Canton native brings minor leagues to life in new book

Former CHS baseball player Tim Hagerty is now a broadcaster for the El Paso Chihuahuas.

Longtime baseball fans easily remember Wade Boggs, who spent the majority of his pro career with the Red Sox after a stint in the Minor Leagues playing in Bristol, CT and Pawtucket, RI. In 1978, Boggs was in the field on a clear evening in Jersey City, New Jersey, when a Jersey City batter hit a ball that disappeared. It did not land on the field or in the stands, nor did it go over the fence. The umpires’ decision around that event is included in Tim Hagerty’s newest book, Tales from the Dugout: 1,001 Humorous, Inspirational & Wild Anecdotes from Minor League Baseball.

Hagerty, a 2000 Canton High School graduate and now a broadcaster for the San Diego Padres’ Triple-A affiliate, the El Paso Chihuahuas, compiled the stories, which date back to the early days of the sport. Cider Mill Press, a division of HarperCollins, published the book this year. The story about Boggs is Hagerty’s favorite.

As he recalls in the book, Hagerty had been working on a research project about Minor League team names when he came across a story about a wild bull charging through a baseball game in Texas in 1888. The story was new for him and it inspired him to look for other unusual stories from the minor leagues.

Former MLB player Billy Butler, who Hagerty had met while working as a broadcaster for the Idaho Falls Chukars, wrote the foreword for Tales from the Dugout, recalling the day that a snake forced a delay in a game when Butler was playing third base for the Chukars.

“That was exciting,” Hagerty said, “to have a guy who was a Major League all-star contribute the foreword to the book.”

Hagerty’s love of America’s pastime goes back to the day he attended his first game at Fenway Park. His mother, Theresa, who taught special education at the Galvin Middle School for many years, picked her son up on his last day of first grade at the JFK School and announced that they were going to Boston to see a baseball game. “I just remember being struck, walking up those ramps, seeing how bright the grass was,” he said of entering Fenway. “It was a Red Sox/Rangers game.”

Later, as a student at Vermont State University, Hagerty looked up the box score from that first game he attended on baseballreference.com and discovered that the Rangers’ starting pitcher that day was Bobby Witt, a Canton native and fellow CHS alum. “It’s kind of an amazing coincidence,” he said.

Hagerty loved playing baseball, and after coming up through Canton Little League he went on to play first base for the Bulldogs during his four years at CHS. He was also an avid reader of baseball information in the Boston Globe sports section.

“Even though I was growing up in Canton, as a kid, if you asked me to name five players on Kansas City or Cincinnati, I could do it. I was really into the rosters,” he said.

Hagerty collected baseball cards during the 1990s, and some of those former players are now coaches and scouts. Occasionally he runs into them in a press box and can still recall the team they played on. He also spent time at Fenway getting autographs and used to head to batting practice early with a glove, managing to catch about 25 foul balls. The balls are in a bin at his parents’ house, each labeled with the date and game he caught them at.

While searching for Minor League stories for his book, Hagerty noticed many commonalities across different teams and eras. The first story in the book is about a team that held a contest in 1877 where fans tried to catch a greased pig. “I love that story, because these days Minor League teams do so much to try and sell tickets and get headlines, and it shows me that’s not new,” Hagerty said. “Teams have been trying to do that since the 1870s — do whatever it takes to get fans out and to get coverage for their team.”

Hagerty found the stories for his book from interviews, Internet searches, and also a research trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York, where he found publications not available online. “That’s what I enjoyed about this book,” he said. “There’s so many stories out there that a lot of sports fans just didn’t know about.”

In addition to broadcasting, Hagerty writes baseball history articles on a freelance basis for various publications such as Baseball Digest and Sporting News. While gathering information for those articles, he would make note of any interesting stories he found about Minor League teams. By 2022, he had about 1,100 short stories for Tales from the Dugout. He eventually decided to narrow that number down to 1,001, after he happened to see one of his wife’s cookbooks that featured 1,001 recipes.

In reflecting on what he has learned from short stories spanning three centuries, Hagerty said that one major change was the quality of the facilities used by Minor League teams. He described Southwest University Park, the stadium where the Chihuahuas play, as a palace. “It is spectacular — everything from the buildings to the backdrop to the video board facilities,” he said. “Over the past few decades, Minor League ballparks have become Major League quality, just on a smaller scale.”

What hasn’t changed is the community aspect of the Minor Leagues. “These teams mean so much to people,” Hagerty said. “Where I am in El Paso, fans get mad at a loss or an error. I think the passion for fans has stayed the same.”

While he enjoys broadcasting from modern parks, as a fan, he appreciates the historical perspective of taking in a game in an older park. “When it comes to sitting in the stands at a game, the value of Fenway Park is that you can sit there and think, ‘Ted Williams stood there. Yastrzemski stood out there. Babe Ruth played there,’” he said. “You can’t have that at a new stadium.”

As a broadcaster, one of Hagerty’s personal highlights was calling the Chihuahuas’ thrilling win over the Oklahoma City Dodgers in the deciding game of the 2016 Pacific Coast League championship series. Hagerty’s call of the final out was replayed throughout the year and on the introduction on the video board. “That’s why you want to get it right, because it’s going to get replayed a lot,” he said.

Hagerty said his passion for sports broadcasting grew out of his experiences with the CHS TV production program under the guidance of the late Ernie St. Jean. “Looking back, it was very helpful to me, because I was 17 years old, broadcasting games, hosting a show, and decided right then that’s what I wanted to do,” Hagerty said. “It really gave me an advantage when I went to college competing for air time on the school station, or on radio stations in Vermont. I already had experience with equipment, with broadcasting live games, with receiving feedback, with working on your voice.”

Hagerty stays in touch with CHS through Zoom talks that he does with current TV production teacher Ed McDonough, and he has corresponded with CHS students who are interested in pursuing a similar career. “I’m really impressed by students at Canton High School,” he said. “You can tell by the questions that they ask that they really did their homework. They have very specific questions. And I love that. That was me in 1999 and 2000.”

Tales from the Dugout is available on Amazon.com, at Barnes and Noble (both in stores and online), at independent bookstores, and directly through the publisher at cidermillpress.com.

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Posted by Mary Ann Price on Dec 22 2023. Filed under Features. Both comments and pings are currently closed.