From the archives: New Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell

Posted on July 25, 2017

Jeff Bagwell of the Houston Astros bats against the San Francisco Giants during a game at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California on May 22, 1999. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

Former Houston Astros great Jeff Bagwell will be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York on Sunday afternoon. This is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a big league ballplayer, and it will surely be a day Bagwell, his family and friends, and Astros fans will never forget. I will be watching the ceremony on television as I can’t get enough of anything Hall of Fame related, and I love to hear what guys like Bagwell have to say in their speeches. Bagwell’s career spanned from 1991 through the 2005 season, and although I did not shoot him as much as my Houston-based sports photographer friends Robert Seale and Karen Warren, I photographed him many times when he came through San Francisco and Oakland hitting big home runs that always seemed to kill my Giants. I thought it would be fun to take a look through my searchable online archive containing over 90,000 baseball images dating back to 1987 and see what came back when I typed in “Jeff Bagwell.” Let’s take a look!

All of the above pictures of Bagwell were shot on gorgeous Fujichrome slide film. Sadly I had to switch to digital in 2003, and things were never the same! The two images below were shot with my first digital SLR, a Canon EOS-1D. Man do I miss looking at these babies on the light table!

Congrats to Jeff Bagwell on this huge honor. It is becoming more and more cool for me to see guys who I have shot getting elected into the Hall of Fame. It is even cooler when I have some nice old pictures of them on chrome in my archive!