Wade Boggs

Wade Boggs was a supremely disciplined contact hitter who won five batting titles and a World Series with the New York Yankees.

Wade Anthony Boggs was born on June 15, 1958, in Omaha, Nebraska, the youngest of three children of Winfield "Win" Boggs, a career Marine and Air Force pilot who met Wade's mother, a mail-plane pilot, in 1945 and married her just two weeks later. The family's military life instilled in Wade an early love of routine and discipline that would come to define his entire baseball career. When his father retired from the service in 1967, the family settled in Tampa, Florida, where Win opened a fishing camp. Boggs starred in both baseball and football at H.B. Plant High School in Tampa, but scouts remained skeptical of his professional prospects — his swing produced consistent contact but little power, an unfashionable profile in the home-run-obsessed late 1970s. The Boston Red Sox nonetheless selected him in the seventh round of the 1976 draft, and Boggs spent six years refining his craft in the minor leagues before finally debuting with Boston in 1982. Once given a full-time role, Boggs became one of the most consistently dominant hitters of his era, winning five American League batting titles between 1983 and 1988 and posting seven consecutive seasons with 200 or more hits. His textbook, disciplined approach at the plate made him exceptionally difficult to strike out while drawing walks at an elite rate — a scientific, almost obsessive precision that extended into his famous pregame rituals. Boggs ate chicken before every single game of his career, earning the nickname "Chicken Man," while also taking exactly 150 ground balls in practice, running wind sprints at precisely 7:17 p.m., and drawing the Hebrew word for "life" in the batter's box before each at-bat. After 11 seasons in Boston, Boggs signed with the rival New York Yankees in 1993 and won his only World Series championship in 1996, famously celebrating by riding a police horse around Yankee Stadium. He closed out his career with the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays, reaching exactly 3,000 hits with a home run in 1999 — his final major league season. Boggs finished with a .328 career batting average, 3,010 hits, and 12 consecutive All-Star selections. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005 with 91.9% of the vote, and both the Red Sox and Rays have retired his uniform number.

Contact hitter with excellent plate discipline and defensive skills at third base

Hall of Fame third baseman, one of the greatest contact hitters in baseball history

• World Series champion (1996)
• 5x AL batting champion
• 12x All-Star
• 2x Gold Glove
• 8x Silver Slugger
• Hall of Fame 2005