
Pop-ups occur when the batters make contact just a little lower than they should, hitting the baseball on its bottom half and sending it hovering innocuously in the sky. With Bagwell’s squat-and-explode attitude, he had to be especially careful. Sometimes he wasn’t vigilant enough, and those rare cases are some of my favorite baseball memories of the time.
We talked a bit about the mechanics of Bagwell’s swing and how long his racket stayed in the strike zone. But when that momentum went wrong, he did it as an absolutely ridiculous uppercut. He stood almost straight and his racket exposed the sky as if trying to throw the ball into space. He hit the pop-ups with such intense rage that it almost seemed like it was intentional. Bagwell was the first player to hit the ceiling of the Astrodome, and the only real surprise is that baseball did not break through the roof.
So here, the machine is messed up. Bagwell was such a finely tuned hitter that the effect was wonderfully chaotic when something went out of control. His pop-ups were dislocated Carnage, but somehow made the rest of his game more impressive. By presenting us with a fault state, they demonstrated the accuracy of the mechanism. They were also beautiful in their own bizarre right.
Here is the only video of the phenomenon we were able to chase. This is Game 3 of the ‘ 05 World Series, and Bagwell passed his first and injured on top of that. It is indeed a few games away from retirement. But it’s still beautiful: