By Tom
Wade Boggs likes to drink beer–actually he loves to drink beer. Between the time he entered the big leagues in 1982 to the time he retired in 1999 as a no-doubt Hall of Famer, he garnered a sterling reputation as one, if not THE, league’s most notorious drinkers.
Now, whether this is true or mythos at this point is to be determined, there’s never been any recording of Boggs slamming case after case of Miller Lite, but he does have some witness testimony to back up his urban legend. Teammates Jeff Nelson and Paul Sorrento certainly had his back on that, when Nelson went on the Mitch in the Morning show on 950 KJR, he was asked by Steve Sandmeyer if the exploits of Boggs were true and Nelson said, “Hell yes they are” or something to that effect:
Sandmeyer: Who would you say drank the most beer out of everyone you ever played with?
Nelson: Easy, Wade Boggs…easy.
Sandmeyer: Really? Wade Boggs?
Nelson: Oh, yeah, without a doubt. I’ve never seen anyone drink as much beer as he did in my life.
Sandmeyer: Get outta here, arlight, give me an example, like how much did he drink?
Nelson: Oh, I’d say, on a typical road trip, east coast to west coast, say a road game to Seattle…Wade would drink anywhere between 50 and 60 beers.
Now if you’re someone who has drank a lot of beer in your life, you’ll have the same reaction I did which is, “There’s no fucking way that’s true, Jeff. How does Wade Boggs make the time for that?” To this Jeff Nelson would say that Boggs would start drinking a six pack at the clubhouse while everyone got their bags packed, he would then drink a few more beers on the bus ride from New York to New Jersey for the flight. The entire flight would take 7 hours to complete, but the plane the Yankees took would have to stop and refuel in North Dakota. Between those stops Boggs would drink “about a half rack” and during the 30 minutes they were grounded. On the final leg of the trip Boggs would drink “another 10, 11, 12 beers on the way out to the west coast” and a few more from the bus ride to the Kingdome.
Steve Sandmeyer, rightly, doesn’t believe him, but Nelson sticks to his story and even says he’s got a witness. He calls up Boggs’s teammate in Tampa Bay Paul Sorrento during the commercial break and asks him how many beers can Wade drink? To which Sorrento says, “Oh, jeeze, I don’t know, like 70.”
And it’s at this point the radio show breaks down and fills with laughter. It’s the only reasonable reaction to have.
If you ask Wade Boggs he’ll tell you it wasn’t that many beers, but a few. A fan at ESPN College Gameday held up a sign that said he once drank 64 beers on a road trip, and suddenly everyone had some questions, like Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon who asked him if it was true. Boggs politely declines, but you get the feeling that he’s hiding something, and he never discloses the real amount.
Let’s jump ahead to January 14th, 2015. The world is a crazy place; the Charlie Hebdo attack has once again forced Western liberal democracies into reexamining their relationship with the Islamic world at-large, which they do so by bombing them.
The financial securities passed years prior in response to the 2008 housing crash are under threat from a now emboldened republican party that made historical gains in Congress in the 2014 midterms.
In my own state, businessman Stan Kroenke just announced that the city of St. Louis was no longer a viable market for the NFL and was moving the team to Los Angeles, years later he would pay a $790 million settlement to the city and county who, turns out, are a viable market.
Some of the things going on then are still going on now. My social studies professor would say that, “History never repeats itself,” and, sure maybe not exactly, but it certainly likes to cover the hits.
Oh hey what’s that?
If there’s one show that’s been around awhile, it’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It completed its 15th season in December 2021, giving it the most seasons for a live-action comedy in American television history. The year before the show was renewed for four more seasons. In 2015 The Gang was premiering their tenth season on FXX, but they almost didn’t make it that far, as co-show runner Glenn Howerton thought the Gang was starting to wear out their welcome and that they may call it quits after season 10. That fate clearly wasn’t in the cards, as it turned out the Gang had plenty more ways to shock us.
The premiere episode of season 10 debuted at 9 pm and was titled, oh man this can’t be true…
Sweet mother of God.
