Boggs Is In…
And I don’t give a crap. Wade Boggs was voted into the Hall of Fame with the 3rd highest vote total in history, topped only by Nolan Ryan and George Brett. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he deserves to be there, but I REALLY don’t care.
I don’t hate or even dislike Boggs, I just really couldn’t care less about him one way or the other.
This guy has all the stats necessary to get him into “the Hall”.
3,010 hits
328 career batting average
7 consecutive seasons of over 200 hits
12 time All-Star
2 gold gloves
5 batting titles
He was an on base machine; averaging 94 walks a season and compiling a lifetime 415 On Base Percentage during a time when OBP wasn’t really given the weight it is now.
He was the best 2-strike hitter in the game at the time, and possibly the best ever. I swear pitchers were afraid to get 2 strikes on him, because they knew they would have to throw another 10 pitches to him and watch him foul them off until he got one he liked. He just wore pitchers out.
He worked as hard, if not harder, than anyone else in the game on his swing. He also worked his ass off to turn himself from a decent fielder into a gold glove fielder.
He’s probably one of the top 3 all around 3rd baseman ever. Who was better? Mike Schmidt, Brooks Robinson, and that’s about it.
You would think that having a guy like that on your team and then, not just losing him, but losing him to your most despised enemy, would be heartbreaking. But for me at least, it wasn’t. I just didn’t care.
His numbers were impressive, and his work ethic was impressive, but to me it seemed like everything he did, he did for himself and no one else.
If I were starting my own baseball team, Wade Boggs would not be playing 3rd base for me. Give me Bill Mueller at 3rd over Boggs any day. Or Tim Naehring (when he wasn’t hurt), or John Valentin.
Boggs is in the Hall of Fame because of his stats and that’s it. He was not a clutch player, not much of a team player, and didn’t provide any kind of spark when he played. He never took any chances. I don’t ever remember Wade Boggs coming up with a gigantic game/momentum-changing hit. I’m sure he must have gotten some, but I don’t remember them.
Not like I remember Trot Nixon hitting that 2-run homer into the bleachers in Yankee Stadium in the 8th inning off Clemens in 2000, to break a 0-0 tie and give the Sox and Pedro the win.
Or Bill Mueller’s 2-run shot into the Sox bullpen off Riviera this past season to give the Sox the 10-9 win over the Yanks in one of the most thrilling games I’ve ever witnessed at Fenway Park.
Or even David McCarty’s game winning home run off J.J. Putz in the 14th inning at Fenway to send the Faithful home happy.
Hell, I even remember Bob Zupcic’s game winning grand slam back in “92”.
Red Sox history is laced with tons of those kinds of hits, involving all kinds of Sox names, some great, some not so great, but none of them named Boggs.
Of the 3,010 hits, I only remember one of them. That was number 3,000. And the only reason I remember it is because it was plastered all over TV when he finally got it. I remember how ironic it was that it was a home run (he only managed 118 of them, despite the fact that he would blast them out in all directions during BP), and how when he got to home plate he got down on his knees and kissed it before being mobbed by his Tampa Bay teammates. And I remember how they all LOOKED really excited for him but I wondered if they really were, and I knew that I wasn’t excited and that I really didn’t care.
He also never did any of the little things.
Runner on 2nd, less than 2 outs, he never tried to pull the ball to the right side or lift it deep enough into the air to get the runner over. Even if the runner was on 3rd and it was an RBI situation he didn’t try to do it! For him it seems like it was always about the base hit, nothing else mattered.
He just went to the plate, waited for his pitch, and then drove it the other way. Or, if he didn’t get his pitch, he took the walk and left it up to the next guy.
It was as if, early on in his career, he figured out what he had, and knew he was never going to be the kind of impact player you need to be to achieve greatness, so he was going to get there the other way. And that way was to pile up so many Goddam base hits that it would HAVE to make him great.
Well he did it; he slapped his way into the Hall of Fame. Good for him. He got what he wanted. I get the feeling he would have traded that World Championship with the Yankees for this trip to Cooperstown if he had to. It just always seemed to me that it was all about him and nothing else.
Gees, for a guy I really don’t care about I sure had a lot to say about him.
I don’t hate or even dislike Boggs, I just really couldn’t care less about him one way or the other.
This guy has all the stats necessary to get him into “the Hall”.
3,010 hits
328 career batting average
7 consecutive seasons of over 200 hits
12 time All-Star
2 gold gloves
5 batting titles
He was an on base machine; averaging 94 walks a season and compiling a lifetime 415 On Base Percentage during a time when OBP wasn’t really given the weight it is now.
He was the best 2-strike hitter in the game at the time, and possibly the best ever. I swear pitchers were afraid to get 2 strikes on him, because they knew they would have to throw another 10 pitches to him and watch him foul them off until he got one he liked. He just wore pitchers out.
He worked as hard, if not harder, than anyone else in the game on his swing. He also worked his ass off to turn himself from a decent fielder into a gold glove fielder.
He’s probably one of the top 3 all around 3rd baseman ever. Who was better? Mike Schmidt, Brooks Robinson, and that’s about it.
You would think that having a guy like that on your team and then, not just losing him, but losing him to your most despised enemy, would be heartbreaking. But for me at least, it wasn’t. I just didn’t care.
