[NY DAILY NEWS] Good piece on Billy Wagner

Typical NY media.

Build someone up as a hero so they can tear him down. The second Wagner says something like "This team doesn't know how to win" or "This is not a playoff team", the NY media's going to tear him a new one.

That's what happened here in Philly. The love affair with Billy the Kid ended by the All Star break.

Anyway, good article. I didn't know a lot of this stuff. Always thought he was a pretty good guy whose only flaw was having diarrhea of the mouth.

Oh, and thanks for making the Stros look like the bad guys based on one incident that's not corroborated by anyone else.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/v-pfriendly/story/382933p-325022c.html

Long road of Billy the Kid

BY WAYNE COFFEY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Saturday, January 14th, 2006

TANNERSVILLE, Va. — Billy Wagner is from a lot of places. You are on the road to one of them, in southwest Virginia, where breathtaking views and crushing poverty are in a dead heat, and where Wagner once was bounced around as if he were the family Spaldeen.

You leave the town of Tazewell and turn left at Frog Level, and pass through Thompson Valley, not far from Criggers and Pucketts Store. You climb up mountains, and switchback your way down the backside. You ride by a field with scores of brightly colored barrels, each with a rooster on top, a ****-fighting breeding camp. You go alongside a meandering creek, and see red dirt and grazing cows in sloping valleys.

Seventeen miles beyond Frog Level, you finally get to Tannersville, a hamlet of 392 people and six roads, a dozen miles from the nearest supermarket. Ten people come into the post office, and that's on a busy day, says Evelyn Barton, the postmaster. A faded wooden sign by the volunteer fire house welcomes you to "The Home of Billy Wagner." In Tazewell, where Wagner starred in football and baseball for Tazewell High, a fancier sign also claims the town as his home.

For so many years, it seemed nobody wanted little Billy Wagner. Now everybody does.

"When you think about everything he's been through, it's amazing how he turned out. It really is," says Erik Robinson, Wagner's best friend.

"He's overcome a lot of obstacles, that's for sure," says Sandra Wyatt, a high school friend from Tannersville.

Seven weeks ago, when the Mets put down $43 million and secured the services of William Edward Wagner, an undersized lefthander with an oversized fastball, the talk was that they had signed a man who could wind up being the best closer they've ever had. What they really got was a survivor, a self-described country boy with humility as thick as his Appalachian twang, and a story all his own, starting with him being a natural righty who broke his right arm twice playing football. Nothing drove Billy crazier than being idle. He learned to throw lefty.

"It would be a great movie, but I'm sure Billy doesn't want that," says Abe Naff, Wagner's baseball coach at Ferrum College.

Billy Wagner is 34, and has lived a lot of life. He dealt with hunger and shame and abandonment as a kid, and cold-blooded murder as a young adult. And people wonder if he can handle the heat of playing in the big city.

"It's tough to blow three games in a row and have the courage to go back out there," Wagner says. "But if you go through what I went through as a kid, not knowing if I was going to eat or who I was going to live with, this is nothing.

"Pressure for me isn't stepping out there and pitching. It's the pressure I put on myself."

* * *
Born to teenage parents - Bill Wagner was 19 and Yvonne Hall was 16 when they had him - Wagner can't even count the number of places he lived. He lived in countless towns with aunts and uncles and grandparents. Mostly he lived with his grandparents, Randolph, who worked in the coal mines for 20 years and in a Pepsi plant for another 25 and couldn't read or write, and Lola Mae Hall.

"It wasn't that (my mother and father) didn't love me, they just didn't know what to do," Wagner says now, but that didn't make it any easier for a kid. He was angry and hurt. The instability wore on him. "When you are 10 years old, your first thought is nobody loves me and nobody cares and they just want you out of their hair and they ship you to the next person."

Hunger didn't make things any easier. A few crackers with peanut butter and a glass of water was a typical breakfast. In school, he faced the stigma of being a "red-chip kid," showing the lunch ladies the red token given to the poorest children. It entitled him to a free lunch, but announced to the whole school that he had no money. Still, nothing was worse than food stamps.

"I was as embarrassed as any person could possibly be, having to go in there to a store with food stamps," Wagner says.

