It's hard to imagine Hall of Fame pitcher Billy Wagner as anything other than an elite closer, but when he came up with the Houston Astros in 1995, the plan was for him to start.
In 83 career minor league games, he started 73 of them, pitching to a 3.10 ERA. There was only one problem — he didn't like it.
As Wagner told “The Road to Cooperstown” podcast on Tuesday, that's what he told former Astros manager Larry Dierker early in his career.
The origins of a Hall of Fame closer.
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“Larry [Dierker] gets hired and he comes down and we’re out playing golf, me, him, Verne Ruhle,” Wagner recalled. “He’s smoking a cigar and drinking some win and he looks at me and goes ‘do you like starting?' And I said ‘no.' He goes ‘do you think you could be a closer?’ I said ‘yeah.'”
That's all it took. Wagner explained why he preferred to come out of the bullpen.
“He asked me why. I said because I can throw every day,” Wagner continued. “We can win every day. I said I don’t think we can win on the days I start but I think we can win every day that I close because I think that allows me to be the full tilt every single day.”
The Astros drafted Wagner in the first round of the 1993 MLB Draft out of Division II Ferrum College, where the Hall of Famer says he would throw between 160 and 180 pitches per start — then pitch in relief the next two games.
“It was never a thought of soreness or things like that where now they want to condense you, like, ‘hey try to throw under 100 pitches. Don’t try to throw so hard in the first inning,'” he said. “And it just wasn’t in my nature to really be able to do that.”
Wagner was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2025, his 10th and final year on the ballot.
