Rob Rains Inside Baseball: Mitchell Boggs Still Looking For Positives In Very Tough Season

By Rob Rains

Just six months ago, this baseball season held so much promise for Mitchell Boggs. He had earned an invitation to be part of the team of major-leaguers representing the United States in the World Baseball Classic. An injury to Jason Motte gave Boggs the possibility of being the closer for the Cardinals.

Boggs was coming off a season in which he had been one of the best relievers in the game. There was no reason why Boggs or anyone else expected this season to be any different.

Different, however, is not a strong enough word to describe how everything, almost from the start, went straight downhill for Boggs.

As he sat in a hotel room in Phoenix over the weekend, now a member of the Colorado Rockies, Boggs thought about everything he had been through this season – the blown saves, being booed instead of cheered at Busch Stadium, going back to the minor leagues, and then being traded for the first time in his career.

An eternal optimist, Boggs refuses to be consumed by the negatives. While it would be natural for a player who has gone through as much as Boggs has endured to just want this year to end as soon as possible so he could forget about it, Boggs takes the opposite position.

He doesn’t want to forget. He wants to remember it all, and learn from the experience.

“I haven’t run and hid from this all year and I certainly am not going to do it now,” Boggs said in a telephone interview. “There’s games left on the schedule and I expect to be really good these next few weeks.

“I don’t want to forget any of this. This is an incredible learning experience for me, as tough as it has been, as hard as it has been - and it has been extremely tough. But I think I would be missing out an incredible opportunity if I try to forget it all. I’ve been through a lot this year. I am not the first baseball player to have a bad season. And it has been a bad year, no question about that. I’m not trying to skate around that at all, but I don’t want to forget any of it. I want to be better because of it, and I feel like I have that opportunity.”

Boggs estimates that he and his wife, Lele, hit “rock bottom” three or four times this season. The hardest day, he acknowledges now, was when he made what would turn out to be his final appearance with the Cardinals.
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