When he got old enough he took on every job he could find. He'd work from sunup to sundown on weekends for Sheriff Bill Osborne on his dairy and tobacco farm, baling hay and cutting down tobacco stalks. By Sunday night he'd be covered with tobacco resin and $53 richer.

"He was always a real hard worker," says Sandra Wyatt, Osborne's niece.

In ninth grade, Wagner moved to Tannersville to live with his aunt and uncle, Sally and Jack Lamie, in a small wood frame house a few miles in from the post office. For the first time he had a stable home life, and rules.

Jeff Lamie, Wagner's cousin and Jack and Sally's son, was one of the best athletes in the county, and soon Wagner wasn't far behind. He was a quarterback and defensive back in football, a center fielder and pitcher in baseball. Sports were Wagner's salvation. He'd get on the mound and sometimes picture the face of someone who had hurt him or dumped him.

"When I first got into pitching, that's what fueled the fire," Wagner says.

Erik Robinson, from rival Graham High School, remembers trying to hit off Wagner. "It wasn't even fair. The ball was going so fast you didn't have a chance," Robinson says.

Wagner had a superb high school career, but drew no big-time interest from colleges. He was hitting 86 mph on the radar gun, but he was 5-8 and 145 pounds, and nobody cared.

"Everybody looked at him and said, 'He's too little to pitch,'" says Lucian Peery, the Tazewell baseball coach. "I couldn't get anyone interested."

Wagner wound up following Jeff Lamie to Ferrum, a small Div. III school a few hours away. He wanted to play football until the coach saw him throw a baseball. "Your arm is too valuable to be under shoulder pads," the coach said. Wagner went 6-0 with a 1.60 ERA as a freshman, and was virtually unhittable as a sophomore, allowing nine hits in 51 innings, and averaging 19.11 strikeouts per nine innings, an NCAA record.

Off the field, Wagner worked in the school library - $48 was his two-week paycheck - and fell in love with Sarah Quesenberry, a star on the Ferrum women's basketball team. When Sarah brought Billy home to meet her father, Steve, they sat and talked for hours, and then went out to play some pickup basketball, where the 6-4, 250-pound Steve and his future son-in-law did some male bonding.

"He pounded on me and ran me into fences," Billy says, laughing. "I think he wanted to show me who was in charge."

Steve Quesenberry became a father figure, a quiet man who was always there. Billy came to love him.

* * *
The scouts finally got over Billy Wagner's size after a dominating summer in the Cape Cod League in 1992, and a year later, the Astros made him the No. 12 pick in the June free-agent draft. Two years later, Wagner was already on a fast track toward the majors, on a minor-league road trip in Wichita. On May 16, 1995, the Astros put him on their 40-man roster. He went to bed in his hotel room, sensing the big leagues were close at hand.

At 2 a.m., the phone rang in his room. It was Sarah. It was hard to understand her at first, but painfully, haltingly, the words came out. Something terrible had happened. Her father and stepmother, Tina, had been murdered outside an apartment complex in Hillsville, Va., shot in the head by Dennis Earl Stoneman, estranged husband of Tina's sister, Teresa.

The last conversation Sarah had with her father was to tell him the great news about Billy and the 40-man roster.

"It changed my wife's life, and her two brothers' lives, forever," Wagner says.

A convicted rapist, Stoneman had been beating Teresa Stoneman for years, according to her court testimony. The last time was a week before she left him. She had taken the last Tylenol in a bottle and he flew into a rage. He bit her and took off his belt and whipped her in the face.

"My children was sitting there. They seen it," she testified. Other times he'd put a gun to her head and threaten to kill her if she ever left him or called the cops on him.

When Teresa fled, she headed to Hillsville with their young son, Earl. Steve and Tina Quesenberry were helping her get a fresh start. Dennis Stoneman drove up from North Carolina with their older son, 15-year-old D.J. He dumped his Chevy pickup and borrowed a friend's car, a white Cavalier, in nearby Fancy Gap, then rode around Hillsville searching for Teresa. When he found Steve and Tina pulling up in the parking lot of Westview Terrace Apartments, he pulled up next to them. He asked where Teresa was. A heated argument ensued. Suddenly, Stoneman pulled out a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver and fired, right in front of D.J.'s face.

