Hello again! Before we get into the subject at hand, I just wanted to explain my recent absence from the site: I dropped off the grid for a bit, to take advantage of a positive turn regarding some non-baseball-related work. While news on that is still up in the air, I wanted to let the long-time readers of the BJOL know that I’m back now, and I should be posting at a regular clip for a while.
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What’s the most underrated ‘peak’ in baseball history?
There are a dozen good answers for this question. And it’s a question that demands other questions. How are we defining ‘peak’? How long is it? Is a peak three seasons? Five seasons? Ten? What metric are we using? Do we want to use WAR or Win Shares, or do we prefer MVP votes, or Black Ink? And what do we mean by underrated, anyway? Are we looking for a pretty good player who nobody really noticed (Gene Tenace, for instance), or do we want someone who was legitimately great (someone like Arky Vaughan)?
It’s a question with a lot of variables, but for my money, it’s an easy one to answer: the most underrated peak in baseball belonged to Wade Boggs.
You can start with a decade. A decade is a pretty long duration of time. Wade Boggs, for the first decade of his major league career, posted a .345 batting average. His on-base percentage was .425.
I think of Boggs, in those peak years, as a ‘century’ player….he did things by centuries. A typical Wade Boggs season would have these markers:
- 200 hits (1983-1989, seven years in a row.)
- 100 runs scored (1983-1989, ditto)
- 100 walks (1986-1989)
- .300 average (1983-1991…every year)
- .400 on-base percentage (1983-1989, 1991)
- 50 extra-base hits (1983, 1985-1991)
That’s looking over just the first ten years of Boggs' career. If we prefer our peaks in shorter formats, let me humbly introduce Wade Boggs’ average stat line for the five-year run from 1985 to 1989, when he was almost certainly the best player in baseball:
113 Runs, 213 Hits, 45 2B, 5 3B, 10 HR, 108 Walks, .357 BA .454 OBP, .496 SLG
Boggs won four batting titles over those five seasons. He led the American League in on-base percentage every single season. Actually, he led both leagues in on-base percentage, every single year.
Maybe you prefer advanced metrics. Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR says that seasons over 8.0 are ‘MVP-level’ performances. This seems accurate: the four players who posted a WAR above 8.0 in 2016 (Harper, Trout, Goldy, and Donaldson) finished 1-2 in the AL and NL MVP votes. Correlation established.
Here are Boggs’ WAR over that half-decade:
|
Year
|
WAR
|
|
1985
|
9.1
|
|
1986
|
8.0
|
|
1987
|
8.3
|
|
1988
|
8.2
|
|
1989
|
8.4
|
He was playing at an MVP-level every year. That’s not to say that he deserved the MVP every year: every year there was someone like Brett or Clemens or Mattingly or Rickey having great seasons ….but Boggs was one of the absolute best players in the game.
That’s rare, to be so reliably great. Mike Schmidt never had five straight 8+ WAR seasons. Neither did Eddie Mathews. Or George Brett. Or Chipper Jones. Actually, Chipper Jones never had one eight-win season by Baseball-Reference’s WAR. Boggs had five in a row.
And he wasn’t just doing it with the bat: Boggs was an underrated defensive player, a competent and intelligent third-baseman who is rated by Total Zone runs as being the 3rd-best defensive player in the AL. He led the league’s 3B’s in putouts three times, double plays four times, and assists once, notching a couple late-career Gold Gloves when he was with the Yankees.
Boggs was a great player, playing on a good team in a big media market. He led the league in one category that newspapers of the 1980’s tended to track in their daily sports pages (batting average), and he did pretty well in a few categories they counted up on Sunday (hits, runs, doubles, walks).
Despite this, his peak was never truly appreciated, not in his prime and not since. Boggs never won an MVP Award, and he never came close to winning an MVP. Care to guess how many times he got a first-place vote for the AL MVP?
Never. Not once. No writer with a vote ever picked Wade Boggs as the best player in the American League. He didn’t get a first-place vote in 1988, when he led the league in runs, doubles, walks, batting average, and on-base percentage. He didn’t get one when he hit .368 and collected 240 hits in 1985. He didn’t get a vote when he decided to hit for power, and added 24 homers to a .363 batting average in 1987.
This is startling, because Wade Boggs’s excellence as a player was a peak kind of excellence. He wasn’t a steady compiler of numbers, like Eddie Murray or Rafael Palmiero. He was a player who racked up a ton of black ink in his big years, leading his league in stats that show up in the newspaper.
So what happened? How come Boggs was so forgotten?
Let’s back track a little bit. No one ever believed that Wade Boggs would be a good major league player. The Red Sox sure as hell didn’t. Let me recount Wade Boggs’ minor-league track record for you:
1976 – As an eighteen-year old drafted out of high school, Boggs posted a .263 batting average for Elmira, the Red Sox A- team.
1977 – Boggs hits .332 for Single-A Winston-Salem. In 499 plate appearances, he strikes out just 22 times. His on-base percentage was .423.
1978 – A 20-year old Boggs hits Double-A, and scuffles. By ‘scuffles’ I mean he hits .311 with a .400 on-base percentage over 109 games.
1979 – The Red Sox want to make sure that Boggs can really hit that Double-A pitching. He bats .325 with a .420 on-base percentage.
1980 – The Sox move Boggs up to Triple-A Pawtucket. He does exactly what he’s always done: posts a .306 average with a .396 on-base percentage.
1981 – Like they did in Double-A, Boston wants to really make sure Boggs can really hack the Triple-A pitchers, so he gets another full year in Triple-A. He hits .335, with an on-base percentage of .437. He is twenty-three years old.