His numbers were impressive, and his work ethic was impressive, but to me it seemed like everything he did, he did for himself and no one else.
If I were starting my own baseball team, Wade Boggs would not be playing 3rd base for me. Give me Bill Mueller at 3rd over Boggs any day. Or Tim Naehring (when he wasn’t hurt), or John Valentin.
Boggs is in the Hall of Fame because of his stats and that’s it. He was not a clutch player, not much of a team player, and didn’t provide any kind of spark when he played. He never took any chances. I don’t ever remember Wade Boggs coming up with a gigantic game/momentum-changing hit. I’m sure he must have gotten some, but I don’t remember them.
Not like I remember Trot Nixon hitting that 2-run homer into the bleachers in Yankee Stadium in the 8th inning off Clemens in 2000, to break a 0-0 tie and give the Sox and Pedro the win.
Or Bill Mueller’s 2-run shot into the Sox bullpen off Riviera this past season to give the Sox the 10-9 win over the Yanks in one of the most thrilling games I’ve ever witnessed at Fenway Park.
Or even David McCarty’s game winning home run off J.J. Putz in the 14th inning at Fenway to send the Faithful home happy.
Hell, I even remember Bob Zupcic’s game winning grand slam back in “92”.
Red Sox history is laced with tons of those kinds of hits, involving all kinds of Sox names, some great, some not so great, but none of them named Boggs.
Of the 3,010 hits, I only remember one of them. That was number 3,000. And the only reason I remember it is because it was plastered all over TV when he finally got it. I remember how ironic it was that it was a home run (he only managed 118 of them, despite the fact that he would blast them out in all directions during BP), and how when he got to home plate he got down on his knees and kissed it before being mobbed by his Tampa Bay teammates. And I remember how they all LOOKED really excited for him but I wondered if they really were, and I knew that I wasn’t excited and that I really didn’t care.
He also never did any of the little things.
Runner on 2nd, less than 2 outs, he never tried to pull the ball to the right side or lift it deep enough into the air to get the runner over. Even if the runner was on 3rd and it was an RBI situation he didn’t try to do it! For him it seems like it was always about the base hit, nothing else mattered.
He just went to the plate, waited for his pitch, and then drove it the other way. Or, if he didn’t get his pitch, he took the walk and left it up to the next guy.
It was as if, early on in his career, he figured out what he had, and knew he was never going to be the kind of impact player you need to be to achieve greatness, so he was going to get there the other way. And that way was to pile up so many Goddam base hits that it would HAVE to make him great.
Well he did it; he slapped his way into the Hall of Fame. Good for him. He got what he wanted. I get the feeling he would have traded that World Championship with the Yankees for this trip to Cooperstown if he had to. It just always seemed to me that it was all about him and nothing else.
Gees, for a guy I really don’t care about I sure had a lot to say about him.
posted by Bob at 1/05/2005 01:58:00 PM
1 Comments:
Over the past day or two I've been reading and hearing a lot about how Boggs was ahead of his time with his 415 lifetime OBP and the way he took and fouled off so many pitches and wore pitchers out.
In these days of "moneyball" with OBP and pitches per at bat having so much more value now, people are saying that Boggs would have fit right in and guys like Theo, who highly value these kinds of numbers, would have payed him a lot of money to do what he did.
To me, it's more than that. Obviously those numbers are important and Theo has proven it with the lineups he's put together over the past couple of seasons. You can see it when you watch these hitters go through pitching staffs. But there is more to it than that.
Boggs was one dimensional. He certainly did those things better than anyone else during his time, and better than most hitters even now, but that was ALL he did.
Boggs usually hit somewhere between 1-3 in the order so I'll compare him to the top 3 guys from last season in Boston; Damon, Bellhorn, and Manny. I don't have pitches per at bat info (that's a relatively new stat that can be found in Bill James' yearly book which I haven't picked up yet, but intend to soon), but I know that they were all higher than the league average. Their OBP's were 380, 378, and 380 respectively. Not quite as high as Boggs 415, but again much higher than the league average.
When you look at Boggs that was all you got.
Johnny Damon drove in 94 runs from the leadoff spot last season. NINETY FOUR BATTING FIRST! The most RBI's Boggs ever had was 89 and his season average was 67. When you get 200 hits a year your bound to drive in some runs whether you want to or not.
Mark Bellhorn drove in 82 with only 138 hits. I will admit that in order to drive in runs, these guys, as well as Boggs, had to rely on the bottom part of the order getting on base, and the guys at the bottom of this order were all much better at getting on base than the guys Boggs had in front of him. But when you're picking up over 200 hits in a season, you've gotta drive in more runs than that.
Plus, both of these guys were willing, and able, to do the little things. Sure the Sox didn't play a lot of "small ball", but these guys could move runners over, or get them in from 3rd when it was needed. Boggs didn't do it although he was certainly capable of it.
It's not really fair to compare him with Manny so I won't. I mentioned him because Boggs spent some time batting 3rd, but you really just can't compare the two.
Anyway, my point here is that as important as seeing a lot of pitches and getting on base a lot is these days, there is so much more to the moneyball player that Theo and others like so much. Getting clutch hits and doing the "little things" being the to biggest examples. Also being a team player and actually caring about your teammates and winning.
I didn't see these other things in Boggs when he played and although he probably would have fit in well in the batting order, I'll still take the other guys.
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