The Red Sox Will Retire No. 26 for Wade Boggs Next Year
Say what you want about Wade Boggs. He was a chicken-eating, beer-chugging sex addict who could hit the shit out of a baseball.
I always found it to be a little bit odd that Boggs’ number still hadn’t been retired by the Red Sox. The team has their silly little criteria of having to play ten seasons in Boston, retire with the team and be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but they bend the rules whenever they want, because they made the rules up. Johnny Pesky isn’t in the Hall of Fame, Pedro Martinez wasn’t with the team for ten seasons, and Carlton Fisk didn’t retire with the Red Sox. Boggs, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2005, played eleven of his 18 seasons in Boston, hitting .338/.428/.462, while collecting five batting titles, four of which were in consecutive seasons.
Over the years, Boggs has voiced his displeasure with the Red Sox dicking him around about his number retirement. In 2012, Boggs said that it’s “disappointing” that they hadn’t retired it yet, and that “it would mean a lot” if they finally did. A year later, Boggs admitted to being “bitter” about the team’s refusal to retire his number because he didn’t meet their made up criteria, while the team continued to retire the numbers of other players who also didn’t meet the criteria. He had every right to be bitter.
Was he a model citizen off the field? Absolutely not, but neither was the guy who they named a street after outside of Gate A and D, and still have his initials written in morse code on the Green Monster. The bottom line is that Boggs was one of the greatest players to ever wear a Red Sox uniform, and he deserves this honor. One of the details that doesn’t get mentioned enough in the years that we’ve been waiting for this announcement is that the man wore a Red Sox cap into the Hall of Fame. With that in mind, I was always baffled that they hadn’t retired his number yet, and always assumed that there had to be more to the story that we didn’t know.
However, this announcement makes sense now. A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with someone within the Red Sox organization, and they asked me what I thought about the team retiring Boggs’ number some day. I know now that they obviously knew that this was going to happen in 2016, but I said that it’s long overdue, and, again, claimed that I found it odd that it still hasn’t happened yet. I also proposed my theory that there must be something that we don’t know, to which they replied that they assumed it had to do with Boggs going directly to the Yankees after his eleven seasons in Boston. I doubt that’s actually why, but whatever the reason is for the unjust delay, the Red Sox finally got it right. On May 26, 2016, Boggs’ number 26 will hang next to the likes of Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, Joe Cronin, Pedro Martinez and the league-wide retired Jackie Robinson.
On that day, I invite you all to crack open 107 Miller Lites, raise them up high, and toast them to the greatest third baseman in Red Sox history.