1982 – The Red Sox call Boggs up to the majors, only to leave him on the bench for April and May, only giving him a full-time job mid-way thru June, where he spells Dave Stapleton and Carney Lansford at first and third. He does exactly what he did in the minors: he bats .349 and posts an on-base percentage of .406. This later number is particularly telling, as his teammate Dwight Evans leads the AL in that category, with a .402 mark. As a rookie spelling time at first and third, Wade Boggs was better than the best on-base guy in the league.
This history gets to the general perception of Wade Boggs, which is that he was a one-dimensional player. He was a one-dimensional player: as a not-so-gifted defender in those early years, Boggs’ only real skill was his ability to post staggeringly high batting averages, and elite on-base percentages. He didn’t make outs. That’s all he did. That’s all he was.
Unfortunately, he came into baseball during an era of an almost ridiculous diversity of skills. You had slick-fielding shortstops and burning-fast base-stealers. You had sluggardly sluggers and batters who flirted with .400. Almost all of the stars of the era – Brett and Schmidt and Rickey and Murphy and Dawson – had multiple dimensions of skills. They could hit for power and average. They slugged and played great defense. They stole bases and hit homers. They won Gold Gloves and batting crowns.
In this realm, Boggs’ almost maniacal obsession with getting on base seemed like too narrow an obsession. Even his National League rival, the equally obsessive Tony Gwynn, was a Gold Glove outfielder who was fast enough to steal 56 bases in a single year. Not Boggs: all he cared about was reaching first.
I came of age as a baseball fan in Boggs’ prime, and I remember reading a lot of articles in the Boston Globe that were critical of Boggs’ approach as a player. He was ‘just’ a single’s hitter (a criticism that casually ignored that he was the most prolific doubles-hitters of his generation). He took walks when the Sox needed hits. He cared only about his stats. He was too precious about his batting average, too fixated on the batting title.
That last criticism reflects the eternal paradox of baseball: it is a team game, yet the central combat is an individual act. A batter stands alone in the box: his teammates cannot help him.
Boggs won those battles. For that first, late-starting decade of his career, Boggs was better than everyone else in baseball at beating the pitcher. For his obsession with that, he endured a steady stream of criticism for all that he wasn’t: he wasn’t a power hitter, or a fast runner, or a flashy and brilliant defensive player. He wasn’t a good quote, and he wasn’t particularly likeable. Growing up around Boston, I don’t remember anyone ever saying that their favorite player was Wade Boggs.
I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s a matter of timing. Would Wade Boggs have been a brighter star in the eras that followed? Would his discipline and high batting averages have allowed him to stand out more in the beefed up steroid era? Would we love him now, in our current epoch of high strikeouts and holy worship to the shrine of getting on base?
I don’t know that he would be. Wade Boggs was an obsessive, in the mold of Ted Williams or Rogers Hornsby. Obsessives are hard to love: they tend to be inward, isolated by their fixations. Wade Boggs was famous for eating chicken before every meal, a detail that was treated as a quirky dimension of his personality. That’s a generous read, but I don’t know that it’s accurate: if I had to guess I’d say that Boggs’ demand for chicken was one of the ways he managed his obsession: eating chicken ensured that that was one less thing he had to worry about every day. He wasn’t obsessed with chicken…I’d bet a silver dollar that Wade Boggs didn’t give a damn about chicken…he just didn’t want to have to think about what to eat every day before the game. He wanted that decision made, so that he could focus on the important work.
I do this; I’m like this. In my own life, I’m constantly trying to free myself from secondary distractions, so that I can better focus on my primary goals. I’m not nearly as disciplined as Boggs was: I’m a marginal obsessive, capable of maintaining single efforts for brief stretches. But I recognize the personality, and its costs. I have a few friends who have been similarly myopic at moments in their lives, friends who are (or were) monastically focused on specific pursuits. Boggs was like that, I think.
It’s not sustainable, of course. Obsession is a way to order a chaotic and random world, and eventually chaos cracks through the order. What is most astonishing about Wade Boggs is that he was able to maintain his specific order for so long, before the cracks started to show. He reached a kind of genius as a hitter, and he maintained it for the better part of a decade, ignoring the steady stream of demands that he do something different, something else. He spent too long in the minor leagues, honing his singular talent and waiting for the Red Sox to finally notice it, and give him a chance. He kept at it, when someone else might’ve tried something different. He never veered. He didn’t quit.
This dedication never received the attention it deserved in its time, and it’s unlikely that we will come back to it in retrospect. The great joy of sports is that they occur in present time, unscripted plays staged with successive casts that change every time the clock resets, every time the first pitch is thrown. We won’t come back to Boggs’ singular genius, any more than we’ll come back to a full appreciation of Arky Vaughan’s career.
What I’ll remember most is a single image of Boggs, from his 1989 Score baseball card. The picture shows him the plate, bat lowered hand, his body crouched in his familiar stance. The photograph is shot from third-base, and it’s one of the rare action shots where the baseball is in picture, held aloft on invisible strings. The catcher’s glove is shown, the baseball is a moment away from it. Boggs isn’t in mid-swing, about to slice a late double towards left. The pitch is already past him: it has already happened, and Boggs is simply following its flight to the catcher’s mitt. His eyes are focused on it: the moment holds a sense that he is still trying to glean from the rotation of the laces or the last break of the pitch some iota of information, some elemental detail that he can store with all the other information he’s accumulated in the duty shelves of the mind. He is trying to see everything in that moment, everything past and everything that will come.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.