HOUSTON — Had Astros relievers John Hudek and Todd Jones not gotten injured in the 1990s, Billy Wagner may have never had the chance to blow 100 mph fastballs past hitters for 16 seasons. We might never have seen him enter the field in the ninth inning to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” which, for the record, he began using as his walk-up song before Mariano Rivera.
As fate would have it — and is so often the case in baseball — one player’s bad luck can lead to another player’s fortune. That’s a story Wagner knows very well. His career was as unlikely as it was dominating, taking him from a tough upbringing on the farms of Virginia to the Major Leagues and into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where he will be enshrined July 27 in Cooperstown, N.Y., with Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, Dave Parker and Dick Allen.