Boggs’ Personal Life Finally Calms Down, but So Does His Bat

This spring smacked of serenity, a veritable Valhalla compared to the consternation of last year. Who would have thought such tranquility would serve as a prelude to the unraveling of Wade Boggs’ cocoon?

If it were going to happen, if Wade Boggs were to appear merely mortal while striking a baseball, last year would have been the year, right? Margo Adams and all that. Trade talk ad nauseum. A mediocre team that allowed the spotlight to shine ever more brightly on Boggs and his own private, and at times sordid, world.

And yet, when the ink dried on last year’s numbers, there he was at .330. It was his second-lowest average in eight years, yet still brought him to 1990 with a career average of .352 and seven consecutive years with 200 or more hits.

Now, when the eye scans the batting leaders in the newspaper, the void is immediately recognizable. No Boggs? Not unless the view reaches to the .280s. Wade Anthony Boggs, the master batsman of the ‘80s, is hitting .284, the lowest he has been in his major-league career at this point in a season.

“I just have to ride with it, just keep swinging and don’t let it get me down emotionally,” Boggs said.

He certainly doesn’t seem down, but this is a person who has elevated preserving his privacy to a religious pitch. He says it doesn’t get him down, but there are moments around the batting cage, particularly at early batting practice, when the stands are empty and the other players sparse, when he treats himself as Ralph Kramden treated Alice.

Publicly, he maintains he is swinging the bat better this year than he has in the past eight. He says there is nothing wrong with his mechanics, that even at .284 he is a better technical hitter than when he hit .368 in 1985.

“I really haven’t had that many lucky hits this year,” Boggs said. “A lot of players don’t believe in luck and a lot of players go to the other extreme. I’m just hitting the ball hard at people. I made a living for eight years hitting the ball in the holes and hitting the ball in the gaps. Now I’m hitting line drives that outfielders are running down. I just classify this year as a year when I’ll be in every highlight film in baseball.”

He is referring to the inordinate number of fine defensive plays that have been made on him this year. In the series last weekend in Baltimore, center fielder Mike Devereaux made several--including two in one game. It has been like that all year.

But Boggs concedes that his left hand, injured May 7 in a collision at third with Seattle’s Ken Griffey Jr., impedes him certain days--to the point he was scheduled to have a cortisone shot today.

“There are good days and bad,” he said. “The only thing that would take care of it would be to stop taking ground balls and batting practice, and I’m not going to do that.”

But Boggs is not one to make excuses. He won’t even buy into a theory among teammates that he has been stymied by the different variations of defenses thrown at him this season. “They’ve all tried everything in the world before, and I’ve still hit .360 or what have you,” he said. “Defenses don’t bother me.”

But they have this year. “Sometimes when you’re not going good, you look out there and it looks like they have 35 guys playing out there,” Mike Greenwell said.

The Twins, for instance, play Gary Gaetti almost 30 feet off the third-base line to cut down Boggs’ opportunities to hit one through the hole on the left side.

“He’s a little bit changed in that he doesn’t hit it into the hole as much, it seems to me,” Sox Manager Joe Morgan said. “He used to hit one in the hole and then they’d move over. And then he’d hit one up the middle, hitting ‘em where they weren’t. He’d drive them wacky.”

Boggs, who turned 32 last weekend, has had a couple of stretches this season when he has looked uncharacteristically frustrated--popping out to the infield, swinging at first pitches and swinging and missing. Two weeks ago, when he struck out against the Indians by swinging through three pitches, a buzz went through the stands.

Still, he claims he is not frustrated. The mere question provokes a Zenlike response that leads one to believe Boggs either has lost the edge that made him so great or finds his performance so painful he only can discuss it in the abstract.

“There’s a master plan for everything, I’m a firm believer in that,” he said. “It was in the cards for me to win five batting titles in the ‘80s, and I’m hitting .280 in the ‘90s. You just have to be thankful that you’ve got health in your family. The moment when the game begins engulfing your life is really when you have a problem. You just have to sit back and say, ‘Hey, I went to the plate four times and hit the ball pretty good and just didn’t get anything to show for it,’ and go on from there.”

Teammates don’t doubt him for a second. “He’s the victim of his own success in a lot of ways,” said Greenwell, who has had his own problems this season at the plate. “Hitting is a big, long life cycle and Wade knows how to do it. He may not hit .350 again this year. But he will hit .350 again.”