In 1938, an umpire at Dudley Field got tired of being heckled by fans so he put down his equipment in the middle of the El Paso Texans’ game, walked off the field and never returned.
True story.
Tim Hagerty’s new book, “Tales from the Dugout,” has a thousand more such stories. His new book is the latest El Paso Matters Book Club selection.
The book features 1,001 funny baseball anecdotes, some of which occurred in El Paso. Hagerty, the El Paso Chihuahuas announcer, recently talked with El Paso Matters about his new book.
El Paso Matters: How long have you been around the game and what made you decide on the format – specifically why 1,001 anecdotes?
Hagerty: This will be my 20th season broadcasting professional baseball games. I’ve been with the Chihuahuas since the off-season before the inaugural 2014 season.
There were so many entertaining stories throughout Minor League Baseball history, I felt writing them as short anecdotes was the best way to pack in as many stories as possible. So each story has a headline above it and many of the stories have illustrations. I hoped for a visual book and I think HarperCollins delivered on the design and illustrations.
As far as why 1,001 – I compiled about 1,100 stories and I wasn’t sure what the final number should be. One day I walked by my wife’s cookbook and its spine said “1,001 Recipes.” I thought that was a catchy number, so I merged some stories together, removed some others and submitted 1,001 stories.
El Paso Matters: How hard was it to differentiate between baseball myths and events that really occurred throughout the minor leagues.
Hagerty: That was very important, because baseball lore is full of apocryphal stories and I wanted to make sure every story in the book was true.
Baseball Digest magazine’s archives are available online, and decades ago they’d print funny stories that players told them. But it was before the internet or newspaper archives, so it was hard to verify the names and dates in the stories back then. So if a player recounted a crazy game from 1938, but my research showed the game actually took place in 1939, I’d use the story but phrase it as “in the late 1930s.”
In addition to Baseball Digest and other publications, I used online newspaper archives, baseball books and went to the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York to find stories. For current stories, I’d keep track of notable games, ballparks, characters and events as they happened, and make note of unique stories that coaches, players or scouts told me.
El Paso Matters: Are there any anecdotes in your book that are El Paso specific, or that you witnessed yourself; and which of the anecdotes is your favorite?
Hagerty: Yes, there are about 20 El Paso stories in the book and about 25 from games I broadcasted in El Paso or elsewhere. The list of El Paso stories includes the time the Diablos set the world record for the largest banana split (105 feet long) as part of a promotion at Dudley Field in 1974. Or the Chihuahuas game that was delayed when a wiener dog ran loose from a between-innings race in 2015. It was amazing to see how much baseball history El Paso has.
An example of a story from a game I witnessed was the time a pitcher got locked in the bathroom. Mobile vs. Montgomery in 2007 in the Southern League. The pitcher was so upset after allowing a game-tying home run that he slammed the dugout bathroom door and locked himself in. He had to be removed from the game and he was stuck in the bathroom until Montgomery, Alabama’s fire department came 40 minutes after the game ended.
One of my favorites was the story former major leaguer Randy Bush told me 18 years ago. He hit a 200-mile home run in a Triple-A game in 1982. The ball soared over the right field fence in Charleston, West Virginia and landed in a moving coal train that didn’t stop until 200 miles later.
El Paso Matters: How long did it take you to finish the book, and what was the toughest part of writing this type of book?
Hagerty: I started the book in 2012 and it was published in 2023. But I didn’t work on it every day. It was more of an ongoing document for a decade.
Most authors you interview send their proposal to publishers and then start working on the book after they get a book contract. But with a full-time job and a young family, I couldn’t have a deadline for a book. So I worked on the book for a decade, finished it and then found a publisher. HarperCollins has been a great partner and now the book is in stores in all 50 states and Canada, which is exciting.
I don’t know if there was a toughest part to writing the book. It was a fun and rewarding project and people seem to like it. Maybe just making sure I was flexible and realized the publisher knows best when they pick the title and other details.
El Paso Matters: What are the top three books, either baseball or non-baseball related, that you would recommend to others?
Hagerty: I usually read a book or two per season on Chihuahuas flights. One great book I read in recent years was Destiny of the Republic about President James Garfield. He was a really impressive guy and would’ve been one of our most famous presidents if he wasn’t assassinated.
Another good one was The Stranger in the Woods, a true story about a guy who lived in the woods in Maine for 27 years.
And I’ve never read a better baseball book than Bottom of the 33rd. The author went back and wrote the personal stories of people involved with the longest game in professional baseball history – Rochester at Pawtucket, 33 innings, in 1981.
