Our eighth installment of our ongoing Legend Series features Bill Spiers, who played multiple positions during his MLB Career.\u00a0 Spiers was also a two-sport player at Clemson, where he played baseball and football. He was a member of the coaching staff with Clemson Football from 2016 until his retirement at the end of the 2023 season.<\/p>\n
Q:\u00a0 What\u2019s a better atmosphere?\u00a0 Playoff baseball at the Astrodome back in the day or a Saturday Night in Death Valley?<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 Come on now!\u00a0 That\u2019s pretty tough!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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I have vivid memories of the Padres series.\u00a0 We had the best record in baseball that year with Randy Johnson and we were supposed to go to the World Series, but they wound up beating us.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had a game winning hit and some 64,000 fans sent me goosebumps and chills.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s that night game in Death Valley, where I\u2019m there and it\u2019s Deshaun Watson against Lamar Jackson the first year I started coaching.\u00a0 I had never run down the hill in a night game as a coach, and I turned the corner on the bus and you get off that thing, you feel the electricity.\u00a0 I had the same exact feeling that I had that moment when I was a player back in the Dome.\u00a0 They were very comparable.\u00a0 Both of them gave me chills.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Q:\u00a0 You mentioned Randy Johnson, what a roll he was on going 10-1 that summer down the stretch.\u00a0 What was it like finding out you were about to land one of the best pitchers in baseball for the stretch run?\u00a0<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 The rumor got out when we were in Pittsburgh.\u00a0 The trade deadline was coming up and we heard it and we all stayed up like it was Christmas Eve or something, just waiting with anticipation.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t hardly sleep.\u00a0 We already had a good team, and then the thought of adding him just made everybody giddy.<\/p>\n
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Q:\u00a0 In a 5 year stretch, you found a way to appear in 628 games for the Astros and you weren\u2019t always considered an everyday starter at a set position.\u00a0 How did you do it?<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 I thrived being a utility player.\u00a0 I learned how to play all the positions, and I tell kids today that\u2019s an important thing to learn to do.\u00a0 That enabled me to be valuable to the team because I knew I could make a contribution.\u00a0 That is honestly what drove me. \u00a0 I didn\u2019t play a ton of outfield, but when I played there, I wanted to act like I had been out there forever, so I worked at it.\u00a0 I was proud that I could play every infield position.\u00a0 The staff had confidence that they could plug me in anywhere.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Q:\u00a0 Who was the toughest pitcher you ever faced?<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 Pat Hentgen without a doubt.\u00a0 I was O-for-my-career against him, and he had this cutter and I could never pick up the ball coming out of his hand and he just owned me.\u00a0 He just ate me up. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Q:\u00a0 What did you like about playing for Larry Dierker?<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 He was so good with pitchers.\u00a0 He appreciated letting the starting pitchers grind it out and learn how to finish things.\u00a0 Larry wasn\u2019t quick to pull guys.\u00a0 He was a player\u2019s manager.\u00a0 We knew that he didn\u2019t have a strict discipline regiment, he just expected us to be ready to play, and we were.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our eighth installment of our ongoing Legend Series features Bill Spiers, who played multiple positions during his MLB…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2389],"tags":[42,5,86538,4551,139,54,3211,10498,4,51806,40324,86539,18916,18,86540],"class_list":{"0":"post-684180","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston-astros","8":"tag-astros","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-bill-spiers","11":"tag-clemson-football","12":"tag-houston","13":"tag-houston-astros","14":"tag-houstonastros","15":"tag-mandatory-credit","16":"tag-mlb","17":"tag-national-league-division","18":"tag-playoff-baseball","19":"tag-playoff-series-game","20":"tag-randy-johnson","21":"tag-san-diego-padres","22":"tag-stephen-dunn"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116477106838513300","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}