Note: This is part of a series for Baseball Digest in which I pick each MLB team’s best player/coach at every position. Visit SoapBoxSportsByte for excerpts of the Red Sox piece before its launch next week.

Wade Boggs rode out of New York on a pinstriped horse, providing what might be the lasting snapshot of both the Yankees dynasty and his own career.

Before his legacy was temporarily tarnished by a Hall-of-Fame bribery scandal, he went on from the Bronx to finish his career with the pre-exorcism Devil Rays. As a result, interviewers introduce him as “former Yankee, Wade Boggs.”

If Boggs had had his (alleged) way, he would have been inducted as Cooperstown’s lone Devil Ray. But saying Boggs is a Yankee at heart is like remembering Sean Conney as Indiana Jones’ father and not James Bond.

For a certain generation, Boggs’ Yankeedom seems obvious. For anyone that resembles a baseball buff, it’s revisionist history.

People forget about the real, decidedly Bostonian Wade Boggs. He contributed some memorable seasons for the two latter teams, but his tenures in New York and St. Petersburg could not shine the proverbial shoes of his Boston career.

After becoming a free agent following a career-worst 1992 season (.259 AVG, a Shea Hillenbrand-esque 1.9 WAR), Boggs signed with the Yankees when they offered—surprise!—a year more than the competing Dodgers.

Never with the Devil Rays or the Yankees would Boggs post a five-win season, a figure he had bested in eight of his ten years manning the hot corner at Fenway.

Say what you want about his affinity for boiled chicken and his propensity towards superstition—Wade Boggs was one of the league’s best hitters for an entire decade.

From his first full season in 1983 to 1991, his penultimate season with the Red Sox, he posted just one year with a WAR under 6.5. In that 3.5-win 1990 season, Boggs still hit .302 and was still among the top ten third basemen in the game.

Third base is a power-heavy position, one where 20 homers and 90 RBIs are much more common than lofty batting averages and on-base percentages. To that effect, Boggs’ impact was a bit of a conundrum. The edict called for him to hit like Ron Santo, but he was doing a better Rod Carew impression than Rod Carew.

Over his entire Red Sox career (save for that final 1992 season and the aforementioned 1990 campaign), Boggs never hit lower than .325. In fact, he only hit lower than .330 once and lower than .350 three times. He posted OBP’s over .400 in every one of those season sand was over .440 on five separate occasions.

Boggs was one of the few hitters of the last 20 years who was feared despite a general lack of power. He only topped 10 home runs once with the Sox, in an ’87 campaign in which Boggs put up an outlandish 24 HRs and a .363/.461/.588. 

Nevertheless, he was a terror on opposing pitchers due to his ability to grind out at-bats and find his way on base. His 7.6 K percentage was the lowest among 80’s third basemen and sixth behind all contemporary major leaguers—behind Tony Gwynn, Don Mattingly, Ozzie Smith, Johnny Ray and Pete Rose. His .428 period-specific OBP was second only to Frank Thomas and blew all other third basemen away by more than 40 points.

Of the top seven “third basemen” in Red Sox history, Boggs and Larry Gardner are the only ones who spent the majority of their career playing exclusively third base. Boggs left Boston with a 75.0 WAR. When Larry Gardner moved onto Philadelphia in 1918, he left a 32.6 WAR in his wake.

As they say so eloquently, ‘nuff said. 

Jesse Golomb researches and writes for BaseballDigest.com. He is also the creator and writer of SoapBoxSportsByte, a blog that incorporates statistical analysis as well as fan perspective into daily pieces on the MLB, NFL and NBA. He can be followed on Twitter @SoapBxSprtsByte or contacted by email at golombjesse@gmail.com.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Note: This is part of a series for Baseball Digest in which I pick each Major League team’s best player/coach at every position. The complete Yankees list is up on the website. The complete Dodgers list will go up early next week. Some of it can be viewed early at SoapBoxSportsByte.

