Wade Boggs - Baseball Legacy

Baseball Legacy

His career paralleled that of Tony Gwynn, who also debuted in the National League in 1982. Boggs and Gwynn were the premier contact hitters in an era dominated by home runs. They both won multiple batting titles—Boggs's five and Gwynn's eight—and each won four straight to join Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Rod Carew as the only players to do so. Gwynn and Boggs each hit over .350 in four straight seasons, the only players to do so since 1931. They joined Lou Brock and Rod Carew as the only players whose careers ended after World War II who finished with 3,000 hits and fewer than 160 home runs.

While not unique among non-pitchers, Boggs also recorded a few innings pitching at the Major League level. His main pitch was a knuckleball, which he used 16 times (along with one fastball) in one shutout inning for the Yankees against the Anaheim Angels in a 1997 game.

His own style included mental preparedness techniques, which consisted in visualizing four at-bats each evening before a game and imagining himself successfully getting four hits.

As of June 8, 1986, over the course of the previous 162 games (equivalent to a full season, though across two seasons) Boggs was hitting .400, with 254 hits in 635 at-bats.

In 1987, Boggs – who was up for a new contract following the season – hit 24 home runs, the most in any year of his career.

On April 7, 2000 his #12 was retired by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. It is the only number to have been issued only once by the Rays. Although he has not had his number retired by the Boston Red Sox, he was inducted into the team's Hall of Fame in 2005.

Boggs was known for his superstitions. He ate chicken before every game (Jim Rice once called Boggs "chicken man"), woke up at the same time every day, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 5:17, and ran sprints at 7:17. His route to and from his position in the field beat a path to the home dugout. He drew the Hebrew word "Chai", meaning "life", in the batter's box before each at-bat, though he is not Jewish. He asked Fenway Park public address announcer Sherm Feller not to say his uniform number when he introduced him because Boggs once broke out of a slump on a day when Feller forgot to announce his number.

Boggs is rumored to have once drunk 60-70 beers during a cross country flight, a story which originally received national attention via a sign in the background of an episode of ESPN's College Gameday before a Pittsburgh vs Virginia Tech football game. Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon questioned Boggs on an episode of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption. According to Boggs "it was nothing to be proud of" and "let's just say it was a few Miller Lites."