Wade Boggs on a Horse (1996)

...or, The Weird Things That Come To Mind When the World Order Is Upended.

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I.

Look, bear with me for a moment, as this one’s going to be a bit of a journey. Because for some reason last week, as the world order appeared to be in terrifying flux, I found myself thinking about Wade Boggs.

That is one of the great scenes from the greatest sitcom of the 1980s (if not the greatest sitcom, period), about a Boston bar populated by quirky characters and owned by a womanizing ex-Red Sox reliever named Sam Malone. This scene comes from one of a series of sterling episodes in which our gang finds themselves completely psyched out by their rivals at Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern, who regularly render the Cheers crew into hapless dupes. When that episode first aired in 1988, Wade Boggs was the best hitter in baseball. Over the course of four seasons, he hit .368, .357, .363, and .366, which feels unfathomable by today’s standards when the best hitters in baseball are lucky to make it to .285. Boggs was beloved in Boston even before that Cheers episode; when the Red Sox lost the World Series to the Mets in 1986 after a ball trickled through Bill Buckner’s legs at first base, Boggs sat in the dugout and cried as he absorbed both the loss of the series and the sudden loss of his mother earlier that summer.

Before the Red Sox started winning World Series and their fans embraced the Masshole ethos and blessed us all with Dave Portnoy, Boston was an overgrown college town whose image was largely defined by an accent and a fictional bar¹ and by their baseball team’s perpetual failure. And Wade Boggs was the aptheosis of that era, an idiosyncratic Boston character who could have wandered straight out of Cheers. He was so superstitious that he ate chicken before every game, wore the same socks day after day, and fielded exactly 150 balls during each practice session. He once fell out a jeep and got run over by his wife, which may or may not have been payback for an embarrassing extra-marital affair that made tabloid headlines in the late 1980s. The legend goes that Boggs once drank 107 beers on a cross-country flight; he was essentially a hybrid of Sam Malone and Norm Peterson, and Boston adored him for his quirkiness. By the late 1980s, Wade Boggs was a kind of mythical figure in Boston—like a weirder, less-square Ted Williams.

And then in 1992, after the worst season of his career, where he hit a pedestrian .259, Wade Boggs found himself a free agent. And he signed with the New York Yankees.

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II.

Maybe it’s because I have family in Boston, and maybe it’s because I lived there myself for a couple of years, but what happened next felt utterly disorienting. Boggs was not the player he once was in New York, but he was still pretty good, and in 1996, even after he lost playing time during the postseason for hitting so poorly, he won a World Series with the Yankees. And in the celebration that ensued, this happened: