Wade Boggs days

It’s Wade Boggs days until Opening Day.

 

I first started paying attention to baseball when I was 11 or 12. I didn’t really know who Wade Boggs was. All I knew was what I read in Sports Illustrated for Kids, and that was that he was a Red Sox (Sock? dammit) who went to play for the Yankees and that he liked to eat chicken. That’s it.

As I grew older and my memories get better, I remember the end of his time with the Yankees and his two years with the Devil Rays. He hit the first Devil Ray home run in history, and his 3,000th hit was a home run. I wish I had been able to watch him play more.

This next paragraph is taken directly from Wikipedia:

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 scored the run that put the Red Sox up 5-3 in the tenth inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. A few minutes later, he watched helplessly from third base as Ray Knight scurried home.

He didn’t reach the World Series again until 1996 when he won as a Yankee.

Boggs once owned a fish camp in Florida that he named Finway.

Boggs played in the longest game in professional baseball history, a 33 inning game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings. Boggs went 4 for 12 for Pawtucket. Incidentally, Rochester also had a future Hall of Famer manning third base: Cal Ripken, Jr. went 2 for 13.