Why Yankees’ Hall of Famer and World Series champ doesn’t watch MLB anymore

Former Yankees World Series champion Wade Boggs isn’t a fan of Major League Baseball anymore.

Even after amassing an 18-year career worthy of a first-ballot Hall of Fame induction, the Chicken Man would rather chug a beer than watch nine innings.

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One big reason for the turn-off - baseball’s new rules.

“I enjoy aspects of the game. But for me, all the new rules? I’m not a fan,” he said via Matthew Vautor of MassLive. “When you have a ghost runner on in the 10th inning for extra innings and you lose the game, I think they’ve missed the boat on that.”

Over the last few seasons, with the game’s popularity waning, MLB has made efforts to increase pace-of-play. Implemented during the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the above-mentioned “ghost runner” rule gives teams a free runner on second base in extra-inning games.

What other rules could Boggs be referring to? This season, MLB introduced a disengagement limit for pitchers, shift restrictions, and a widely popular pitch clock.

You’d think Boggs would love the new rules, especially the pitch clock since it’s allowed the game to go back in time, in a sense. Currently, the average game lasts 2:40 - those are mid-1980s levels when the five-time batting champion was at the height of his game.

The new rules aren’t all Boggs refers to in his current dislike of the game. Analytics are playing a major role in it too.

“It’s crazy how the sabermetrics has taken over the game, trying to make it cool, but it just doesn’t fit,” the 12-time All-Star said. “I think they wanted to make it more interesting for the younger generation kids to where they could tabulate numbers and say, ‘Ooh, that’s cool,’ and launch angle and various things like this. So it makes watching a baseball game a math equation.

“The announcers start throwing numbers at you - ‘He had 107 exit velocity with a 37% launch angle. And his home run was at 93 degrees.’ Nobody wants to hear that,” Boggs continued. “He hit a bomb. And he hit it hard. That’s plain enough for the game. Don’t reinvent the wheel when it’s not flat.”

This is funny coming from a player that is a sabermetrician’s dream come true. In analytics, a batter’s job is to create runs and in his prime, there was no one better than Mr. Boggs at that. He boasted a 151 wRC+ in his eight seasons in MLB.

A close look at more advanced stats reveals that the eight-time Silver Slugger Award winner was the best hitter in baseball from 1982-1989 - when game times were similar to that of 2023.

He boasted an MLB-best .409 wOBA and .443 OBP which resulted in the top fWAR of 60 in baseball. The next-best batter, Rickey Henderson, who had a 53.3 fWAR in that time, trailed by nearly seven whole points.

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Boggs’ beef isn’t that the game has changed. It’s that the game looks too easy for him.

“I’d walk about 300 times because I wouldn’t swing at the high pitch,” he said.

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