Mike Celizic

Wade Boggs was probably never appreciated as he should have been. And even now, inducted into the Hall of Fame, there isn’t the buzz about him that there would be if he had made his mark on his game in a bigger way.

He hit singles, mostly; 75 percent of his 3,010 hits were of the one-base variety. Just 118 of them cleared the fences. And there were a lot of people who said when he played and probably still say that if you can’t hit home runs, you can’t be a true superstar.

That’s nonsense, and people are beginning to realize it today, when baseball numbers crunchers like Bill James and general managers like Theo Epstein and Billy Beane are reintroducing the idea that there is nothing more important to scoring runs than getting on base.

And in his day, few were as good at Boggs at doing that simple-sounding yet absurdly difficult task — getting safely to first.

For four years, from 1985-88 and age 27-30, Boggs batted .367, .357, .368 and .366. He averaged better than 200 hits and 100 walks in each of those years and his on-base percentage was above .450. For his career, he got on base via hit, walk or being hit by a pitch an average of 1.8 times per game. He average just 41 strikeouts a season, and his career batting average was .328.

Only one person active today, Todd Helton, who is hitting .335 for his career, has a higher lifetime average, and Helton plays in the best hitter’s park in the game, Coors Field. Helton is also just 30 years old, and already is showing signs of tailing off.

For a career, the only player of Boggs’ generation with a higher average is Tony Gwynn, who finished at .338. In earlier generations, Ted Williams and Stan Musial are the players of most recent vintage to hit for a higher average. Williams retired in 1960 and Musial in ’63, which means that in the past 42 years only one person — Gwynn — has retired with a higher average than Wade Boggs.

This isn’t just a singles hitter who went into the Hall on Sunday. This is one of the most skilled people in the arcane art of putting a round bat squarely on a round ball that anyone below the age of 50 can remember seeing.

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Blinded as we are by home runs, it’s easy to lose sight of how difficult it is merely to hit the baseball, let alone hit it were someone ain’t. Boggs did that 3,010 times in a career that didn’t begin until he was 24 years old and ended just 18 years later.

People who remember singles hitters over the past 20 or 30 years think of Pete Rose, who has more hits than anyone in history. But Boggs was a better hitter than Rose, whose career average is .303 and who played 24 seasons on his way to breaking the all-time record for hits. Boggs led the American League in batting five times and was in the top five six other times; Rose led a league three times and had four other seasons in the top five.

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