Adjustments for Bagwell...

I remember hearing that Bagwell was going to study his swing in the off season and work on it to compensate for his bad shoulder.

I'd like to see him take a more standard batting stance and see how he can do. It seems that he tries to swing too hard a lot, or maybe it just looks that way. From what it looks like, he swings up at the ball a bit too much, is off balance either during, or after the swing, or both. He nearly falls over if he misses the ball.

I'm not intending to bash Bagwell, but I feel he may be able to adopt a more standard, smooth, and effective stance and swing and still hit for power, and a higher average.
Frankly, his swing is ugly.

Lastly, what exactly did Bags do to hurt his shoulder? What happened?

 

All I've heard about his adjustments so far is that he'd pick up his lead foot a little earlier, so he could get his bat started earlier.


How'd he get bone spurs to begin with?

 

Here's an interesting article. Sounds like arthritis, I guess.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCI/is_12_62/ai_110471529

HE CAN'T THROW AS WELL AS many of the youngsters who watch him play. He freely admits that no youngster should ever try to copy how he hits.

When, during the course of a two-home run afternoon last July, he rocketed his 400th career homer at Cincinnati's Great American Ball Park, the ball wound up in the possession of a local youngster whose reaction was almost predictable. The 9-year-old boy had never heard of Jeff Bagweell.

"Hey, that's cool," says Bagwell, the best basher in Houston Astros history. "He doesn't need to know who I am. It's only important that he knows who Barry Larkin is."

A wise father might have whispered the whole truth about the relative accomplishments of the Reds' celebrity shortstop and the Astros' factory-town first baseman.

Bagwell is riding a Cooperstown cushion of burgeoning statistics, peer admiration for his work ethic and a quiet appreciation among baseball insiders for his determination to fight off the effects of an arthritically wasted right shoulder and, at 35, stay on top of his game. Perhaps within a decade, he will he in the tlall of Fame, hailed as one of the most feared hitters of his tine in the National League.

"It's hard for people to understand," Astros manager. Jimy Williams says, "just how hard Jeff Bagwell has worked to maintain the skill level that he feels that he has--and feels that he has to have-to help him compete and help this team win. That's all he's trying to do. He's not trying to impress anybody."

In doing so, Bagwell continues to impress both the numbers-crunchers and those with an appreciation for the subtle requirements for extended success.

"This game is about change," Bagwell says. "If people change to you, you have to change to them."

For 13 big league seasons, all with the Astros, Bagwell has stayed ahead of the curve--and at the pinnacle of the game's best fastball hitters. Twice in recent seasons, he has radically altered his once gaping stance, all in an attempt to cover the outer part of the plate, a problem compounded by his decayed shoulder.

Yet, his slumps remain mild. And the homers keep popping off his bat.

On July 20, he bagged Nos. 399 and 400, joining a group of three dozen players to reach that plateau. After two slow months, he erupted in July with 10 homers and 25 RBI. By the end of 2003, he had batted .278--his lowest average since 1992--with 100 RBI, 109 runs scored and 39 home runs for the season and 419 for his career--two ahead of Frank Thomas of the White Sox. Thomas and Bagwell share the same birthday (May 27, 1968) and were both named league MVPs in 1994.

REACHING 30 AGAIN

With his 37 homers, Bagwell reached the 30 mark for the eighth straight season. He's about a year away, if his production rate continues, from doubling the career homer total for the second-greatest slugger in Astros history, Jimmy Wynn, who hit 223 from 1963 to 1973.

He's roughly three years away, if his pace holds, from joining the ultra-exclusive 500-homer list, now just 19 players deep. Three years also happens to be the time remaining on Bagwell's contract.

"If I play those three years and I don't get there," Bagwell says, "I'm not going to be a happy camper."

