Last night, a few Sun-Times staffers went out for an after-work beverage to celebrate the completion of another compelling Satuday paper. As it often does, the conversation turned to baseball and how today’s game doesn’t stack up to the current incarnation of America’s pastime. Some good stories about yesteryear were tossed around, but somehow I

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Last night, a few Sun-Times staffers went out for an after-work beverage to celebrate the completion of another compelling Satuday paper. As it often does, the conversation turned to baseball and how today’s game doesn’t stack up to the current incarnation of America’s pastime.

Some good stories about yesteryear were tossed around, but somehow I failed to mention my favorite baseball legend of all time.

I
first stumbled across the gem about a year ago and since have made it a point
to bring it up as much as humanly possible.

It involves Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs and a whole bunch of beer.

The dirty details after the jump.


Evidently, Boggs enjoyed putting down Miller Lites. Like, really enjoyed it.

I’m not kidding you Steve. Seriously. Wade was the kind of guy who was always the first one at the club house. So
he’d get to the clubhouse, and he’d bring a six pack with him. He’d be
there drinking a beer when someone showed up, and as we were all
packing our stuff up out of our lockers and getting our bags ready for
the trip, Wade would sit there and drink that whole six pack.

Now, at the time, we were flying out of New Jersey, so it was
somewhat of a drive from Yankee stadium to the airport in New Jersey.
Wade would drink another couple of beers on the bus to the airport. At
the time, we were flying this older airplane, it couldn’t make it
across the country without refueling, and it wasn’t the fastest
airplane in the sky. So we would stop in North Dakota or something.
Wade would drink about a half rack between New Jersey and North Dakota,
and it would take about a half-hour to an hour to refuel once we got
there, so he’d have a few more beers while we were grounded in North
Dakota.

Once we got back up in the air, Wade would drink another 10, 11, 12
beers on the way out to the west coast. The whole flight from coast to
coast ususally took us well over 7 hours. We’d touch down at Sea-Tac,
hop on the bus headed to the Kingdome, and Wade would have another beer
or two on the bus. Then, all of us would get to the Kingdome and unpack
our bags and sit around and BS with each other, and Wade would have a
beer in his hand the entire time. He was always one of the last people
to leave the club house too. So I’d say that all in all, he drank over
50 beers on the trip, and this wasn’t just an isolated incident, he did
that almost every time.

It should be noted that Boggs said the number of tasty Miller Lites may have been inflated over the years.

Enjoy your Saturday, folks. Thanks for your readership.