There was never any doubt that he’d get in. In fact, the most suspenseful thing concerning Wade Boggs and the Hall of Fame was whether he’ll will himself invisible again if Margo Adams shows up at the induction ceremony.

Wade Boggs was a lot of things when he played baseball for the Boston Red Sox but there are two things he wasn’t – 1) dull and 2) anyone’s favorite player.

Boggs belongs in Cooperstown. Forget about the statistics, his obsession with and compilation of which are the reasons he’s going to be enshrined this summer. He belongs for so many other reasons, perhaps not the least of which is that he’s one of the unique athletes of his generation.

I never saw anyone with the same bat control until Ichiro came along. Every time he was up to bat, one got the sense that he could do whatever he wanted with the right pitch, that he’d either take or foul off as many pitches as he had to until he got the one he wanted.

And yet this is what made him so maddening to watch for many Red Sox fans. To them, Boggs never hit for enough power, never hit behind the runner in key situations, never put the team ahead of his own individual numbers.

Is it possible to have strong feelings about someone, yet still feel indifferent about them? If so, that’s the way I felt about Wade Boggs.

I loved watching him hit. Every at bat was like a clinic. And I admired the fact that he worked hard to become a very good defensive third baseman. But some things really bugged me about him, too, and if you were a Sox fan in the 1980s, they probably bugged you, too.

Why, I wanted to know, was Wade Boggs one of the fastest runners from home to first in all of baseball yet one of the slowest from first to third or second to home? How is it that the same man who hit tape-measure home runs like Mickey Mantle in batting practice would hit for less power than Jody Reed when it counted? And why did I have to hear about his chicken fetish every time the Red Sox were on national TV?

At first, these things made me very angry, but then a series of unfortunate events arose and I started to feel a little sorry for him. First his mother died in a horrific traffic accident during the 1986 season. Then the whole Margo Adams scandal erupted and there was Boggs, with his wife, Debbie, sitting next to him, copping to a sex addiction.

From there, the stories started to take a more humorous, but also more pathetic, turn. My personal favorite was the time he was thrown out of his Jeep and got run over while he and Debbie were pulling out of a restaurant parking lot. Wade proudly showed off his tread-marked arm in front of the Boston press and dubbed himself “the white Irving Fryar.” Another time, he told the writers he had willed himself invisible to escape a knife-wielding assailant outside a bar.

Though his creativity was to be admired, I could never fully embrace Boggs, which is why it didn’t bother me when he left for the Yankees and why I don’t care whether he wears a Sox cap or one of Margo’s stockings into the Hall. He deserved to get in, deserved to get in on the first ballot, too. It just won’t have the same sentimental value for me or a lot of Red Sox fans of my generation as when Carl Yastrzemski or Carlton Fisk made it, even though we’re not old enough to remember their entire careers like we remember Boggs’.

You know who really seems to have the passion of Red Sox Nation behind them now, though? Jim Rice. Is it me, or has there been more talk about Rice not making it than Boggs making it this past week?

I’m torn on big Jim Ed. I liked him because he was the only Red Sox who made the All-Star team every year when I was a kid. Like Boggs, he worked hard to become a better fielder than he was when he first came up, though he was hardly Gold Glove caliber. Every year, you knew he’d hit .300, smack 30-40 homers, and play the Green Monster expertly. He may not have played long enough to reach the magical 400 home run or 3,000 hit milestones, but he finished in the top five in MVP voting six times. If a so-so slugger like Tony Perez can make Cooperstown, Jim Rice should be in, too.

But I can’t kid myself, either. Opposing pitchers may have feared Rice, but so did Red Sox fans when it came to hitting with men on base. From about 1980 on, there was nobody we wanted to see hitting in a clutch situation less than Jim Rice. And I mean nobody. Especially if there was someone on first and less than two out. Remember the jokes? What’s Jim Rice’s license plate number? 6-4-3. He finished first in double plays every year from 1982 to 1985. He grounded into 131 of them over those four years while hitting 118 homers.

Rice gained some votes among the writers this year competing against a fairly weak class. Next year’s class is even weaker, so there’s hope he’ll make it then. If he doesn’t, he’ll probably have to wait for the veteran’s committee to vote him in. But they’re not even smart enough to vote Luis Tiant in.

El Tiante. Now there’s a guy I’d drive to Cooperstown to see inducted into the Hall.

Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer who can be reached at [email protected]