ESPN's Darren Rovell Has Always Been Like This, Apparently

Prolific tweeting cornball Darren Rovell has a pretty cute story about Jeff Bagwell coming to his bar mitzvah on ESPN today.

Rovell says he was an avid baseball nerd as a kid, reading Baseball America and Minor League Baseball Card Monthly, which to be honest, I didn’t know existed until today. For his bar mitzvah, his dad, who had a “career in the medical device business” (it all makes sense now, right?), reached out to the Astros public relations to see if any players could attend, as the team would be playing against the Mets that night.

The Astros provided Jeff Bagwell—who you might have heard was finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday—for “$500 and a round trip car ride from the hotel in New York City to the party and directly to Shea Stadium for the game that night.”

It was Bagwell’s rookie season, and he was in a room full of teenage boys who were Mets fans, so no one really gave a shit about him, per Rovell. That’s when the story became peak Rovell:

I recall explaining to them that Bagwell was a great young rookie and, since we all dealt in baseball card currency back then, it was smart to get his autograph now.

It’s perfect. It’s honestly perfect, and actually pretty comforting to have at least some evidence that Rovell’s role as sports marketing’s biggest cheerleader is not entirely a put-on, but just the way he is.

Congrats to Bagwell, who may one day do a blog about going to the bar mitzvah of a kid who’d eventually win a Clio Award.