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Billy Wagner coaches baseball at the Miller School of Albemarle, a 1,600-acre oasis in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Charlottesville, Va. It’s a private boarding school that feels more like a small college, he says, and his program is a three-season enterprise — fall, winter and spring — for kids who have every reason to dream big.
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“Yesterday the rain was so bad that the school canceled afternoon practices, and they were like, ‘Can I come to your house and work out in your cage?’” Wagner said by phone last week. “And I’m like, ‘No, no, no — go home.’ But you can’t take their passion away.”
This is the life Wagner wanted in 2010 when he retired as the best reliever in the game. That season, with the Atlanta Braves, Wagner’s 1.43 ERA was the lowest in baseball among pitchers with 70 appearances. He averaged 13.5 strikeouts per nine innings, made his seventh All-Star team and helped Atlanta reach the playoffs.
Wagner was 39; chronologically, the time was right to leave. But he could have kept pitching, could have stacked more paychecks onto a fortune that had reached nearly $100 million in career earnings. He could have made a stronger case for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Next Tuesday the Hall will announce the results of this year’s voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. An official asked Wagner to be home with his cellphone nearby, but Wagner, respectfully, said he couldn’t do that. He’s not very good with disappointment, he said, and can’t bear the thought of waiting for a call that might not come.
“I’m from Southwest Virginia; I literally came from nothing,” said Wagner, a flame-throwing lefty who is naturally right-handed. “And to reach the heights of baseball, to be looked at as one of the greatest, I don’t even know how I would describe it, because it’s just not something I ever thought would be possible.”
Now it seems likely. Candidates need 75 percent support for election, and Wagner is polling at 79 percent among voters who have revealed their ballots, as tracked by Ryan Thibodaux on his website and X. Wagner received 68.1 percent of the votes last year, and this is his ninth appearance on the ballot of a possible 10.
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Wagner ranks sixth on the career saves list with 422, behind Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman and Lee Smith, who are in, and Francisco Rodríguez and John Franco, who are not. His 903 innings would be the fewest of any Hall of Fame pitcher, but his 2.31 ERA trails only Rivera among Cooperstown relievers. His 0.998 WHIP would be the second-lowest in the Hall to Addie Joss, who has been dead for 112 years.
“When Billy retired, coming off another elite season, I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, hopefully this won’t be held against him when he’s up for the Hall of Fame someday, because he’s as good and as dominant as we’ve ever seen,” said Brad Lidge, who succeeded Wagner as the Houston Astros’ closer after setting up for him in 2003.
“But what I see with the Hall of Fame voting process, more and more, is that voters understand that shorter duration with dominance is more important than the long-term kind of stat-compiling.”
For many candidates, clearing a path to the Hall is like merging onto a gridlocked freeway. When Wagner debuted on the ballot, in 2016, there were 11 players up for consideration who are now enshrined — plus Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Jeff Kent, Mark McGwire, Curt Schilling and Gary Sheffield, among others. Voters are limited to 10 selections, and candidates must maintain 5 percent to stay on the ballot. Wagner escaped the off-ramp with an opening figure of 10.5 percent.
Smith, who was on that ballot, peaked at 50.6 percent despite retiring as the career saves leader with 478. Smith’s career ERA was a bit high for a closer, at 3.03, and he never pitched for a pennant-winner, struggling in two League Championship Series. He was elected by an eras committee in 2019.
Every other closer in the Hall has pitched in the World Series: Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Trevor Hoffman, Rivera, Bruce Sutter and Hoyt Wilhelm. All but Hoffman worked in clinching games, too. The postseason is a small sample, by nature, but closers have an outsized impact on the results; the job they signed up for, after all, is all about extreme highs and lows.
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“Your job requires you to be great,” Wagner said. “Good is not very good as a closer.”
Yet even the greats are not always good. Eckersley and Gossage served up famous World Series homers to Kirk Gibson, and Eckersley was touched for a walk-off hit by Cincinnati’s Joe Oliver in 1990. Hoffman blew a save in his only World Series appearance, and Rivera did so in his only World Series Game 7.
Wagner never reached the World Series, and his postseason ERA is a ghastly 10.03. With the Mets in the 2006 NLCS, against St. Louis, he was shelled in a loss in Game 2 and passed over for Aaron Heilman in the ninth inning of a tied Game 7.
Yet Wagner actually had only four save chances in the postseason, and converted three. The only time he blew a save, in a 1998 Division Series against San Diego, the Astros won the game.
What resonates, beyond his choppy 11 2/3 postseason innings, is how unusual Wagner was for his time. With 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings in his career, he was the archetype of the modern closer. Of the 31 pitchers with 300 saves, only three have more strikeouts per nine — Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen and Craig Kimbrel, who all made their debuts in 2010, the year Wagner retired.
Today’s relievers are trained to throw very hard and strike out at least a batter per inning; when one fails, another is likely waiting in the minors. Wagner, who debuted in 1995, was an outlier in those pre-revolutionary times.
“He was the exception, not the rule, as far as lefties having that good of a fastball,” said Bret Boone, the former All-Star second baseman. “There were only two of them, him and Randy (Johnson). They were the only lefties who were 98, 99 (mph) all the time.”
Playing catch is supposed to be like biking with training wheels, but with Wagner, you buckled into a Ferrari: 0 to 100 in one or two throws. Nobody wanted to be his catch partner, Lidge said. The ball tended to reach you before you could even see it.
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In 2005, when Wagner pitched for the Phillies, Jim Salisbury of The Philadelphia Inquirer caught him in the bullpen for a story. The warmups, Salisbury said, were terrifying.
