Wade Boggs doesn’t watch much baseball anymore.
The game he once mastered doesn’t look like he remembers it. New rules and new approaches? He’s not into it.
“I enjoy aspects of the game. But for me, all the new rules? I’m not a fan,” said Boggs, who won five batting titles with the Red Sox. “When you have a ghost runner on in the 10th inning for extra innings and you lose the game, I think they’ve missed the boat on that.”
But it’s more than the recent tinkerings. Boggs built a Hall of Fame career hitting singles and doubles, taking walks and getting on base. He only hit double-digit home runs twice in a season. He doesn’t like the game’s fixation on power and advanced statistics.
“It’s crazy how the sabermetrics has taken over the game, trying to make it cool, but it just doesn’t fit,” he said. “I think they wanted to make it more interesting for the younger generation kids to where they could tabulate numbers and say, ‘Ooh, that’s cool,’ and launch angle and various things like this. So it makes watching a baseball game a math equation.
“The announcers start throwing numbers at you – ‘He had 107 exit velocity with a 37% launch angle. And his home run was at 93 degrees.’ Nobody wants to hear that,” Boggs continued. “He hit a bomb. And he hit it hard. That’s plain enough for the game. Don’t reinvent the wheel when it’s not flat.”
After the book and movie “Moneyball” brought analytics further into the mainstream, Boggs’ esteem as a player was actually raised. His willingness to take a walk and ability to get on base were more valued after his career than when he played.
“It wasn’t fashionable for a third baseman to be an on-base guy,” Boggs said. “They were more home run hitters, the Mike Schmidt type of player. And so I made it fashionable that you can get on base, score runs and help the team in that sense.”
How would he fare today?
“I’d walk about 300 times because I wouldn’t swing at the high pitch,” he said.
But he felt like the evolution of advanced stats didn’t appreciate players like him.
Today’s hitters do swing at the high pitch. A lot. It’s part of why he doesn’t tune in as much.
“Guys swing at that pitch above the letters and letter high and they can’t catch up to it. That’s the reason that they strike out as much as they do. But every once in a while they run into one. When you have more strikeouts than base hits in a month, there’s a problem in the game,” he said. “It’s just difficult to watch at times.”
Boggs will occasionally watch Red Sox games when they’re on TV in Florida. He likes what he’s seen from Masataka Yoshida, who, like Boggs, controls the strike zone and rarely strikes out.
“Just seen him a couple games and he’s able to use the wall going the other way. So that’s gonna benefit him, without a doubt, in games at home,” said Boggs, who was interested to see how Yoshida would adjust as opposing teams saw him for the second and third times.
“I just think they’re gonna try to find out what he can’t hit and then, if they do find out that he has a hole or a weakness, they’ll exploit it,” Boggs said. “A guy like (Luis Arraez) in Miami and Yoshida that don’t strike out very often, it’s hard to find a weakness in their swing. Guys still have to throw the ball over the plate to get ‘em out. And when they do, they’re gonna make contact.”
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