Wade Boggs did it all on the baseball diamond across nearly two decades in the bigs. Five-time batting champ. Twelve-time All-Star. A coupla Gold Gloves for the same hands that can flash a World Series ring. Yet when the Hall of Famer is in public, what often gets remembered is his mere 20 minutes one day in a Hollywood recording studio.
“When I do an autograph show for baseball, I feel like I’m at a Comic-Con,” Boggs says last week by phone from Tampa, while recounting his guest appearance on a beloved episode of “The Simpsons,” titled “Homer at the Bat,” that first aired 30 years ago this month. He voiced a cartoon character named “Wade Boggs” who comes to barroom blows over the question: Who’s the best prime minister in British history? (Today, without pause, the real Boggs replies with winking conviction: “Pitt the Elder!”)
While some autograph-seeking fans bring nostalgic photos of Boggs in a Red Sox, Yankees or Devil Rays uniform, many others ask him to sign images of his animated avatar wearing the jersey of the Springfield power plant’s company softball team — sometimes situated between befuddled teammate Homer Simpson and scheming manager C. Montgomery Burns.
“Half the pictures are of me getting punched in a bar or a picture of us with Homer,” Boggs says of the autograph requests. “It’s all good — it’s one of those episodes for the ages, and one of the ones that sticks out in people’s minds.”
As Major League Baseball endures a lockout and faces a possible delay to this season, it’s an apt occasion to remember another time when ballplayers and management didn’t see eye to eye. Enter Homer, Mr. Burns and the mighty lineup of imported pro ringers.
“Homer at the Bat,” which featured the voices of nine active major leaguers and made its debut Feb. 20, 1992, was more than a quirky one-off in celebrity stunt casting. The 17th episode of Season 3 emboldened the minds behind “The Simpsons” to push the boundaries of what an animated half-hour series could do and show.
And from a ratings standpoint, it was a bellwether for the surging show: “Homer at the Bat” marked the first time that a new “Simpsons” episode beat an original episode of “The Cosby Show,” long an NBC juggernaut; on that prime-time Thursday night, “Simpsons” softball also topped CBS’s Winter Olympics coverage from Albertville, France.
“It was a huge deal” for the then-upstart Fox network, says “Simpsons” executive producer and showrunner Al Jean. “That was a changing of the guard in television.”
Soon the show was asking itself, “What can’t we do?” recalls David Silverman, who had recently been named the show’s supervising director. Celebrities wanted to guest-star on “our little cartoon show.”
The idea to get real ballplayers for “Homer at the Bat” sprang from the mind of the late Sam Simon, who co-created the show with Matt Groening and James L. Brooks. “The Simpsons” had previously landed such guest voices as Dustin Hoffman and Michael Jackson, but they didn’t voice cartoon versions of themselves. Early on, the show focused on fleshing out its core characters.
“Homer at the Bat” would center on how Burns backs his nuclear power plant’s company softball team. In a nod to the 1984 baseball film “The Natural,” the once-hapless squad begins winning thanks to surprise slugger Homer and his homemade Wonderbat. Once the team has a shot at a championship, though, Burns decides to bring in professional ringers — after handshaking on a $1 million bet with the owner of the rival power plant.
Simon was convinced that the show could attract major league talent. Jean recalls telling him, “We’ll never get them all.”
But Simon had a plan: Bring in the players one or two at a time, as they swung through town to play the region’s Dodgers and Angels. Acknowledges Jean: “He was pretty much right.”
Barry Bonds passed on being in the episode. So did Ryne Sandberg and Nolan Ryan, Jean says. But almost everyone else said yes. “Everybody loved ‘The Simpsons,’” a then-rare adult animated show in prime time, Boggs says. He nabbed the chance to play third for this Springfield of Dreams.
The show’s creatives draft-casted an entire starting nine: Mike Scioscia at catcher; Roger Clemens on the mound; Don Mattingly, Ozzie Smith and Steve Sax joining Boggs in the infield; plus Ken Griffey Jr., José Canseco and Darryl Strawberry roaming the outfield. (Strawberry replaced Homer in right field — a rivalry that became fertile turf for one-liners, tears and Simpson family heckling.)
The “Simpsons” offices had their share of sports geeks, some of whom were in fantasy leagues. One was the episode’s director, Jim Reardon, a die-hard Red Sox fan who played APBA baseball board games while young. Co-creator Brooks has fond memories of attending Dodgers games at Ebbets Field, and the episode’s writer, John Swartzwelder, lovingly tucked in references to such stars of yestercentury as Cap Anson and Jim Creighton. When Burns asks whether he can get such players as Creighton as ringers, he’s told the sport’s first true star has been dead since 1862. Says Silverman: “It was a breakout episode for Burns,” who “sometimes has one foot in the Dickensian universe.”
A crucial unknown, though, was how the guest athletes would deliver as voice actors. This with a script that had “a checkered history,” says Jean, noting that the first table read — without any ballplayers around — elicited little laughter. “It was a bomb. You could hear a pin drop.”
Jean can smile now about how he and Mike Reiss, his co-showrunner at the time, reacted: “We thought we were going to get fired.”
Yet somehow, bringing in the athletes helped the episode find its energy. “You sense the fun of the ballplayers in it,” Brooks says. “That above everything makes the show special — because it was a risk for them, and it somehow translated.”
