7 August 1999
Wade Boggs got his long-cherished 3000th hit today. The previous
two days featured Tony Gwynn doing the same thing and Mark McGwire hitting his 500th home run; much pomp, circumstance,
and hype preceded and followed these doings -- Major League Baseball and its corporate partners are always all-too-ready to
spread a thick layer of schmaltz and shameless self promotion on any milestone event. Ask them about labor issues
or MLB's corporate-welfare jones or attendance problems, and all
you'll get is the verbal equivalent of a blank stare. Out of all
the predictable back-slappings and celebrations (and even Gwynn
got sick of it -- press conferences and ceremonies are Not
Baseball, and therefore of minor importance to him), the Boggs
thing was the only one to really interest me.
As a New Yorker, trained almost from birth to hate his pure-evil
Red Sox, I was embarrassingly unable to hate Boggs. I'd even
try to induce hatred by summoning the Rizzuto Memory -- of that
long-ago day in Fenway Park when some persistent,
potty-mouthed Bawstun hecklers nearly drove our beloved Phil Rizzuto out of the WPIX broadcast booth and into the stands,
ready to lay some smack-down, a turn of events akin to goading
the Dalai Lama into throwing chairs at your head.
The Rizzuto Memory didn't work vis-à-vis Boggs. There was just
too much to admire; he was a Hit Machine, lashing opposite-field
line drives almost at will when he was In That Zone. He was a
student of the game; it looked like he took his work more
seriously than most (he still works on his knuckleball, even
though he isn't a pitcher). He excelled for years in the minor
leagues
only to languish there, since the Sox wouldn't find a way to fit
him on their roster -- how can you hate an underdog? And in the
finest tradition of Baseball Superstition, he always ate
chicken on the day of the game. Even when Margo Adams went
public with their affair, one could attribute his adultery to
another great baseball tradition -- Boys Will Be Boys when
the workday's done. A Yankee fan, raised on the tales of
Curfew-Bustin' Last-Call Legends like Mickey Mantle and Billy
Martin (and the wife-swapping done by Fritz Peterson and Mike
Kekich), could relate to that.
It was much easier to like him when he signed with the
Yankees, but his last days in New York were rough on me. The
Yanks had Boggs and Don Mattingly (another favorite of mine) in
their infield, but neither one could produce offensively the way
a third-baseman and first-baseman traditionally should -- with
lots of homers and runs batted in; Mattingly's bad back made it
no longer possible, and it was never Boggs' MO, even in the best
of years, which was probably one reason why he spent so many
years in the minors. Many of the callers and hosts on WFAN were treating them -- and perhaps rightly so -- like they were
old nags, ready for the glue factory. They were a shadow of
their former selves, yes, but they were still excellent ball
players, IMHO. Everyone speculated on which free-agent signings
would replace them in the next season. Mattingly retired; the
unwanted-in-NYC Boggs signed with the expansion team in
Tampa, his hometown -- a good place to end one's career. Tino
Martinez and Charlie Hayes (and later Scott Brosius) took their
places. The reconstituted Yankees went on to win championships,
so I couldn't complain, could I?
I began to occasionally check the Tampa Bay boxscores to see how
Boggs did -- there were still hundreds of hits to go before
reaching the 3000 milestone, and he was out of the lineup on
occasion, due to injuries or just the need to give an old guy a
day off; he was now nearly as old as some of his teammates'
fathers. At some point I stopped checking, confident that he'd
come close to 3000, and the press would begin hyping the matter
-- which, a few weeks ago, they did. In the finest tradition.
Tonight, Boggs hit a two-run homer in the sixth inning against
Cleveland, his third hit of the game (a reminder of those In
That Zone days of frequent multi-hit games), and the 3000th of
his career. ESPN Radio re-ran DeWayne Staats' play-by-play
call in their every-twenty-minutes updates. The fact that #3000
came on a home run was historically significant -- Boggs is the
first player to reach that mark by hitting one. That's fitting,
in this New Day of the super-juiced ball and "Honey, I Shrunk
the Strike Zone" (as was the 15-10 final score) -- Boggs was the
poster boy for the original modern-day juiced ball in 1987,
when he hit the studly (for him) sum of twenty homers. You could
end barroom debates back then by invoking that stat:
"Whaddya mean da bawl iz joosed?"
"I got two words faw ya: Wade Boggs. Got two maw: twenny homiz."
The guy in the stands who caught the home-run ball is an old
Yanks fan, now living in Tampa; he said he'd return the ball to
Boggs, rather than, say, head over to QVC or Sotheby's and
"give" it to the highest bidder. I suspect it will end up on
exhibit at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where I could visit
it on occasion. People will make money off of that baseball --
that guy in
the stands will get a finder's fee of various goodies from the
Tampa Bay organization; Boggs gets his normal handsome paycheck
anyway, but I suspect there will also be QVC-like Boggs
"memorabilia" (i.e. junk) sold to "commemorate" #3000.
Cooperstown is one big tourist trap itself, and this
week's events (McGwire and Gwynn included) makes for one more
item for someone's pilgrimage. This day is really all the
pilgrimage I need -- a trip through a memory or two.
And so I raise a toast to Wade Boggs, albeit only a mixture of
apple juice and iced herbal tea. It may be more appropriate to
raise a drumstick or some Buffalo Wings, but I've already
chowed down on a Reuben and salad. These things can't be
planned in advance, can they?
"In baseball, you don't know nothin'." -- Yogi Berra