A native New Englander, Bagwell came to the Astros in a now infamous 1990 trade with Boston that netted the Red Sox journeyman reliever Larry Andersen. A year later, Bagwell was named Rookie of the Year in the National League. In 1994, after hitting .368 with 39 homers and a leagne-best 116 RBI, Bagwell was selected unanimously as the N.L.'s MVP, only the third player in league history to be chosen without dissent.

The following season, a broken hand forced him out of the lineup for a month, He returned with a special protective device sewn into his batting glove and in 1996 launched an offensive tear that reached a peak during Houston's debut at cozy Minute Maid Park (then Enron Field) in 2000. Bagwell banged a career-high 47 homers that season, knocked in 132 runs and hit .310. But soon afterward, his right shoulder began to creak.

Surgery after the 2001 season relieved much of the pain but reduced his shoulder to little more than bone on bone. Surges and slumps have been his brea and butter since then. Before his 10-homer burst in July, Bagwell hit only one in May and three in June. Still, he played on.

Since 1999, Bagwell has missed, on average, only two gaines a season.

"I can't do some of the things that I did before," he says. "I can't throw like I used to, and that's been tough on me. Hitting, my numbers haven't been up to par the last couple of years. It's been a little bit of trial and eFror every at-bat. But it's a tough game. You may know what yell're doing wrong. But to actually fix it is not as easy as it sounds."

Few hitters have ever gone to greater extremes to find a fix. Few hitters have ever employed a stranger stance.

His wide base--a perfect blueprint for a single-arched bridge--has been a constant, a platform for a vicions uppercut that imperils pitches. whether imperfect or not. But his once garishly open stance has slithered since 2000, back to even and, more recently, to closed.

"It got to where nobody pitched me in ever," Bagwell says. "So I just said, 'OK, I play in this ball park where it's good to right, so I'll hit every ball to right." I did that and had a pretty good season."

MATTER OF EXTENSION

But the adjustment, Bagwell says, was as much a concession to age as to arena.

"With my shoulder, it was harder to extend out--and you have to extend if you're going to generate any kind of power," he says. "With my crouch, it's hard for me to get back closed from the open spot. I'm not as quick as I used to be."

That's a secret Bagwell has kept hidden from oppnsing pitchers. Strictly as a fastball hitter, Bagwell may rank as the best of his generation. Billy Wagner, the Astros' punch-out closer. remembers well the one opportunity he had to challenge Bagwell with has triple-digit veloeily. It came in spring training of 1996, Wagner's rookie camp with lhe big club.

Wagner threw heat. Bagwell parked it over the left-center field wall.

"He can look like he's late on a fastball," Wagner says. "But all he's really doing is setting you up to throw it again, one he can handle, one out over the plate just a little bit."

Just how Bagwell hits anything is a bit of mystery.

"I would not advise telling any youngster to emulate what he does," Williams says.

"I do everything wrong," says Bagwell, in total agreement.

"I step backwards, and that's bad. But my biggest flaw is my hands drop. My hands drop-a lot. You can't see it so much with the naked eye, but if you saw it on film, you'd die. When my swing is off, I can't get my hands back up, so I end up going forward a little bit. Not good."

Those slumps are typically short, a testament to Bagwell's skills as his own troubleshooter.

"It's difficult," he says. "As many times as I've been through it, my swing is so unorthhodox, it's just hard to fix."

"He's his own hitter," Williams says of Bagwell. "He has his own stance. He has his own weigth shift. He has his own approach to hitting. He's a unique guy."

Sure, his hands drop, Williams says with a laugh.

"You know, if you drop down and don't hit, it's called a hitch," he says. "If you drop down and do hit, they call it a trigger mechanism."

Bagwell remains the trigger for the Astros' offensive barrage. Yet, Bagwell's intangibles, Williams says, mean just as much to the Astros as his plate punch.

"Just to watch him run out a baseball, so consistently, time after time," Williams says. "I see it four or five times a day, whenever he hits the ball. You can't put a price on that. He's a guy who always treats the game with respect."