In the back seat of Steve and Tina's car, six-year-old Ross Payne, Tina's son, saw it all. The testimony of the boy is what locked up the conviction, says Gregory Goad, the county prosecutor.

After his son testified against him, Dennis Earl Stoneman asked the judge to give him the death penalty. He is serving life without parole. In Goad's office, surrounded by a wild turkey and a boar head and three buck heads, Goad has a signed photo from Wagner.

"Thanks for all the hard work, God Bless ..." reads the inscription.

* * *
Billy Wagner doesn't live in southwest Virginia anymore. He's a gentleman farmer in the town of Crozet, just west of Charlottesville, where he and Sarah live in a restored farmhouse with their three children, Will, 7, Jeremy, 5, and Olivia, 2, and 19 alpacas. There are 120-plus acres and endless mountain views, and more important than any of that, there is stability. If Billy Wagner was going to do anything as a father, it was to make sure his kids felt safe and loved, and knew where home was.

"He's a great father and a great husband," Erik Robinson says.

Robinson is the executive director of 2nd Chance Learning Center in Bluefield, Va., a program that offers academic and emotional counseling for at-risk kids. Wagner provided the funding for the program, with no fanfare. It's not important that anybody knows. The important thing is to reach out to kids who might be going through what he went through. In Tazewell County, one in three adults doesn't have a high-school diploma, and only 11% of the population has a college education.

"This has been Billy's dream for a long time, and he's made it happen," Robinson says, sitting in his office.

Says Wagner, "The need for this is so crucial in southwest Virginia. It's diminishing so rapidly, with a lack of jobs and a lack of ambition. The program is just taking baby steps, but the idea is to help build the region. Not every kid is going to be able to save the world, but they can make their corner of the world a little better."

Abe Naff, Wagner's coach at Ferrum, recalls the time he and his family visited Billy in Houston. They went to five ballgames, but the most vivid memory is coming back to Wagner's cul de sac, and seeing him playing kickball with the neighborhood kids.

"Billy is just an All-American guy," Naff says. "The heroes in today's world are people who you don't want to be heroes, but Billy Wagner is one guy you want your children to be like. I don't think you could go anywhere in the United States and hear a negative word about him."

A month before his first spring training in a New York Met uniform, Billy Wagner, No. 13, is running every day, lifting weights in the gym in the house, getting his 5-11, 200-pound body into shape. He has 284 career saves and 840 strikeouts in 630.1 innings, and in his 11th year, pushes himself more than ever.

"There's something to be said for going out there in the offseason and working and trying to perfect your craft," Wagner says.

After all the places he's lived, all the humiliation he's felt and the heartache he's seen, Billy Wagner says much less has changed than you might think. It's why the people in Tannersville and Tazewell and everywhere appreciate him so much.

He pauses, and talks about how much he loves all the folks who have been there along the way. "I don't want people to treat me like a (big-league) pitcher or an All-Star," Billy Wagner says. "I'm just Billy. What you see is what you get. I work hard and play hard and I love my family, and I'm not going to change just because of money or circumstances."

Astros put the squeeze on Wagner

Billy Wagner made his big-league debut on Sept. 13, 1995, in the same ballpark he now calls home. He retired Rico Brogna on a fly to left-center, a happy debut that was followed closely by an unhappy confrontation with the realities of the business.

When the Astros returned home from the road trip, then-GM Bob Watson and manager Terry Collins sat down with Wagner in the Astrodome dugout. They told the promising 24-year-old closer they wanted him to play winter ball, in Venezuela.

Wagner said no. His wife's father and stepmother had been brutally murdered four months earlier, and with a trial looming, he wouldn't be going anywhere.

"I need to be with my family," Wagner said. He said Watson and Collins pressed him.

"It's not the O.J. Simpson trial," Wagner recalls Watson saying. Wagner replied with "choice words," and was told that the club couldn't promise that he'd be back in the big leagues if he didn't accede to its wishes.

"Well, there's 20-something other teams that will look at me," Wagner said.

Weeks later, Watson, now a VP for Major League Baseball, left to be GM of the Yankees.

"I definitely don't recall making any offhanded comment about O.J. Simpson," Watson says. "I'm sensitive to family and what that's all about. I wasn't there when the full-court pressure was put on this young man, because I had already gone to the Yankees."