SportsJuly 13, 2014
Notre Dame's Haggerty selected Southeast Missourian Player of the Year for baseball
Josh Haggerty had the kind of senior season that's hard to believe. Even for him.
Josh Haggerty had the kind of senior season that's hard to believe.
He hit .531 leading off for Notre Dame against many of the best teams Missouri had to offer. He hit .571 with runners in scoring position. He drove home 27 runs, and struck out just eight times in 113 plate appearances.
He also chipped in on the mound for the Bulldogs and had a 1.54 ERA in 22 2/3 innings pitched.
And none of those numbers cover the school records he broke.
"I don't know how I did so well, really," said Haggerty, a left-handed center fielder who uses few words, even around his coaches and teammates.
A look to the ground and a slight shake of the head follows when he's asked why his success is hard to comprehend, even for him.
"I don't know," he repeated. "Just because you don't see numbers like that often. I don't know how I did it. I couldn't do it again if I wanted to."
Three of his numbers -- 52 hits, 42 runs scored and seven triples -- now rest at the top of the Notre Dame record book.
That kind of production even surprised Bulldogs coach Jeff Graviett.
"Yeah, because there's some of those numbers in my opinion were untouchable," Graviett said. "That hits record was untouchable -- just what it would take to do that. I really had no idea of the season he was having until about three quarters of the way. [SEMO ESPN broadcaster Todd] Bonacki said something to me, he said 'He's about to break this record, break this record.' I looked at the stats and was like 'Holy cow.'
Haggerty averaged 1.86 hits a game to break the school record set by Austin Greer in 2009 when Notre Dame won a state title and played 30 games, two more than the 24-4 Bulldogs played this season. Before Greer, the record had stood since the 1980s, according to Graviett.
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His senior year was the end of a dramatic high school evolution for Haggerty. He will continue his baseball career next year when he plays at Mineral Area College.
He described himself as a 5-foot-2, 135 pound kid as a freshman who used his speed as much as his bat to reach base.
"We pushed him to be a bunter," Graviett said. "When he was up there as a freshman and sophomore, we're really working on bunting for a hit not realizing what he was going to develop into. If you've got speed from the left side, we're going to teach you to bunt for a hit up here. That's how we do it."
Still, his talent was obvious. He skipped the freshmen team and started on junior varsity as a freshman, then was the varsity team's starting right fielder as a sophomore.
"Sophomore year I was about 5-6 and now I'm about 5-11, 6-foot, 175-180 [pounds]," Haggerty said. "And I worked on my swing a lot. I used to swing like Ichiro, and I used to run out of the box and everything, but I don't do that anymore. I stay in and drive the ball."
Haggerty credited former Balls-n-Strikes instructor Matt Wagner, who also coached his Lids Missouri Bulls summer team for three years, with remaking his swing.
He hit .351 with 19 RBIs in the No. 2 hole for Notre Dame as a junior, but an impressive summer season allowed Graviett to readjust his expectations for Haggerty's senior season.
"I think it really wasn't until last summer with the Bulls," Graviett said. "I started talking to [Bulls coach] Todd Pennington and those guys. The summer he was having, the power. He was a good player as a junior but didn't possess a lot of power. He started to get that gap-to-gap, even home run [power]. He hit a lot of home runs last summer for them even though he didn't for us. Talking to those guys I really thought we had a chance to have something special. He really became a good singles hitter, bunt hitter, and you add that other stuff in there you have a chance to be really productive."
Haggerty's slugging percentage increased from .505 as a junior to .847 as a senior. He increased his homer total from one to five, his triple total from two to seven and his double total from eight to 14.
"I don't know," Haggerty reiterated when asked about his improvement. "I guess I just hit the ball well. I was seeing the ball well all year. I knew what pitches were coming, and my swing felt good for most of the year. Everything just worked out."
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Haggerty has an ability to read pitches early, determine what is coming and how he can hit it with authority.
"Two of the better ones I've coached are him and [Notre Dame senior] Luke Haines," Graviett said. "Two guys that it didn't really matter what the count was that they had this year. They were able to hit with two strikes, could stay back on good off-speed and pitches and, really, the thing they don't try to do is do too much.
"But, yeah, you've got to be able to recognize those pitches. That's really a God-given talent in my opinion that you can have. Them two, and especially Josh, possessed that."
Haggerty said he had an indication that he would have a good year when he hit three triples in a season-opening tournament.
"I was picking up pitches well, and I had good pitch selection all year," Haggerty said. "The ball honestly looked like a beach ball most of the year just coming in."
The skill to see pitches early and his easy-going attitude combined to create a player who was immune to the pressure of chasing records and being the best hitter on the best team in Southeast Missouri.
"I've been coaching for however many years," the veteran Graviett said. "It seems like the two guys that have the most success are the ones who are kind of laid back and just enjoy playing, don't get caught up in all the stuff and just one-at-bat-at-a-time type things. The other ones are the really, really competitive kids. [Notre Dame pitcher] Graham Ruopp kind of fits in that category -- just really, really ultra competitive. You've got to be one of the two, it seems like, to be successful, and they vary so much -- two different personalities. It's a weird combination, but that seems to be the two, as far as high school-wise, that have a lot of success. He's one that's laid back. Every at-bat's the same for him.
"He's the same whether it's leading off a game or the game-winning run on base. It doesn't matter."
Haggerty said that his father, Bobby Haggerty, who played football at Southeast Missouri State University and is a football assistant at Central, never wanted him to pay attention to statistics while serving as one of his coaches growing up. Instead, he learned to focus on one thing at a time.
"I just go out and play and play one game at a time," Haggerty said. "That's all I did really. I didn't think about what happened the day before or what was going to happen after. Whenever I got in I just played."
Notre Dame appeared in the Class 4 state quarterfinals for a second consecutive year, where it met three-time defending state champion Westminster. The Bulldogs lost 2-1 in a high-quality contest that ended with a Notre Dame player being thrown out at home.
That loss, while stinging, was easier for Haggerty to stomach than the previous year's 7-5 defeat, when a couple errors greatly impacted the game's outcome.
"I think it does because they actually beat us," Haggerty said. "We didn't beat ourselves. It makes it means a little bit more."
This year's game felt like a de facto state championship when it was played at Notre Dame.
"Oh yeah. For sure," Haggerty said. "Because they just went in and walked through in state."
Westminster, which the Bulldogs also played in the regular season, claimed the Class 4 state title for a fourth year in a row and was one of multiple eventual state champions Notre Dame faced.
"This is one of the top years I feel like we played competition-wise -- three state champions and the runner up in another class," Graviett said. "Just up and down played a lot of quality opponents all year long, which makes [Haggerty's accomplishments] even more phenomenal in my opinion."
Haggerty said he will head to MAC, a junior college in Park Hills, Missouri, with the goal to "figure all the little things out" and eventually play for a Division I college or university.
"I think he realizes now -- I think his goal is to end up playing Division I baseball somewhere, and realizes that he's got the tools to do it, he's just got to become a better baseball player to do that at that high level," Graviett said. "Having a dad that played college football and doing that stuff, I'm sure he's realizing the mental game is what he's got to master if he's going to reach his goal and become a Division I player."
Haggerty said one game that stood out to him the most from his senior season was the Bulldogs' 10-2 win over Jackson on April 16. He was 1 for 5 with three strikeouts in that contest.
"After that game I didn't have a game where I didn't have multi-hits," Haggerty said. "From April 17 to the end of the year, I didn't have a non-multi-hit game."
Of course, he didn't know exactly how he pulled off that feat -- or even that he had until someone told him.
"I didn't realize it was going on whenever it happened," he said.
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