Fenway, Boggs a Chorus

You would think the configuration of Fenway Park in Boston would send a class left-handed batter screaming into the night. It would look to him like the structural equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, a nightmare in steel and concrete.

There isn’t even a geometric figure to describe its eccentricity. The way the expanses of right and center field are cut into by the left field fence make it look like a balloon with a corset in it.

When Ted Williams first came up to the Boston Red Sox, they had only one left-handed hitter, Roger (Doc) Cramer. Cramer came to the rookie Williams with a word of advice. “Kid,” he said, “don’t try to pull the ball to hit home runs here. It can’t be done.” Cramer knew whereof he spoke. He had come to the Red Sox from friendlier Philadelphia’s ballpark with modest power. But he had hit only one home run in five years at Boston.

Williams didn’t listen to him, of course, and proceeded to hit 31 home runs that season.

But that was Williams, the greatest striker of the baseball for his time. For the merely mortal left-handed hitter, the right field seats were 380 feet away. Most major league home runs are in the 330-350-foot range, some less.

You would think a great left-handed hitter would need smelling salts the first look he got at Fenway’s outposts.

For Wade Boggs, it was like his first sighting of the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon. It caught his breath. He got weak in the knees, a dreamy look in his eyes and he looked like a guy about to sing under a balcony.

You know how some guys at the school dance actually opt for the girl with the buck teeth and the thick glasses? She looks just gorgeous to them. They step right over the Marilyn Monroe lookalikes to get at them.

That’s the way Wade Boggs was. He got tongue-tied just looking at that old bawd, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Every place he looked he saw money. He wouldn’t change a thing.

You would think only a right-handed hitter could love Fenway. After all, that left field wall is only 315 feet away, and it cuts directly across into center field without veering out. It’s so close they have to put a 30-foot net atop it to keep balls from breaking windows across the street. It was built in the days when ballparks were constructed to accommodate the streets around them, not vice versa.

The wall not only doesn’t scare Boggs, he embraces it. He loves every wart and wrinkle on her. They could make beautiful music together, he was sure.

Boggs plays the wall the way Heifetz played Mozart or Chopin an etude. He can play Stars And Stripes Forever on it if you give him enough hanging curveballs.

Other lefties may curse and fume at the lopsided dimensions of the ballpark, but Wade just incorporates them in his game plan. Wade plays the hand he’s dealt.

Some years ago, Wade Boggs went to arbitration in a sometime bitter dispute with the ball club. Boggs didn’t really want more money. He just wanted to stay around his soulmate, the ballpark. He wanted a five-year, no-trade deal. He just didn’t want a divorce.

It would be like asking Toscanini to leave his orchestra. “I love this ballpark. I love Boston,” Boggs explained.

Why wouldn’t he? In 1985, Wade Boggs tapped out 240 hits, the most in the American League since 1928 (Heinie Manush, 241) and the most in the big leagues since 1930 (Bill Terry, 254). His lifetime batting average going into this season was an astounding .352. That’s Ty Cobb territory. In fact, the only batters ahead of Boggs in the game are Cobb, Rogers Hornsby and Shoeless Joe Jackson, pretty heady company. He is supposed to be a ping hitter, but he has rapped out 335 doubles, many of them off the left field wall, and he once hit 24 homers in a season, just to show he could.

But, mostly, he just wears out left field. Around the league it used to be said Wade Boggs was the only hitter in the league who only needed one strike. Some seasons, he got over 50% of his hits with two strikes on him. “His only real weakness is called strike three,” his former manager, John MacNamara, once observed. Boggs “umpires” himself out of an at-bat at times. He also walks 100 times a year. So, he also umpires his way on base.

Most kids are still learning to walk at 18 months. Wade Boggs was learning to hit. He has a picture of himself at bat at 18 months. “Ted Williams once saw a picture of me as a baby, and he said I had perfect form,” Boggs says proudly.

Gifted with 20/12 vision (he sees at 20 feet what others need to be 12 feet to make out) and sound mechanics at the plate (his stance hasn’t changed since 18 months), Boggs is the nearest thing to a hitting machine in the game. It is a measure of his prowess that a broadcaster on the Fourth of July telecast as he came to bat noted Boggs was batting “a mere .300.” Batting .300 would be cause enough for most players in the league to throw a party and bronze the ball. With Boggs, they want to send him to the hospital for testing.

He gets on base a phenomenal 300 times a year. The Red Sox cannot win the pennant without him. If other people see Fenway as an ugly old battle-ax who hates left-handers, Boggs sees her as Michelle Pfeiffer. “I always hit the ball to left field anyway,” he said contentedly the other day as he sat in the Red Sox locker room munching a chicken sandwich. “This place was built for me.”