Coyne's Clippings

Former Sox Wade Boggs gets elected into the Baseball Hall Of Fame, and Dan Shaughnesy has a recap of his career both on and off the field. Here's one of my favorite parts...

Two years later, his personal life became tabloid news and put Wade and Debbie Boggs on an interview couch with Barbara Walters after a California woman filed a $6 million palimony suit against him. Later that summer, he got into a fight with Dwight Evans aboard the team bus, but Boggs was a guy who could turn down the sound when he got into the batter's box. Despite all the public ugliness in '88, he still batted .366 to win his fourth consecutive batting title, fifth in six years.

There were more absurd moments after that. He said the newly constructed 600 Club diminished his power. He said he escaped a knife-wielding assailant by willing himself invisible. He fell out of the family Jeep when Debbie wheeled out of a Winter Haven restaurant parking lot. After the back tire ran over his arm, leaving the imprint of a steel-belted radial, Wade displayed the wound and announced, "I'm the white Irving Fryar."

In the spring of 1992, one year after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boggs announced, "The Red Sox always win the World Series the year after the Russian Revolution." Historian Wade was citing the 1918 Sox, who won it all after the 1917 uprising in St. Petersburg forced the czar to abdicate. Unfortunately, the 1992 Red Sox finished last under Butch Hobson. Sox fans were Bolshevik. Boggs, too. He didn't like Boston's contract offer and went to New York where he won his only World Series ring (1996).