Wade Boggs was overwhelmingly elected to baseball's Hall of Fame on Tuesday, and it figures. Baseball is in Boggs' blood; he's related to Abner Doubleday. After receiving the third-highest vote total in history, the 3,010-hit machine revealed he's a seventh-generation removed blood-related cousin of Doubleday, the alleged inventor of baseball.
's why Boggs had an eerie feeling when he played twice on the sacred turf of Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, N.Y., as a member of the Boston Red Sox, or when as a giddy teenage minor leaguer in 1976 he walked through the museum's hallowed walls.
Doubleday (1819-1893) is credited with inventing the rules for baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. Boggs' sister, Ann Morrison, studied the family tree and discovered the family link about 10 years ago.
"She went to a genealogist trying to see how far our family tree could go back," Boggs said Tuesday. "It wound up we're blood-related on my grandmother's side with Abner Doubleday. That was kind of neat to see someone who had an influence on baseball actually had an influence of me having it as an occupation."