“The Gang Beats Boggs” is one of my personal favorites. It won’t make any top 10, 20, hell maybe top 30 lists, but it’s right up there with the Gang solving the gas crisis, or the Nightman Cometh, or the Gang getting addicted to crack to get on welfare, or the Gang going on a Family Feud knockoff. It spawned a sequel of some sort, “The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies’ Reboot.” The synopsis is pretty simple, our protagonists take a flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and attempt to drink 50, 60, or 70 beers. The amount doesn’t necessarily matter, all that matters is they do it–my favorite bit being that Charlie Day’s character thinks Wade Boggs is dead, and, despite being corrected numerous times, continues to believe so and say rest in peace.
It’s here that the legend of Wade Boggs leaves the stratosphere and enters the reaches of space. Wade’s like most of us, he likes to tell good stories, and he tells Charlie Day a pretty good one, who turns around and tells Jimmy Fallon that story. Jimmy Fallon hosts The Tonight Show which at this time is the highest rated late-night television talk show, and the night before the season 10 premiere Charlie Day comes on and tells everyone watching that the real number is not 50, 60, or 70, but really 107.
The logistics for drinking 107 beers cannot be reasonably fathomed because it defies reason at every step of the way. It already seems impossible to drink more than 50 beers to begin with, even with a whole 24 hours to do so. Even with a whole day at their disposal and a four to five beer average, someone would have to possess an ironclad tolerance and a liver made of tungsten. No normal human being can do that, but Wade Boggs is not normal.
Completely obsessed with this, I decided to run some numbers. Wade Boggs made at least 64 cross-country flights while playing for the Red Sox, Yankees, and Devil Rays over the course of his 18 year career. He racked up a .328 career batting average, a 91.4 WAR, and 3,010 hits. As of August 19th, 2022, there have been 20,195 players to lace up their cleats and play a Major League Baseball game. Wade Boggs is one of 33 of those players to record at least 3,000 hits in a career, putting him in the top 0.16% all-time.
| Year | Flights | Beers | Hours | BpH |
| 1982 | 3 | 150 | 18.91 | 7.93 |
| 1983 | 4 | 200 | 24.5 | 8.16 |
| 1984 | 4 | 200 | 25.16 | 7.95 |
| 1985 | 3 | 150 | 18.58 | 8.07 |
| 1986 | 3 | 150 | 18.91 | 7.93 |
| 1987 | 3 | 150 | 18.33 | 8.18 |
| 1988 | 4 | 200 | 23.91 | 8.36 |
| 1989 | 4 | 200 | 24.33 | 8.22 |
| 1990 | 3 | 150 | 18.25 | 8.22 |
| 1991 | 4 | 200 | 25.16 | 7.95 |
| 1992 | 3 | 150 | 18.5 | 8.11 |
| 1993 | 4 | 200 | 24.32 | 8.22 |
| 1994 | 4 | 200 | 26 | 7.69 |
| 1995 | 4 | 200 | 25.41 | 7.87 |
| 1996 | 4 | 200 | 25.48 | 7.85 |
| 1997 | 2 | 100 | 13 | 7.69 |
| 1998 | 4 | 200 | 21.75 | 9.20 |
| 1999 | 4 | 200 | 23 | 8.70 |
| 64 | 3,200 | 393.5 | 8.13 |
Perhaps his greatest achievement is his beer drinking prowess. Jeff Nelson didn’t say that Boggs did these cross-country benders once in a blue moon, but that he did them nearly all the time. It took Boggs 2,429 games to record his 3,000th hit, and an extra 10 games and 10 hits to finish at the number he stands with today. In just a fraction of a fraction of those plane rides, Wade Boggs drank his 3,000th beer by his 60th flight, assuming he drank an average of 50 beers per trip, and if what Jeff Nelson and Paul Sorrento said is true, that 50 beers per trip number is coming in on the low side. If all of this wasn’t somehow shocking or silly enough for you, please understand that the final tally is, very realistically, potentially much higher than what is being reported.
There’s more to this than just the sheer amount of beers Boggs drank. The average length of a MLB baseball game between 1982 and 1999 is around 2 hours and 50 minutes. While this number is also a rough estimate and definitely not precise, I don’t think it’s too outlandish to suggest that Wade Boggs spent at least 6,910 hours playing baseball. With his 3,010 career hits, he’d average a hit every 34 minutes for a hits per hour of 0.43. That’s Wade Boggs the baseball player, now Wade Boggs the beer drinker logged at least 393.5 hours flying cross-country all while slugging 3,200 beers for an astonishing rate of 8.13 beers per hour. They really don’t make them like Wade Boggs anymore.
