COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Of all the words uttered by Craig Biggio during his induction speech at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, his brief mention of Sachem should have caught a few Long Islanders by surprise.
The Long Island native out of Kings Park, N.Y. paid tribute to Marty Hassenfuss, his coach on the Sachem Athletics, a Connie Mack team from the area.
“My first chance to get noticed by schools and scouts was when I played for a guy on Long Island named Marty Hasenfuss,” he said.
The Athletics won Connie Mack World Series titles in 1978, 1979 and 1980 and was a youth baseball power in the area that gathered talented players from central Suffolk County.
Biggio, who was also a star on the gridiron in high school, won the Hansen Award as the top football player in Suffolk County in 1983. After staring as a catcher at Seton Hall, Biggio was drafted by the Astros in 1987, made his debut with Houston in 1988 and spent the next 20 years in the big leagues.
He is just the second Long Island native after Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski to be inducted to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Yastrzemski actually has a connection to the Sachem area as well. Long before Sachem was known as Sachem, Yaz, who grew up in Bridgehampton, N.Y., used to play on a team sponsored by his father’s potato farm. They would travel west occasionally and found themselves playing against the Hawkins Nine, a team formed around the Lake Ronkonkoma area that still resonates today because of the oft traveled road known as Hawkins Avenue.
On a parallel Sachem note, Biggio also faced alum Neal Heaton a number of times in big league games as Heaton pitched in the National League for many years.
–Words by Chris R. Vaccaro