Wade Boggs 1991 Fleer Ultra

On July 16, 2019 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

A few weeks ago I received a letter in the mail from the BCB. It had been a long time since I got anything from him (or her), so I ripped open the envelope and out dropped a Wade Boggs card. Since it's been so long since I received a BCB letter, I forgot to write down the return address for this card. 

Wade Boggs reminds me that you can think that you know a lot about baseball or other stuff, but at the end of the day, no one really knows anything. And what you do know, at times, can make you sound incredibly dumb. 

Boggs was a true Boston star when baseball meant everything in the world to me. I didn't like him. At all. I hated getting his cards in wax packs, even though I knew that he was good. I told everyone that he was a decent hitter but there was always a caveat. "Sure Boggs will get you a few hits in the first four innings but where is he when it really matters?" "Yeah Boggs will hit over .350, but where's the power?" "I know that Boggs gets on base, but he has no speed. He goes from station to station to station. It takes four hits to drive him in! Why do you lead this guy off, he's not Vince Coleman!" 

I'm pretty sure that I wasn't alone. There was a very loud group of Boggs haters in Boston. Many came from the city's papers and a lot called on the talk shows. For a guy who was so great, he got no love in his home park. 

As the years crawled by, I started to really think that Wade Boggs out-and-out sucked. And that's because I was too dumb to appreciate what it was like to watch baseball before Boggs showed up. When I was a kid and I played Red Sox General Manager, first I'd have a big lunch (just like real GM Lou Gorman) then I'd pretend to call any team and beg them to take Boggs off my hands.

"Hello Seattle? Sure, I'l trade you Wade Boggs straight up for Jim Presley!"

"Yes, I know that Gary Gaetti was a key member of your World Series team, Minnesota. Take Boggs AND Jeff Sellers for him! Please! I'm begging you!"

Mike Schu (the Phillies moved Mike Schmidt across the diamond to make room for him, he must be good!), Terry Pendleton (dude played third base and was fast -- he really wasn't that fast, TBH), Mike Pagliarulo (Pags and Don Mattingly were my version of Maris and Mantle) and Carney Lansford (why couldn't the Sox have traded Boggs to Oakland for Tony Armas!), were all players I held in higher regard than Wade Boggs. 

I wasn't being a troll, I wasn't looking at numbers in a weird new way, I wasn't even being a contrarian; I just thought that Wade Boggs blew. I thought that all of his numbers were hollow (remember that time that he struck out in the ninth inning against Dennis Eckersely of Game 1 of the 1988 ALCS, WTF man?) or that he was selfish (he hit 27 homers in 1987, that proves that he can hit with power if he wanted to!) or that Fenway helped him (if it wasn't for the wall, all those doubles would be outs). But the fact was, I was just never advanced enough to get Wade Boggs*.

* This is not like how I don't get Bruce Springsteen. I get Bruce Springsteen, I get why he's popular and good and why people love him. I'm not one of those people. I mean, I like him just fine and he checks off a lot of boxes for me, he's just not my cup of tea. I don't own anything by the man and probably never will. But I don't feel about Springsteen the way that I do about Billy Joel or Rush. Those dudes are terrible. It's the same thing with Radiohead and Pink Floyd. I know that they're good, I just don't dig them. I can't tell you why. 

Back to Boggs. This sounds absolutely stupid, but I never appreciated what he brought to the table; which was a 338/428/462 slash over 11 seasons with the Sox, only striking out 470 times in 7200 plate appearances. Not only that but he worked his ass off to be one of the best defensive third basemen in the league. With or without the Wall, he was a doubles machine, cranking 420+ over his Sox career and was patient as hell walking over 1000 times. 

But I didn't want that. I wanted a third baseman who hit bombs. Home runs. If you played either of the corners or the outfield and you didn't hit at least 20 dingers, you weren't worth a greasy shit to me. If you asked me in 1989, I'd say Wade Boggs hit like a second baseman, just a bunch of singles and dinky doubles (this was patently untrue, BTW, Boggs rocketed balls off the wall, absolute peas). And yeah I was kind of right, Boggs did hit like a second baseman if that person's name was Rogers Hornsby. 

After Boggs moved on to the Yankees (HA! He's your problem now New York) and had a bunch of good years, I had to watch the likes of Scott Cooper and Wilton Veras and Tim Neahring and Chris Donnels try to play third. And it was brutal. They either couldn't hit, couldn't field, couldn't stay healthy or sometimes all three. 

At some point in the mid 90s, I realized that I missed Wade fucking Boggs. I missed his insanity, he once tried to will himself invisible when someone pulled a knife on him (his titanic drinking exploits didn't come out until much much later). I missed his tales of OCD, chicken every day, drawing the Hebrew symbol Chai in the dirt before every at bat, taking ground balls at the same time. I even missed the lurid tales of Margo Adams*. 

* Well maybe not. When this story broke, I was the world's youngest prude. "Ballplayers fool around on their wives with other women? Land sakes! I need my fainting couch!" I was so appalled at Boggs for ruining the Red Sox' good name (and this was maybe a year or two after the team was involved in some racist shenanigans at the Winter Haven Florida Elks club) that I wanted him gone. "Gary Gaetti? We'd be lucky to get Steve Lombardozzi and Al Newman for him." I kept a clipped newspaper article of every trade that Boggs was ever rumored to be in and read it over and over and over. There was one particular great deal for the Sox: Boggs to Atlanta for Ron Gant and Tom Glavine. But none ever came to pass. 

Here's the thing, when I was having these obviously idiotic thoughts about a sure-fire, first ballot Hall of Famer, I thought myself as a particularly smart and nuanced baseball fan. Not only did I think that understood the game on the field, but I thought that I knew what the front office looked for off the field too. 

And I wasn't shy about it either, I had a weekly column in the school paper where I'd write this insanity for the entirety of my high school to read. I'm glad I don't have those AHS Weeklys any more, I'd probably use them as kindling to light myself on fire. 

The point isn't to beat myself up over wrong headedness from 30 years ago, it's more to say: we're all wrong about certain things. We can get something stuck in our head and just obsess about it over and over and over again until it becomes their truth. I was wrong America, Wade Boggs is and was pretty god damn good at baseball.