I understand that all of this is on some shaky logic, and that I’m moving the goalposts here, and that the odds of this urban legend actually being true–and true 64 times–are pretty low. But who cares. How about something more tangential to quell the longing for a return to reality?
| Year | G | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | AVG | OBP | SLUG | OPS | TB |
| 1982 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .000 | .000 | .000 | .000 | 0 |
| 1983 | 4 | 18 | 14 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 2 | .357 | .500 | .429 | .929 | 6 |
| 1984 | 4 | 17 | 14 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 2 | .143 | .294 | .143 | .437 | 2 |
| 1985 | 3 | 15 | 13 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 1 | .231 | .333 | .308 | .641 | 4 |
| 1986 | 3 | 16 | 13 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 | .385 | .500 | .462 | .962 | 6 |
| 1987 | 3 | 12 | 9 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 1 | .444 | .583 | .778 | 1.361 | 7 |
| 1988 | 4 | 19 | 17 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | .418 | .421 | .647 | 1.068 | 11 |
| 1989 | 4 | 18 | 13 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | .231 | .389 | .308 | .697 | 4 |
| 1990 | 3 | 13 | 13 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | .231 | .231 | .308 | .539 | 4 |
| 1991 | 4 | 16 | 14 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | .214 | .313 | .286 | .599 | 4 |
| 1992 | 3 | 13 | 9 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | .222 | .462 | .222 | .684 | 2 |
| 1993 | 4 | 19 | 17 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | .176 | .263 | .176 | .439 | 3 |
| 1994 | 4 | 19 | 16 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 1 | .188 | .316 | .250 | .566 | 4 |
| 1995 | 4 | 18 | 13 | 4 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | .615 | .667 | .500 | 1.167 | 9 |
| 1996 | 4 | 17 | 17 | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 3 | .294 | .294 | .471 | .765 | 8 |
| 1997 | 2 | 10 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | .444 | .500 | .556 | 1.056 | 5 |
| 1998 | 4 | 14 | 12 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | .250 | .357 | .250 | .607 | 3 |
| 1999 | 4 | 16 | 15 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | .133 | .188 | .133 | .321 | 2 |
| 64 | 273 | 231 | 30 | 65 | 15 | 1 | 1 | 18 | 38 | 17 | .281 | .377 | .364 | .741 | 84 |
Wade Boggs took 231 official at-bats after traveling cross-country and consuming at least 50 beers. That’s 64 games along with 273 plate appearances after day-drinking what most people drink in a few months. I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked an 8 hour shift after drinking around 10 beers the night before and could hardly function. Wade Boggs wasn’t doing some shitty sales job, he was doing a trade and at the top of his profession.
| G | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | K | AVG | OBP | SLUG | OPS | TB |
| 2439 | 10,404 | 8,803 | 1,143 | 2,477 | 572 | 38 | 38 | 686 | 1,448 | 648 | .281 | .377 | .364 | .741 | 3,201 |
Boggs slashed .281/.377/.364 hungover and possibly drunk over his career, and while his power numbers and average suffered somewhat compared to his career totals, he still racked up 65 hits and 38 walks. If we took these 64 games and averaged out his entire career with this same production, Boggs would still finish with 2,477 hits, not quite 3,000 but ahead of Hall of Famers like David Ortiz, Jim Rice, and Barry Larkin. That 2,477 hit mark would also be good for 104th all-time, just behind should-be Hall of Famer Fred McGriff, and remember that that’s 104 out of 20,195 to ever play the game, even at his worst a drunk Wade Boggs would still be in the top 0.51% of players to ever do it.
We’re at the end of this. Did you have fun? I had fun. One of my favorite things about baseball is the imagination of it, or at least the ability to distort it. It’s a lot like clay, being able to take something so silly as an urban legend and analyze it, fabricating an alternate version of a man who hung up the cleats 23 years ago.
Now, it’s very unlikely Wade Boggs ever drank this many beers to begin with, or if he did, drank them as much and as consistently as he did. But I can’t help–almost like a devil’s advocate–play with the notion of but what if he did? That’s kind of the cool part about sports, the caricature you create can defy all that logic and noise, while the world burns all around you. When asked by a TMZ Sports paparazzi in Summer 2015 about the 100 beer mark, Boggs said it was because he had a hollow leg that he kept all the beer in that he drank. Drunk Wade Boggs can do anything if you just let him.
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