ALL-STAR GAME : Baseball / Ross Newhan : No Longer Bogged Down, Wade Belts One

Pete Rose has been something of a blessing for Wade Boggs.

Baseball’s investigation into the alleged gambling activities of the Cincinnati Red manager has helped people forget Boggs and his affair with Margo Adams.

Comedian Jay Leno, at the All-Star gala Monday night at Disneyland, poked fun at Rose (“all things considered I’d rather give my money to a savings and loan”) but didn’t tell one joke relating to Boggs’ affair.

Maybe Leno spotted Boggs and his wife, Debbie, seated near the stage, and opted for good taste.

Debbie was sitting behind the plate at Anaheim Stadium Tuesday night, part of a crowd of 64,036 attending the 60th All-Star game.

The last time Boggs was in Anaheim with the Boston Red Sox was in mid-May. He spent almost half a day giving a deposition to Adams’ attorney, heard Margo taunts from the crowd and seemed distracted and out of sync as he went 2 for 11 in a three-game series.

Tuesday night was considerably more pleasant, as much fun as Disneyland had been the night before.

Has Rose replaced him as an object of fan ridicule.

“I don’t know about that, but I didn’t hear one negative thing tonight,” Boggs said. “Of course, I don’t pay attention to it or let it bother me when I do.”

Boggs didn’t give the crowd much chance Tuesday. He hit the sixth pitch Rick Reuschel threw him over the left-center field fence for his third All-Star hit in 10 at-bats and first home run, tying a game his American League team won, 5-3.

As he finished circling the bases, he pointed toward the seats behind the plate.

“I was pointing toward my wife,” Boggs said. “That was for her. That was special.”

He said it with a touch of emotion, as if maybe he was wiping his Orange County slate clean.

The Big A is not far from the hotel where he first met Adams about five years ago.

Now it’s as if he never knows what to expect here, when the next reminder is likely to appear.

Did the home run address those demons?

“It helped,” Boggs said. “It helped more than a single up the middle would have. At the start of the game I was walking around like an expectant father in a maternity ward. The home run calmed me down. It relaxed me more than I’ve been in a while.”

Boggs has won four consecutive American League batting titles and five in the last six years. He has 200 or more hits in six consecutive seasons, but home runs are not his specialty. He hit 24 in 1987, but has since hit only seven in 896 regular-season at-bats or one every 128.

He had arrived in Anaheim with a .322 average after a struggling start but had hit only two homers in 312 at-bats.

Bo Jackson opened the bottom of the first by hitting Reuschel’s second pitch onto the green canvas in dead center, a drive estimated at 448 feet.

“I didn’t want to hit a dribbler up the middle after that,” Boggs said. “That would have been a real letdown, but a home run was the last thing on my mind.”

Actually, Boggs--who didn’t know if he would be able to play here until he received a cortisone injection Sunday for an ailing shoulder--had given Jackson a word of encouragement just before Bo stepped to the plate.

“I said to him, ‘all right, let’s do it,’ ” Boggs said. “I don’t know if he took it in the context of back-to-back homers, but I only meant ‘let’s get something going.’ ”

The National League had scored twice in the first.

“All I wanted to do was see the ball and hit it hard,” Boggs said. “I was concerned about the twilight, but Reuschel’s pitches were coming out of the green backdrop and I saw them better than I saw some of the pitches later in the game. I worked the count to 3-and-2 and got a fastball up over the plate.”

Boggs hit it an estimated 398 feet, which doesn’t compare with Bo’s drive, but is a lot farther than Boggs normally hits them.

“I hit a couple in that same area during batting practice yesterday, but it’s definitely not my game,” he said.

Red Sox Manager Joe Morgan, an All-Star coach, smiled and said: “He took a home run swing at that ball. It was up, and he whaled into it.”

Would Morgan like to see him do it more often?

“At times, with men on base, I wouldn’t mind it,” he said. “But I don’t want to take away from what he does best.”

What Boggs does best, of course, is slash singles and doubles and win batting titles.

“He did it last year when all the distraction started, and he probably will do it again,” Morgan said. “He’s hitting .330 (.322) and he probably will hit .360 again. Whatever it takes, he is capable of doing it.”

All of that is another reason the home run meant so much to Boggs.

“I would have been happy with a single,” he said. “But I get a lot of singles. A home run in an All-Star game is something I’ll never forget, definitely a highlight of my career. I wish I could bottle the feeling and carry it with me.”

Where? San Francisco? Los Angeles? Atlanta? Chicago’s Wrigley Field?

Rumors of a trade persist, inflamed, in fact, by the three-year, $7.3-million contract Boggs signed with the Red Sox recently. The contract is devoid of a no-trade clause and there is less of a risk if a club deals for Boggs because he can’t leave as a free agent when the season ends.

Boggs shook his head and said he treats the rumors with the same disregard that he displays toward taunts from the stands.

The Red Sox may not have forgiven him for the internal problems and embarrassments he created with the Adams’ affair, but the fans seemed to have lost interest, the taunts becoming less frequent. Maybe he can thank Pete Rose for that. Maybe it’s merely the march of time.