Red Sox: What if Jeff Bagwell never got traded to Houston Astros?

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HOF 1st baseman Jeff Bagwell throwing out ceremonial first pitch

Houston Astros former players Jeff Bagwell (left) and Roger Clemens (right) throw out a ceremonial first pitch before a game against the Kansas City Royals at Minute Maid Park. /

Bagwell vs Andersen by the numbers

Bagwell spent his entire 15 year career playing in Houston. He finished as the Astros all-time leader in several offensive categories, including home runs (449), runs batted in (1529), WAR (79.6), walks (1401) and sacrifice flies (102) to name a few.

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Andersen, as mentioned before, played in just 15 games for the Red Sox. In just one month of baseball, he had 25 K’s in 22 innings of work while sporting a 1.23 ERA.

Bagwell played a full season for the Astros for every game that Andersen pitched for the Sox. His best season came in the 1994 shortened year due to the MLB strike cutting the season short. In 110 games Bags had a .368/39/116/15 line adding 104 runs in just 479 plate appearances.

Bagwell also had the best OBP/SLG/OPS of his career with a .451/750/1.201 line. He has the 39th best OBP of all time (.408). Bagwell also posted the 11th best slugging percentage in a single season of all time (.750) and ranked 33rd all time with .540 career slugging. To add to his best campaign, he had a 1.200 OPS ranking as the 20th best single season place of all time and a career OPS of .948, good for 22nd all time.

The strike in 1994 hurt baseball and it hurt several players chances to have Herculean numbers. Several teams lost out on playing more than 45 games. Taking Bagwell’s average into consideration, had he played the full 162 games, Bagwell could have had a .368/57/170/22 line. This all assuming that he didn’t stray from his current averages. He would have added 216 hits and 153 runs scored making that one of the best theoretical lines in baseball history.

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