Many recording sessions crackled with mutual admiration. Jean remembers Ozzie Smith being accompanied by a son who did an impression of Bart; and Reardon recalls Ken Griffey Sr., still an active player at the time, wanting to meet Homer. Dan Castellaneta, a Chicago Cubs fan, broke into his Homer voice upon meeting the veteran, as if calling a Griffey home run at Wrigley Field in the ’70s.
The “Simpsons” creatives vocally coached the players, such as when clearing up Griffey Jr.’s seeming confusion over his line while guzzling brain-and-nerve tonic: “Wow! It’s like there’s a party in my mouth and everyone’s invited.”
“Their readings were fantastic — they’re all funny, and they all got the jokes,” Silverman says. “And the natural, non-actorly flatness enhanced it.”
“Homer at the Bat” presented another fresh challenge: how to caricature so many real people within the show’s visual aesthetic. This episode, Silverman says, confirmed that the show “could Simpson-ize celebrities" after an earlier guest appearance by Magic Johnson.
In a similar vein, Reardon says his “biggest job was trying to pull off the baseball scenes as accurately as we could,” including the angle of a swing and the mechanics of a double play. “We did it fairly representatively,” the director says, to “make it as real as we could in a world of jawless yellow people.”
Sax, the former Dodgers and Yankees infielder, says he could envision how the caricatures would look, given the house style. “And they buffed me up a little bit,” Sax says of his “Simpsons” physique, “which I was thankful for.”
The show also had fun with the design of Ozzie Smith’s character, who dresses like the ultimate tourist. “He’s known for being very stylish and fashionable,” Reardon says, “so basically, Mike and Al said: ‘Put him in the tackiest Hawaiian shirts, black socks and sandals.’ ”
Boggs found his character’s design to be amusing, but he scores one aspect as an error. “I guess they thought I was left-handed, because in the picture with all of us, I’m holding a glove in my right hand,” says the former third baseman. “That’s the blooper of the cartoon.”
As the episode’s championship game approaches, Burns tempts the wrath of the softball gods by declaring there’s no way misfortune could simultaneously befall all his ringers. Cut to a series of ill events for eight of them, including Scioscia (radiation poisoning from working at the power plant), Smith (a tumble into another dimension), Griffey Jr. (cranial gigantism) and Sax (a police traffic stop gone wrong).
“That’s the way it goes in cartoon land, right?” a laughing Sax says by phone from the Sacramento area — noting how his character, as a Yankee, is “held responsible for every unsolved murder in New York” and winds up behind bars. “I just thought it was hilarious.” (Sax liked the experience so much that he recently had Jean on his podcast, “Sax in the Morning.”)
Boggs’s character doesn’t make the big game because of political fisticuffs at Moe’s Tavern; town drunk Barney Gumble throws blows while insisting that Boggs’s pick for best Brit prime minister, Pitt the Elder, could never govern as well as his man Lord Palmerston. “I kind of questioned getting punched out in a bar — it wasn’t one of those typecast kind of things,” Boggs says now.
Boggs was more baffled, though, because his real-life nickname was “Chicken Man” — given his superstitious game-day routine of eating poultry — yet it was the hypnotized Clemens character who is sidelined when he starts behaving like livestock. “If anyone was going to cluck around like a chicken, that would have been me — that was another way they dropped the ball,” says an amused Boggs, adding: “But it worked out great.”
The “Simpsons” creatives point out that only one player demanded a script change. The Canseco character was originally written as a Lothario — inspired by the 1988 film “Bull Durham” — before word came from the Canseco camp: “He called and said, ‘I’m not going to do it unless you change it.’ ” recounts Jean. They scrambled at the 11th hour to turn Canseco into a good Samaritan who performs an exhausting fire rescue. (Canseco did not respond to a request for comment.)
Perhaps the oddest twist, though, was the fate of Mattingly. Burns kicks his character off the team because of Mattingly’s supposed long sideburns. Jean says the bit was inspired by his own grandfather’s insistence that his young store workers “get a haircut.” The Mattingly character shaves off much of his hair but is still booted from the squad. Burns may not know quite what sideburns are, yet Mattingly’s character nails his exit line: “I still like him better than Steinbrenner.”
Not long after Mattingly recorded his “Simpsons” session in 1991, Jean says, the ballplayer was fined and benched by Yankee management for refusing to cut his mullet, per team policy. By the time the episode aired, the showrunner says, many viewers presumed the Mattingly character’s arc was parodying the headlines, rather than foreseeing the fluffy kerfuffle.
Says Jean now: “It was ‘The Simpsons’ ’ first prediction.”
Capping the episode was a parody of the 1981 Terry Cashman hit, “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey & the Duke)” — titled “Talkin’ Softball” with new lyrics by the show’s Jeff Martin and sung by Cashman — that summoned a sepia-toned “nostalgia for this ridiculous episode,” Jean says.
Fan affection for the episode increased over the years, till upon its 25th anniversary, “Homer at the Bat” spawned a Fox Sports mockumentary, as well as a day of tribute at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Jean and Reardon were among the “Simpsons” contingent in Cooperstown, N.Y., that day — along with Boggs, Smith and Sax — as Homer was “inducted,” and the episode was featured in a “Simpsons” exhibit. “I know Wade Boggs is in the Hall of Fame,” Sax says wryly, “but now I can say I’m in the Hall of Fame, too.”
So would a reunion episode ever be in the offing from “The Simpsons,” now in its record-breaking 33rd season? “I think it would be a novelty to have us all get back together and do one last episode,” Boggs says. “Homer’s getting up in age now — I don’t know if he can do the great things that he’s done — but we can carry Homer.”