“I tell you what, you could hear the ball, especially on flat ground, when all of a sudden it’s just on you, and you’re like, ‘Whoa, what the —? Am I crazy for doing this?’” Salisbury said. “But in the bullpen, I put the mitt up and he just dotted it. Every fastball, he dotted it. He went 10 fastballs, five sliders and five more fastballs to finish. I had a tough time with the slider.”
Wagner threw around 80 percent fastballs in his heyday with the Astros and Phillies. The pitch became famous in 1996, in August of his rookie season, at the Astrodome against the San Francisco Giants. Two errors had loaded the bases and cut Houston’s lead to a run with one out in the ninth. Up next were Barry Bonds and Matt Williams, two of the era’s most fearsome sluggers. Wagner struck them out on six pitches, all fastballs.
“He’s not afraid of anybody,” Houston’s Jeff Bagwell said that day. “I don’t think Barry has seen three straight fastballs for strikes like that in his life.”
For his part, Boone said he always saw Wagner well, yet went 0-for-8 against him with five strikeouts, a small slice of opponents’ meager .187 average against Wagner in his career. Even a tip from a teammate couldn’t help Boone.
“They tell me that, in the physics of baseball, the ball can’t actually rise — but then why did Eduardo Pérez tell me to swing an inch above where I thought Billy’s fastball was?” Boone said, laughing. “So I have no idea. It was just elusive.”
Wagner’s talent has always defied explanation. He is naturally right-handed. He can’t use a pencil or a fork with his left hand, but he could throw 100 miles an hour with it.
When Wagner was 5 years old or so, he broke his right elbow roughhousing with a bigger kid named Chip. (They were tossing around a hat because they didn’t have a football.) While wearing a cast, Wagner threw left-handed. When the cast came off, he broke the same elbow again when he fell off a jungle gym. He kept throwing as a lefty.
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Wagner didn’t grow to be very big — 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds entering his senior year of high school in Tazewell, Va., and a generous 5-10, 180 in the majors – but that left arm carried him to Ferrum College and a breakout summer in the Cape Cod League in 1992. It was a big deal to Wagner that Peter Gammons, the Hall of Fame writer who was then a staple of ESPN, knew who he was.
“I remember being at the All-Star Game in Falmouth,” Wagner said. “The MVP vote had already went on, but I came in and punched out three guys on nine pitches and I remember Peter going, ‘Hey, I think we need to re-vote.’ I ended up getting the MVP in the game, and he mentioned me on ESPN as Billy ‘Ray Gun’ Wagner.”
Wagner turned down an overture from Skip Bertman, the celebrated LSU coach, to stay at Ferrum, where he set Division III records that still stand: most strikeouts per nine innings in a season (19.1, in 1992) and a career (16.0).
Yet for all that success, Wagner said, his future seemed limited to the people who knew him best. In the summer of 1992, after that unprecedented strikeout season, his Aunt Sally — who had gotten custody of Wagner with her husband, Jack, when Wagner was 16 — suggested he drop out of college and join the military. The reality of his status as a top pro prospect was impossible to grasp.
“There was no way for somebody like me to have perspective on that and go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where I’m gonna be,’” Wagner said. “I mean, my name was never spoken in those words in any of my family’s homes. We watched baseball. We appreciated it. We enjoyed it. But we also knew that that was a different lifestyle. We were gonna be blue collar, work at the brick factory or be in the military and that was it.”
Wagner was born to a 16-year-old mother and a 19-year-old father who was about to be shipped to Vietnam. The couple separated when he was 5. He was loved, but was somewhat in the way. Often he was hungry.
“Everybody was supportive, they just didn’t have the means to really provide,” Wagner said. “My dad had gotten remarried, my mom had gotten remarried, and it’s one of those things: I was the odd man out. Everybody wants a fresh start when they get that (new) marriage, so that’s how it was. I was passed around the grandparents, aunts and uncles and pretty much had to grow up a lot sooner than most.
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“I mean, there was no hand-holding. When I went through the draft, my Uncle Jack’s sitting there with a (sleeveless) shirt on and a Coleman lantern on the table because the power went out. You just learn how to survive.”
The Astros took Wagner in the first round, 12th overall, in 1993. Two years later he was added to their 40-man roster. Two days after that, his father-in-law, Steven Quesenberry, who had exemplified the familial bonds Wagner always craved, was murdered in Hillsville, Va.
Quesenberry and his wife, Tina, were shot to death by Tina’s brother-in-law, Dennis Stoneman, after an argument in the parking lot of an apartment complex. Stoneman was sentenced to life without parole in 1996.
The turmoil and hardship made Wagner pitch with fury; pain and rage singed the seams of that blazing fastball. He worried that more doom was just ahead, which gave him an edge to keep doing all he could to stave it off.
Wagner, 52, and his wife, Sarah, have four children; the oldest, Will, was 12 when Billy retired and is now a Triple-A infielder with the Astros. Retiring on top, Wagner said, was all about immersing himself in the family experience he never had as a boy. His miracle left arm was his chance for a new life, and Wagner was eager to live it in full.
“Going through the draft with Will, going through the recruiting process for college, the first girlfriends, the first breakups, teaching (his kids) how to drive, those are important to me,” Wagner said. “I retired because I didn’t want to miss those moments. Pressing for 500 saves and somebody’s approval to say I was good or wasn’t good — that really doesn’t matter.
“Could I have played longer? Without a doubt, absolutely. But there were more important things and things that were worth giving up.”
If he gave up the Hall of Fame, Wagner can live with it. But it’s looking like he just might have it all — if not next week, then probably next year. The small kid with the broken arm, shuffled from house to house, should soon have a forever home in Cooperstown.
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(Top photo of Billy Wagner in 2000: Sporting News via Getty Images)
