The Outsports Power 100 features out LGBTQ people in American sports with power and influence, including Chris Hagstrom-Jones at No. 100. For our extensive coverage of the 2024 Outsports Power 100, and to see all of the honorees, click here. And be sure to share on social media with #Outsports100.
Working in a minor league baseball front office often means filling jobs that go way beyond roster construction or ticket sales.
For Chris Hagstrom-Jones, his job as assistant general manager of the South Bend Cubs has provided him an opportunity to show off the kind of skills rarely seen on the business side of baseball.
“I’m known for doing the worm on the dugouts,” said Hagstrom-Jones, part of the 2024 Outsports Power 100. “To get people hyped up, I’ve become known as ‘The Worm Guy.’ So I’ll jump up on our dugout and during a heightened moment, I’ll kind of flop around.”
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Suffice it to say, you don’t usually get to witness Theo Epstein helping fans spell out “Hot To Go.”
It’s what Hagstrom-Jones loves about his job. It finds him spending some parts of his day designing marketing plans or assembling social media posts, and other parts donning the mascot costume in the community or dressing as Captain America for Marvel Night.
As his LinkedIn bio describes it, he’s a “web slinger of fun” and a “part time superhero.”
“When you’re at the major league level, there’s a lot of people you have to go through to make things happen and to do things,” he said. “Whereas at the minor league level, there’s our president, and vice president and then myself. And [we’re] like, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ ‘OK, go for it!’ There’s just so much freedom to be creative and to have fun and it’s phenomenal.”
Hagstrom-Jones has been a professional jack-of-all-trades for South Bend since 2014. It’s been an ideal career path for someone who fell in love with baseball at a young age in the suburbs of Chicago.
His first experiences on the diamond came when he was 8 years old with a program called Buddy Baseball, where he would provide support and help young players with developmental disabilities learn the game.
He also played sports until a football injury during his first year at Stevenson High School in Illinois convinced him to look into broadcasting. He got a show on the school radio station and did play-by-play for their football games.
During that same time, another aspect of his life began to crystallize. Hagstrom-Jones dated girls, but as the years passed, he also began to realize that he was different from most of his peers.
“Part of stepping away from competing was also figuring out who I was in high school. I could’ve maybe kept playing, but I didn’t know who I was at the time. So maybe there was some fear there as well.”
As he was going through the experience of understanding who he really was, Hagstrom-Jones remained in the closet. Yet “the mask was slowly chipping away” as he got involved in his high school theater program and attended club events for students questioning their sexuality.
During winter break of his first year at Southern Illinois University, Hagstrom-Jones came out as gay to his family. A child of divorced parents, he remembered telling his father, “Dad, you always said the person that I found, you would be happy” and being particularly worried to come out to his mother.
What he found from both of them was total love and support.
Since then, Hagstrom-Jones has found that he just has to show up as his true self in the sports industry. “I never came out to people in sports saying ‘Hey, I’m Chris. I’m gay.’ I just…I was me.”
While studying at SIU, he found himself falling in love with the behind-the-scenes aspects of sports production. This led him to an internship with the independent league Southern Illinois Miners baseball team, and eventually a full-time job in Class-A South Bend.
But before he left for Indiana to take the next step in his professional journey, Hagstrom-Jones got to spend one more special day at the Miners’ home ballpark when he married his partner Zach, a musician whose family hailed from Southern Illinois, on the field.
Their wedding featured an arch decorated with Wrigley Field-esque ivy over the pitcher’s mound, scorecards as place settings, and a cake with baseball-stitched hearts.
“It’s the most traditional non-traditional marriage that you can think of for two gay men,” he said.
One year into his new job, South Bend switched affiliation to Hagstrom-Jones’ beloved Chicago Cubs. He helped oversee the team’s rebranding, earned two championship rings for South Bend’s league titles in 2019 and 2022, and he was able to say he was part of the Cubs organization during their history-altering World Series championship in 2016.
Thanks to his job, he got to meet a few transcendent baseball legends.
When South Bend hosted the 2019 Midwest League All Star Game, Hagstrom-Jones oversaw a meet and greet with Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg. A few months later, on a visit to Wrigley Field, he again crossed paths with Sandberg who greeted him by name.
“Hey, Chris!” Sandberg said. “South Bend, right? Good to see you!”
Well that was cool.
“I was fan-girling out hardcore internally,” he said, “I got recognized by Ryne Sandberg!”
Even with all of those incredible baseball moments, the biggest highlight of Hagstrom-Jones’ South Bend tenure is still on the horizon.
“We’re celebrating our 10-year wedding anniversary in October. And we’re celebrating it at the stadium club of Four Winds Field,” he said, “So now I get to celebrate again at another baseball field.”
It’s enough to make him dance on top of the dugout.
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