Simmons' case "for" Boggs

I put the "for" in quotes because in reality, Simmons' recent article on Wade Boggs' Hall of Fame election, which is linked to with a line that reads "The case for Boggs," is the case against Boggs. It's a typical Simmons ignore-the-facts column; in fact, he even does us the service of stating out front:

That's the thing about statistics: you can trust them only so much. They don't account for the Horrys and Jeters, or Orlando Cabrera's sparkling defense last October, or even the petrified look on CWebb's face.

Here's a better way of putting that: it is the absence of statistics in the columns of writers like Simmons, in favor of an infatuation with personality and pretty faces, that accounts for the Jeters. But Simmons clearly has a vested interest in ignoring stats because he makes a (darned good) living inventing things like The Chris Webber Face.

Boggs never resonated with fans like other Boston stars of that era. You never went to Fenway thinking, "Boy, I get to see Boggs today, somebody pinch me." You never watched a Red Sox-Royals game and thought to yourself, "I'm glad we have Boggs instead of Brett."

Nobody's arguing that Boggs is better than Brett, of course. And I don't remember seeing "Fans excited to see him play" being a criterion for the Hall of Fame (then again, I don't believe any formal set of criteria exists anyway). Just because a player isn't flashy and is severely undervalued by a fan base famous for trashing its own stars doesn't mean you "can't trust the statistics."

Situations never mattered to him. If the Sox were down by one in the ninth, with a runner on third and two outs, Boggs invariably drew a walk, leaving the game in someone else's hands. That's just who he was. There's a reason he cracked the top five in MVP voting only once. Local writers and talk show hosts skewered him for being a selfish singles hitter, wondering why he wouldn't hit for power. All this "getting on base" stuff was hurting the team.

I sort of expected Simmons to follow this up with a "Ha ha! Just joshing ya!" in the next paragraph, but apparently it's straight up, and he believes it! First of all, why in the world would a pitcher even throw to Boggs in the described situation? If the score were tied, it would be a no-brainer intentional walk; down by one, the 8-time OBP champion is still not going to get anything over the plate. Not to mention the fact that since it's Mr. Anti-Stats telling the story, we can't even be sure that this situation ever actually occurred.

And get this: a "selfish singles hitter." Yeah, it's the singles hitters who get all the glory, isn't it? The big contracts, the endorsements, the women. Mark MacWho? And don't you just hate it when your players get on base? Look, if Billy Beane wasn't right, if the A's hadn't had the most wins per salary cap dollar for the last five years or so, then maybe you could treat this paragraph as something other than sand-pounding stupidity. But Beane is right, he has the results to prove it, and the whole world is following his lead now anyway. Which Simmons at least acknowledges in the last paragraph:

But then maybe Boggs was just ahead of his time.

So shouldn't this column have been something more along the lines of, "We Boston fans were too stupid to know what we had"?