Roy Campanella

Of anyone on this list, Campy might get the strongest challenge from a fellow Dodger. Mike Piazza was only with the team for five years, but his Dodgers WAR is just 8.6 wins short of Campanella’s career mark.

In those first handful of years of his career in Chavez Ravine, Piazza put up some of the greatest offensive seasons in the history of the catcher position. He clubbed at least 30 home runs in four of the five years, never batted under .318, and had four seasons over 6.0 WAR (including an insane 9.4 win 1997 season when he put up 40 HR, 121 RBI and a .362/.431/.638 line).

In all five seasons, Piazza finished in the top-10 of the MVP voting, including two second-place finishes.

Over those five seasons, Piazza was by far the most valuable catcher in the Majors, with WAR that topped second place Pudge Rodriguez by 33 percent. He was the fifth most valuable player in the entire major leagues, just a half of a win behind third-place Jeff Bagwell and about ten wins short of Barry Bonds.

His .331/.394/.572 line speaks a few thousand words that aren’t worth taking the time to write.

Moreover, his skills as a receiver had yet to deteriorate. Fangraphs has him at around defensive replacement level for four of his five years in Dodger blue. He was actually well above average in his rookie campaign.

By contrast, Campanella was the second ranked Major League catcher over his career. He was also the 12th-ranked batter. His defense was likely not as good as everyone perceived it to be; he only had one season that ranked well above replacement level in this regard.

So why does the Majors’ first black catcher get the nod over it’s first catcher to marry the Playmate of the Millennium amid rumors of homosexuality?

Let’s take a look at the names that were ahead of Campanella. The one catcher who finished ahead of Campy in WAR was Yogi Berra, who (according to messianic statistician Bill James) is the most valuable player in the history of the position.

Of the 11 batters who finished ahead of him, only teammate Gil Hodges was not a Hall of Famer.

The catching position has generally been one where any substantial hitting ability is viewed as a godsend. Hodges played first base, a position where offensive production is an expectation rather than a bonus.

Campanella, along with his contemporary, Berra, was a revolutionary of the position. For the first time, teams were began to try to extend their futile pursuit away from primarily defensive receivers and towards backstops who could provide some pop.

Realizing that an offensively capable catcher would give their prospective team a massive advantage over other teams and their anemic backstops, front offices began to place emphasis on coaxing production out of the second half of their batteries.

From the beginning of professional baseball to when Campanella retired in 1957, just five catchers had a higher WAR than Roy’s career mark of 43.1. All five are Hall of Famers.

From 1958 to the present day, 14 different backstops have reached that mark.

Only Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk and Gary Carter are Hall of Famers. Thanks to his disastrously non-commital response to questions about testing positive (“Only God knows”), Pudge may or may not join that club.

Thanks to his mind-blowing statistics, Piazza would have likely gotten the nod had he stayed with LA for his entire career.. But even such, he played in an era where those stats were far from aberrational.

It’s simply hard to be that wowed by his achievements, given the fact that he played in the era of bloated biceps, cap sizes and statistics, an era when even Brady Anderson could be confused for Babe Ruth.

If that’s not enough, to lend a grain of salt to Piazza’s achievements, consider the fact that Jason Kendall finished his career just half of a win shy of Roy Campanella’s career mark.

Yes, that Jason Kendall.

Jesse Golomb researches and writes for BaseballDigest.com. He is also the creator and writer of SoapBoxSportsByte, a blog that incorporates statistical analysis as well as fan perspective into daily pieces on the MLB, NFL and NBA.   He can be followed on Twitter @SoapBxSprtsByte, or contacted by email at golombjesse@gmail.com.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

 To view the article this rant is based on, click here. 

Take a look at this video. Yankees fans should get a warm feeling inside; Sox fans, not so much.

I don’t mean to incite nostalgia, good or bad. Or maybe I do, but not in the way that you might think.

