Wade Boggs: Crazy- but Great

By Ryan McGowan

Memo to Red Sox Nation: You can now breathe a sweet sigh of relief.  Wade Boggs will be wearing a Boston cap on his Hall of Fame plaque.
One of my favorite January subplots is the annual, idiotic speculation over which cap so-and-so will wear on their Hall of Fame plaque.  When Carlton Fisk was inducted in 2000, you would have thought that God was showering Boston with naked women and free beer from the sky with all the hoopla that surrounded the revelation that Pudge would have a capital “B” engraved on his plaque in Cooperstown.  Reggie Jackson’s plaque is adorned with an interlocking “NY”, angering fans of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim who felt that his performance in the original “Naked Gun” (the immortal line, “I must… kill… the Queen…”) was a more enduring contribution to baseball than, say, hitting three home runs in the 1977 World Series for the Yankees.  Such is the absurdity of these debates.

The truth is that no one gives a rat’s ass what cap is on your Hall of Fame plaque.  Does anyone care whether Jimmie Foxx wears a Red Sox or an A’s cap?  If Willie Mays wears a New York Giants or San Francisco Giants cap?  Does anyone even know?  Jen and I went to Cooperstown in October, right before the ALCS, and it was a great trip.  It’s a place every real baseball fan should visit, and probably the only reason that Central New York State still exists as a remote outpost of civilization.  I loved the place, but I don’t ever recall thinking, “Wow, wouldn’t it have been great if Tom Seaver was wearing a Red Sox cap, for that one year that he played for us in `86?”  The insignia on the cap isn’t really something I ever noticed, or cared the least about, on the plaques.

Boggs himself brought on some of this debate when he signed a contract with his hometown team, the AL East powerhouse Tampa Bay Devil Rays.  As a condition to his contract, it was agreed that he would request that he wear a Devil Rays cap in his Hall of Fame plaque.  The Hall, probably rightfully so, changed its rules, so that players will not sign such contracts and undermine the spirit of the rules of induction.  Sorry, D-Rays fans, but you’ll have to wait for Rocco Baldelli or Tanyon Sturtze to be inducted before you can get your cap in Cooperstown.

It is precisely this kind of controversy, though, for which Wade Boggs will be remembered in Boston.  In eleven seasons at Fenway, Boggs won five batting titles, with seven straight seasons of 200+ hits.  His lifetime average is .328, and he had four seasons in which he hit above .360.  If he had broken into the majors today, Billy Beane, J.P. Ricciardi, and Theo Epstein would brawl in an all-out human cockfight for the rights to sign this on-base and run production machine.

Still, Boggs has a dubious reputation in Boston lore.  Similar to some of the criticism leveled against Nomar Garciaparra, Boggs has often been derided as a “selfish” player, because of his nature as a singles-and-doubles, Punch-and-Judy hitter (only two double-digit home run seasons in 18 years).  Both of them had bizarrely obsessive rituals: Nomar with his toe-tapping and glove-zipping, Boggs with his game-day diet and on-the-clock wind sprints at precisely 7:17 PM.  Oddly, Nomar was often criticized for his lack of patience at the plate and his tendency to hack away at the first pitch he saw.  Boggs was the consummate batter with the “good eye”, twice leading the league in walks, often with a mind-numbing approach to “getting a good pitch to hit.”  He was Mark Bellhorn without the strikeouts and the god-awful she-mullet.  He was Ted Williams without the power.  The man was a professional hitter.  

But if you were going to grab the average Red Sox fan off the streets (assuming we could pry him off his barstool and remove the six layers of “2004 World Champions” paraphernalia covering his entire body surface), and play word association with “Wade Boggs,” chances are you would hear one of two things: “Margo Adams,” or “Chicken.”  More cynical fans might say, “Sold his soul to the Yankees for a ring,” while more sadistic ones might answer,  “Fell out of a moving car in spring training.”  A few might even say “Great hitter.”  But it probably won’t be the first thing out of their mouths.

Is there a dislike of Boggs among the general fandom?  Probably not; most real fans can appreciate his considerable skills as a hitter, and his penchant for playing hard every night.  Still, for some reason, Boggs never quite clicked with the Boston fans in the same way as did Yaz, Lynn, Fisk, Pedro, Evans, Ortiz, etc.  He seemed to be an enigma, if not quite a “mystery wrapped in a Twinkie”, he was a mystery wrapped in a coat of pine tar.  He woke up at the same time every day.  He took batting practice at 5:17 every day.  He ate chicken before every game.  His obsessions were undoubtedly responsible for his success–he took exactly 150 ground balls every day, and while this didn’t make him an elite fielder, it certainly made him an adequate third baseman for years.  He drew the Hebrew word “Chai” (meaning “life”) in the batter’s box before each at-bat.  

This guy was nuttier than Steve the Pirate from “Dodgeball.”  Much like Nomar, Boggs was never able to connect with the fans on a truly personal level.  It just wasn’t in their personalities.  No one played harder than these two guys, but in the end, most fans saw them as selfish, brooding malcontents who couldn’t leave the Sox fast enough.  Moving on was probably the best thing in both situations, except that going to the Yanks got Boggs a ring, while moving to the Cubs simply paved for the way for the Sox to win it all.  Still, both were truly great players, possibly the best at their positions in Red Sox history, and deserve to be remembered as such.

Maybe when more time passes, and the memories of Boggs’ legendary antics in Winter Haven spring training and the ridiculous image of him on a horse have faded, the numbers that he put up will speak for themselves.  His career was about twenty years off from being truly appreciated, as he would have been a god had he played in the current OBP-obsessed era.  Still, it is good to see him get his due in the Hall of Fame.  No matter what they ultimately engrave on his bronze cap, Boggs was one of the best.  On the day of his induction, everyone should eat a chicken dinner and raise a glass of his favorite brew, a frosty Bud Lite, to one of the all-time under-appreciated Red Sox players, #26.

Now we just have to work on getting Jim Rice inducted.  But that’s for another time.