Footsteps Not There to Follow

Maybe, just maybe, the best baseball player on the planet doesn’t have a “Jr.” or a Roman numeral after his name. Maybe his father didn’t hit 332 big league home runs, as Barry Bonds’ father, Bobby, did. Maybe Dad didn’t play 19 years in the majors and in two World Series with Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, as Ken Griffey Sr. did when Junior was just a stripling.

Maybe the best player’s father was just a working stiff like the rest of us. Maybe the kid didn’t have to say “Thanks, Dad!” but just “I did it my way.”

Maybe the best player is just plain old Jeff Bagwell. Period.

A case could be made. I mean, Junior Griffey has all those home runs--27 the last time I looked.

But Bagwell has 20. Not too shabby. Leads the National League is all. Bonds isn’t even in the hunt.

This is not to take anything away from the second-generation superstars. Far from it. But they are household words in the fans’ lexicon. Bagwell is not Jeff Jr. He’s Jeff Who?

Griffey, they ran for president. Albeit jokingly. Bonds could make mayor of San Francisco. Bagwell has trouble cashing a check.

Bags doesn’t have a shoe contract. His autograph isn’t sought much west of Corpus Christi.

He did win the league MVP in 1994. But Barry Bonds won it three times. Twice in a row.

If Jeff Bagwell weren’t so easy to overlook he wouldn’t even be playing for Houston. The hometown Boston Red Sox had him signed, sealed and delivered but they never gave him much of a chance, shunting him down to whistle-stops such as New Britain, Conn. They gave him up for a so-so relief pitcher, Larry Andersen, who never pitched a complete game in the majors and, in fact, started only one. It was one of the great heists in big league history.

What would you want Bagwell to do? In 1994, he hit .368, drove in 116 runs and hit 39 home runs. Those aren’t quite Lou Gehrig stats but Bagwell doesn’t have any chummy outfield walls to aim for. The Astrodome is the third-toughest ballpark in the league to hit home runs in. The toughest is Dodger Stadium, but Bagwell hit three home runs in a day--two in one inning--there on June 24, 1994.

Sure, Barry Bonds has speed. He stole 40 bases last season. Bagwell stole 21.

OK, so they walk Bonds a lot, take the bat out of his hands. Sure they do, 151 times last year. League lead. But they walked Bagwell 135 times. This year, they have put Bonds on 58 times. But they have put Bagwell on 46 times. (Griffey doesn’t let them walk him--only 78 last year and as low as 44 times in a season.)

Jeff Bagwell was hitting .333 at the close of business Saturday night. Griffey was hitting .304. And the Bonds was hitting .261.

No one is proposing Bagwell for the Sultan of Swat or the Big Hurt or any of the other superlatives of the Grand Old Game. But he ought to be able to get his picture in the papers east of Texas now and then.

The pitchers know who he is.

The remarkable thing is not that Bagwell is as good as he is without help from heredity, the remarkable thing is that he’s as good as he is with the most atrocious batting stance in the history of the game and the eyesight of, oh, say, a Latin professor.

Bagwell is astigmatic. Ted Williams could tell you the sex of an insect at 40 paces. Without his contact lenses, Bagwell would be hard put to identify a roaming bear. The contact lenses are corrective, but anyone who has tried to make do with them in the winds of, say, 3Com Park, knows what a nuisance, not to say, handicap, they can become.

“They can become a liability in swirling winds,” Bagwell acknowledged the other night as he lined up for a three-for-five night with a double and two stolen bases at Dodger Stadium.

His batting stance has to be seen to be disbelieved. Some guys have beautiful form at the plate. Graceful, rhythmic. A Sam Snead picture swing. Bagwell stands at the plate with his knees bent, his toes out, his back twisted. He looks like a guy poised on a parapet of a burning building preparing to jump into a net below.

You would say he has one foot in the bucket (or, as Lefty Gomez was wont to say, “One foot in the American Assn.”). A pitcher would think he couldn’t do anything with an inside fastball but jump out of the way. An outside pitch he would have to wave at.

Ha!

Last year, Bagwell pulled 31 of those inside fastballs and outside curves into the seats. He led the league in doubles with 48. He is among the league leaders this year with 21.

Bagwell has proved he can hold his own with second-generation superstars. He is not apt to be concerned if another Reggie Jackson shows up in the league.

But, of course, if a Nolan Ryan II or a teen-age Tom Seaver or Bob Gibson showed up on the hill, that might be competition of a more serious sort. Those guys’ daddies put lots of guys into another line of work.