I’ve harped on this quite a bit, but I am going to continue to harp on it for quite a while. It may not be a fixable issue, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t constantly irritate me for the foreseeable future.

While you’re either basking or melting in the glory of this video, take a hard look at the stands whenever the camera pans away from the field. There’s hardly an empty seat in the house.

Yes, this is one of the most thrilling moments in the history of the sport. Not only that, but it took place in extra innings of perhaps the biggest game between the two franchises that constitute sports’ most tenuous rivalry—and at the apex of that rivalry, no less.

So no, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the stands are full.

But let’s think about this. This was a four hour playoff game, meaning it ended after midnight. I looked it up, and it turned out that this was a Thursday. I would think there would be plenty of people on hand that night who had work early the next morning. Or who had kids who had school that Friday. Or both.

But they all stayed. There might be a few who walked out that night, but there sure weren’t a lot.

Transport this moment to the new Yankee Stadium in 2011, and I would think it would have unfolded quite differently.

The crowd on hand would surely be delirious. There would be plenty of fans who remained. But there would also be plenty of fans who didn’t.

How do I know this? Well, I think anybody who’s spent enough time at either of the two venues would vouch, but let’s quickly jump in the DeLorean once more.

I attended Game 1 of the 2009 World Series at the Stadium, easily the biggest game in the Bronx since the Yanks collapsed in ’04 against the Sox. It was a close game, but a miserable one. Cliff Lee blanked the Yankees. They looked so hopeless offensively that Chase Utley’s solo home run in the first felt like a debilitating punch to the crotch. You didn’t even get hit that hard, but you also couldn’t manage to bring yourself to your feet after collapsing in a heap. When he homered off CC again in the sixth—another solo shot—it felt more like a visit to the guillotine than a punch in the groin. The Yankees simply weren’t recovering from that. At least on that night.

So yes, it was a bleak game, and the crowd’s mood was understandably somber. I was too. But if you looked around the stadium that night, there were clusters of empty seats everywhere. The stadium wasn’t even full when the game started, with visible vacancies in sections all around the ballpark (except the bleachers, naturally). But when Utley went deep that second time, people started leaving. In the World Series. In the sixth inning. Of a two run game, for christ’s sake.

Part of what made the Boone home run so special was that it served as the culmination of a massive comeback.

In that game, the Yankees trailed by four after three-and-a-half innings. After six innings, they had managed just three hits off a still effective Pedro Martinez. Yankees fans had no reason to think Grady Little’s bullpen phone didn’t work—those first 5 innings were as bleak as they could possibly be. Even after Little left Pedro in for the 8th, the right-hander managed to get Nick Johnson to pop out to lead off the inning. As Derek Jeter stepped into the batters’ box, baseball-reference’s win probability chart had the Red Sox having a 94% chance of winning the game, meaning the Yankees had just a six percent chance of survival.

When Chase Utley went deep for the second time in 2009, the Yankees still had a 25 percent chance of winning the game.

They were far from dead, and the thought of losing that game could not even compare to the dread Yankees fans would have experienced if Grady Little had even had a shred of sense in him.

You have two big games in October. Two playoff games in the Bronx where the opposing team had a knife to the collective throat of the Yankees and their fans.

In one game, the home team and their faithful spectators stuck around, standing and sweating for four hours with 50,000 compatriots, feeling defeated until their fears were vindicated as bedlam was unleashed in the Bronx.

In another, 35,000 sat in their seats, lamenting their favorite team’s fate long before it was sealed. Thousands more put the WCBS broadcast on their respective car radios, and turned the volume down as they drove home on the turnpike or highway of their choosing.

For a full-length and explanatory rant on this phenomenon, click here.


Jesse Golomb is the creator and writer of Soap Box Sports Byte. He currently works for Baseball Digest. If you enjoyed this article, or want takes on the rest of the Major Leagues, the NFL and more, you can read the rest of his work on soapboxsportsbyte or follow  @SoapBxSprtsByte

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com