Big, bigger, Biggio.(baseball players)

Publication: The Sporting News

Publication Date: 18-JUN-01

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2001 Sporting News Publishing Co.

Is CRAIG BIGGIO the best player in baseball? No. Is he the biggest, the strongest the fastest? No, no and no. Is he the most powerful? Sure is.

The truth about Craig Biggio lies somewhere in the stories the Astros tell. Where, exactly, is often hard to say. But the one about the locker cuts right to the issue. Goes like this:

Next to Biggio's locker in the Enron Field clubhouse is a vacant one, creating a little extra space for the 36-year-old second baseman. That's one of the perks he has earned after 13 years of dirty uniforms, hard slides and a kamikaze approach to baseball.

Biggio shares the extra space with first baseman Jeff Bagwell, his longtime teammate and close friend, who dresses on the other side. Assorted scraps wind up there: fan letters, spare spikes, coffee mugs, rolled-up posters--the everyday artifacts of the clubhouse.

Drayton McLane winds up there, too. The Astros owner must spend more time in his team's clubhouse than any other sports franchise owner this side of Mario Lemieux. He makes a regular foray into the locker room after home games. On most of those nights, he winds up at Biggio's and Bagwell's lockers.

McLane winds up there partly because Biggio and Bagwell are almost always the last two players in the clubhouse and partly because he wants to hear what they have to say.

"We just talk," McLane says. "That's what we'll do after a game at night. I'll just sit out there and talk to them and just ask them about baseball. I read the box scores, and following the games, I'll say, `What do you think about this?' or `What do you think about that?' I've learned a lot of baseball that way."

Then late last month, someone created a handmade nameplate and taped it over the vacant locker, where it remains. It says, "McLane."

That's meant as a joke, but some might say it illustrates the pecking order on the Astros: Craig Biggio, Drayton McLane, Jeff Bagwell.

Is that overstatement? Yes. But Bagwell and, even more so, Biggio--though it's difficult to separate the two in this context--enjoy a line...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.