BOSTON — Yeah, that Green Monster was nice.
“Oh, (expletive),” Xander Bogaerts said this week, smiling wide as he recalled what he loved about Fenway Park. “I mean, the left field helps, you know. I can tell you that. I’ve had a couple balls here that would have been a couple more doubles.”
At least a dozen more, actually. And that is without actually trying to hit a ball high and deep to left field when he is in his home park now. Because he knows what happens to long fly balls in the heavy air on the San Diego Bay.
“It just dies here,” Bogaerts said.
He flashes back from time to time to what happens west of Back Bay, in the old ballpark with the 37-foot-high green wall that runs from the left field foul pole, 310 feet from home plate, to the center field flag pole.
One such reminder came Saturday, when Nick Castellanos hit a fly ball that traveled 68 feet high before landing approximately 364 feet from home plate in the glove of Tigers left fielder Riley Greene in front of the wall at Petco Park.
“That would have been on Lansdowne,” Boagerts said of the street that runs parallel to the Green Monster and hardly 50 feet beyond it.
Bogaerts returns to Fenway Park this weekend for the second time with his new team to play the Red Sox, the team that signed him when he was 16 and with which he played a decade in the major leagues and won two World Series rings.
It will be the first time he has a chance to hit a ball off (or over) the Green Monster in a different uniform. He was on the injured list with a fractured shoulder when the Padres visited Fenway Park in June 2024.
Before the first game of that series, a tribute played on the video board and Bogaerts received a warm and sustained standing ovation.
“That was pretty sweet,” Bogaerts recalled. “It was a nice time to soak it all in, because I wasn’t playing. I was hurt, and you wouldn’t want to get too distracted while playing.”
Xander Bogaerts standing ovation and video tribute In his return to Fenway #padres pic.twitter.com/BSpwDVNJ0x
— Allison Edmonds (@aedmondstv) June 28, 2024
Rafael Devers, now with the San Francisco Giants and then with the Red Sox, as he was for six seasons alongside Bogaerts on the left side of the infield, recalled that moment in ‘24.
“I see that, and I feel like he needed that,” Devers said this week.
It was good, Devers said, for Bogaerts to remember.
“Xander Bogaerts was very historic for that organization,” Devers said.
No one has played more games at shortstop in a Red Sox uniform than the 1,094 Bogaerts did from 2013 through ‘22.
He debuted at 20 years old on Aug. 20, 2013, and ended up hitting .296 in the postseason and starting all six games of the World Series, which the Red Sox won over another legacy franchise, the St. Louis Cardinals.
Five years later, he became one of eight players to have been part of at least two of Boston’s four World Series titles this century.
Before signing an 11-year, $280 million contract with the Padres in December 2022, Bogaerts was an All-Star five times, won four Silver Slugger Awards and hit .292 with an .814 OPS and 156 homers and 308 doubles.
From 2015 through ‘22, Bogaerts ranked 11th in the major leagues in WAR (33.9), eighth in batting average (.299), 16th in extra-base hits (435) and fifth in games started in the field (1,075).
That is not the player the Padres have gotten.
Bogaerts has dealt with freak injuries each of his three seasons with the Padres, and those maladies have served as markers dividing his on-field performance into practically equal parts good and bad.
He has been one of the Padres’ top offensive performers for portions of all three seasons with the team and an absolute albatross in the lineup for portions of all three seasons.
He still seeks a full campaign with the Padres as good as any of the seven he turned in over the eight-year period between 2015 and ‘22.
He has played just 408 of the Padres’ 492 games since the start of 2023 and is batting .270 with a .733 OPS in brown and gold.
He has been in San Diego a little more than a third as long as he was in Boston. But it feels like a long time.
“I was thinking about that the other day,” Bogaerts said on Tuesday. “Not the same amount of time, right? But maybe dealing with all my headaches, it feels like a lot longer — just the ups and downs, having the good and the bad.”
Just how recently Bogaerts arrived is revealed in his utter amazement that Petco Park was not always full.
In his mind, there is one great similarity between playing for the Red Sox and Padres:
Expectations.
For reference, one of those two teams played its first game in its home ballpark five days after the Titanic sank and has won nine World Series titles, including four of the past 22. The other team began playing in 1969 and has yet to win a championship.
Anyone who followed the Padres before the current decade remembers dozens of years between playoff appearances and crowds of 14,224 on a Tuesday.
“No sellout crowds?” Bogaerts said incredulously when regaled with a brief history of San Diego as a sports town, the Padres’ struggles on the field and in the shadow of the Chargers.
But Bogaerts began noticing the Padres in 2020, when he would catch their games on television after his ended on the East Coast, and he was intrigued by the “Slam Diego” vibe and a young shortstop who played like his dreadlocks were on fire. That year ended with the first of what has become four postseason appearances in six years, an unprecedented run in Padres history.
Bogaerts arrived in San Diego shortly after the Padres’ run to the 2022 NLCS. His first Padres team included Juan Soto, Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. Of the 246 games at Petco Park since Bogaerts joined the team, 193 have drawn at least 40,000 fans and none has had an announced attendance of lower than 29,581.
So, to him, the current version of the Padres and the fans that love them are all there have ever been.
And his take on the groups that follow the two teams might be shocking to those steeped in old tropes about the laid-back San Diego fan.
“I just think (San Diego) is just — the one thing that I like, and it can be a little frustrating, because I’ve been fortunate enough to play on two teams where we won,” he said. “Coming here, this is all that they want. I say ‘they’ because I wasn’t here before. Coming here, you notice right away — I don’t know if every little thing gets a little overblown, maybe. But why? It’s because they just want it so bad.
“In Boston, it’s like they’re just used to playoffs all the time. … You’ve won four times — 2004, ‘07, ‘13, ‘18. And here, they have never won. So you can see how much they want it. It’s just a lot of frustration for the fans. It’s different. Boston fans are more intense. But they still understand. I’m not bashing either fan base. It’s just a difference. And why is there a difference? Because in Boston, they have won, and here they have never won.
“You can feel here more like — desperate is a hard word to say — but just like a lot of years of frustration coming out. They want it bad. In Boston, they might want it, yeah. But here they want it bad, because they never had it.”
Bogaerts believes his legacy is tied up in the expectations.
He knows he has disappointed. He is supposed to be part of the appeal of the Padres, whose business strategy revolves around not only a beautiful ballpark and winning but in having big-name, exciting players. He has heard the boos and seen the criticism.
“It’s something to come to see,” Bogaerts said of the Padres’ star power. “And that’s why, when you don’t perform, that’s what you get.”
During spring training, almost as a throwaway line while talking about Bogaerts’ place in the lineup, Padres manager Craig Stammen said: “Xander is on track to be in the Hall of Fame.”
Where he laid a base for that in Boston, Bogaerts would need to finish his career like few players in their mid- and late 30s do in order to make it to Cooperstown.
He barely entertained the idea when Stammen’s comment was brought to his attention. Asked what he thought it would take, he shrugged and quickly rattled off some numbers.
And then he said: “And a championship here.”
