Boggs Is a Real Homer

By STEVE SPRINGER

Aug. 8, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Realistic hitters don’t start thinking about 3,000 hits until they get to 2,500. The highly optimistic might start envisioning 3,000 upon reaching 2,000, the dreamers when they get to 1,000.

But the dream of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ Wade Boggs began even before that. Even before his first major league hit. Boggs started thinking about 3,000 hits when he was 12 years old.

That shouldn’t really be a surprise. He started swinging a bat when he was 18 months old.

And he knew, even when he was showing some power at Plant High in Tampa, Fla., that his smooth stroke would produce far more line drives than home runs. He knew he looked a lot more like Pete Rose at the plate than Harmon Killebrew.

So Boggs began to perfect a style that has brought him down a long and winding road, from Tampa to minor league stops such as Elmira, N.Y., and Bristol, Conn., to Boston, New York and back to the Tampa area for his 3,000th hit.

Boggs reached the milestone in untypical style Saturday night when he hit a two-run home run against Chris Haney in the sixth inning of the Devil Rays’ 15-10 loss to the Cleveland Indians before 39,512 at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Boggs’ second homer of the season made him the first to reach 3,000 with a home run. It was his third hit of the game, after two run-scoring singles against Charles Nagy.

One day after Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres reached the 3,000-hit plateau and two days after Mark McGwire got his 500th homer, Boggs became the 22nd player to join the 3,000 club, which has served as a ticket to the Hall of Fame for every member who is eligible.

Boggs’ hitting achievements were notable even before he signed his first professional contract.

He supposedly had 26 hits in his final 32 at-bats as a high school senior although there are no official records to verify that.

It’s not too hard to believe.

In 1981, Boggs hit .335 to win the International League batting title, stepped up to the big league level with the Red Sox the next season and got even better.

In six of his first seven big league seasons, Boggs exceeded that .335 mark, with averages of .349, .361, .368, .357, .363 and .366.

Along the way, in a career that has stretched over 18 major league seasons, Boggs, the only player in this century to have seven consecutive 200-hit seasons, has won five batting titles and, he hopes, a continuing respect for men such as himself and Gywnn who don’t have to dent scoreboards to leave their mark in the game.

“I had one style and took it to the max,” Boggs said. “I said if Pete Rose can do it [this way], so can I, but there were always cynics. I was always told I’d never hit third in the big leagues or be the type player who could play third base in the big leagues because I didn’t hit home runs. I’d hit .365 with 200 hits and I’m still trying to figure out why I was a failure.”

Boggs is certainly not a failure in the eyes of Arizona Diamondback left-hander Randy Johnson, who knows a good hitter when he faces one. Johnson may be a dominating pitcher in the minds of many, but, in Johnson’s mind, it is Boggs, and Gwynn, Boggs’ National League counterpart, who often become the dominant force in their duels with the pitcher.

“Boggs, like Gwynn, is a disciplined hitter,” Johnson said. “He knows the strike zone. It is important to get ahead with a hitter like that. When I do, I don’t throw strikes after that. Instead, I hope that he will come out of his mechanics a little bit and try to do something he wouldn’t normally do. But he has the ability, like Gwynn, to continually foul off pitches he is not looking for until he gets the pitch he wants, to wait for the pitcher to make a mistake.”

Johnson thinks the best thing that ever happened to the left-handed hitting Boggs was to play in Boston, where the Green Monster wall in Fenway Park, towering over a short left field, is a temptation few if any hitters can pass up.

“Boggs hits to left a lot more because of Fenway,” Johnson said. “It’s a lot easier going with the pitch than trying to pull it. I think Wade’s swing developed because he played the majority of his games in Fenway.”

Boggs spent 11 seasons with Boston, which included a losing trip to the World Series in 1986, and five years with the New York Yankees, which included a World Series championship in 1996.

There were certainly some problems along the way. Boggs had an infamous affair with a mistress, Margo Adams, which overshadowed his hitting prowess for a while, especially after he told reporters he thought he suffered from a sexual addiction.

Boggs was once accused by Don Mattingly of being so obsessed with his own statistics that he benched himself on at least two occasions at the end of a season to win a batting title because of injuries Mattingly felt weren’t that serious.

There is no question Boggs is obsessed with numbers, all sorts of numbers. He can recall exactly when he got his first major league hit--April 26, 1982, against Rich Dotson of the Chicago White Sox--how many foul balls he has hit to a certain part of the ballpark, and even how many times he has eaten chicken in his career.

Which brings us to another Boggs’ fixation--superstitions. Many players follow set routines before a game, believing that it brings them luck. So Boggs’ insistence on eating chicken before taking the field is not that unusual. What is unusual is that the strict chicken diet is only one of 60 to 70 superstitions he is concerned with every day.

No attention to detail is too demanding for Boggs if it allows him to ward off the unseen, but undeniable, demons of bad fortune.

For example, Boggs doesn’t use the same type of sanitary socks as teammates. And to make sure they don’t get mixed up by clubhouse personnel, Boggs ties the socks together in a distinctive way after the game.

But neither the Devil Rays nor his previous employers in Boston and New York have cared what he did with his socks. Short of eating chicken in the on-deck circle, every team Boggs has played for has been happy to go along with his many superstitions as long as they were accompanied by the trademark line drives off his bat.

“You don’t have anybody out there now even resembling Boggs and Gwynn,” Johnson said. “The two of them are the last of a dying breed. It’s more of a power game now. But I’d much rather face a lineup of power hitters than to face disciplined hitters like those two.”

But, Boggs insists, it gets tougher and tougher to maintain that reputation for discipline and consistency. At 41 he says he has had to struggle to reach his cherished 3,000 hits.

“I’ve had to learn a whole new generation of pitchers,” Boggs said. “This has given me a difficult time since the guys I knew have all retired now. I’m trying to learn about guys 23, 24, 25 years old, how their pitches work, how the catchers set up for them. I’m trying to get comfortable with a new generation.

“It’s like going from the PGA to the senior tour. The swing is the same, but the courses change.”

Not Boggs. He has been on the same course since he was 12 years old.

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Two for the Show

Years that players have reached 3,000 hits in the same season:

1914: Honus Wagner and Nap Lajoie

1925: Tris Speaker and Eddie Collins

1970: Hank Aaron and Willie Mays

1979: Lou Brock and Carl Yastrzemski

1992: Robin Yount and George Brett

1999: Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs

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