It wasn't easy to believe David Ortiz could keep Father Time out of his lineup as June 10 arrived and he had 6 homers; with an anemic batting average and on-base percentage, he looked too much his age. Two days past three months later, it's almost as difficult to believe he joined the 500 home run club with two downtowners on a fine Saturday night in St. Petersburg, where the Red Sox and the Rays played en route to merely finishing the string.
But there Big Papi was, facing Rays starter Matt Moore twice in five innings. In the top of the first, with Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts aboard on a pair of infield singles, Ortiz jerked a 3-run homer. In the top of the fifth, he stood in to open the frame, fouled off a second strike for a 2-2 count, then hit the fifth pitch out.
On a day when he led a Red Sox power display the milestone mash made it 8-0, Red Sox, which enabled Boston starter Rick Porcello to just relax and pitch his game, even if he did surrender a 2-out, 2-run homer to John Jaso to interrupt his striking out the side otherwise in the bottom of the inning. Porcello could even afford to serve up an RBI double to Luke Maile in the bottom of the seventh.
In a season in which nothing much else went right for the Red Sox and their manager was knocked out of action to fight a battle with lymphoma, Ortiz's milestone would probably stand as the number one highlight of their second straight plummet to the bottom after that surrealistic World Series triumph in 2013.
His surge since June 10 has been staggering, with 28 bombs in 273 at-bats, a surge that at his point in life has probably been equaled only by Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron before him. He's also the third Red Sox — Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx are the others — to hit his 500th in a Red Sox uniform, though only Williams hit all 521 of his bombs for the Olde Towne Team.
And the Red Sox needed all the morale boosts they could get.
Their big offseason free agency signings, Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez, have proven problematic to put it most politely. Their inability to land a genuine pitching ace has hurt. General manager Ben Cherington essentially fired himself when the front office brought aboard Dave Dombrowski, the freshly-executed Detroit GM, to oversee baseball operations. Winning ten of their last fifteen has brightened things somewhat, but only that.
Ortiz reaching the 500-bomb milestone in the first five innings of Saturday's game turned the brightening into blinding light.
Against the left-handed Moore, Ortiz in the top of the first followed a fastball tailing back over the plate from the inside and parked it about six rows up the right field seats. Opening the top of the fifth, he measured a slightly inside curve ball with just enough hang to hit to the rear end of those seats.
It was a triumph for a veteran whose early season saw him struggling mechanically, seeming a little sluggish when facing fastballs and unable to wait on breaking balls, before he simply reversed the order, jumping as best a 39-year-old hitter could jump on good fastballs and reminding himself the virtue of patience on the breaking stuff.
This is a man who shook off a leaked positive test for an actual or alleged performance-enhancing substance — he has argued long since, and plausibly, that it came in an over-the-counter supplement he tried, which has been known to happen, and sees his continuous negative tests since as a kind of coarse badge of pride — and hammers himself to produce.
Ever since he signed with the Red Sox after the Twins, his second organization (they found him from somewhere in the Mariners' organization), gave up on the hefty fellow with the obvious, but undisciplined power, Ortiz has motivated himself with work and a few unique incentives.
One was his fury at the Twins' mishandling of him; though scattered wrist and knee injuries played a hand, Ortiz was a booming slugger who didn't fit the small-ball-obsessed Twins of the early 2000s. A second was his original arrival with the Red Sox, during which he seemed unable to find a place until he demanded a trade and Theo Epstein, then the general manager, promised him something was in the works.
Indeed. Within days Epstein sent Shea Hillenbrand — disgruntled over being displaced at third base by Bill Mueller — to Arizona for pitcher Byung-Hyun Kim. The best thing about that ill-fated trade was the opening it left for Ortiz to take title to the Red Sox's DH slot. He hasn't yielded since.
His other in-game motivations include feeding off fan reaction positive and negative, as he noted in a Players Tribune essay four months ago:
"Physically, I was always a bull. But I learned to play the game with my head and my heart and my balls. I got smarter. I got mentally tougher. I used to have a trick every time we went into Yankee Stadium, especially in the playoffs. I'd walk out to the on-deck circle and look into the crowd and pick out the craziest guys there. I'd find the ones that were screaming all kinds of stuff at me, and I'd look them right in the eyes. It was like a game — see who blinks first. Then I'd turn to my dugout and say, "Hey, watch this. I'm gonna hit this one to the choo-choo train."
"One night I hit a home run and when I was rounding third base I found these two guys in the stands who had been screaming at me," he continued. "And they were literally fighting. The one guy was yelling, 'Why the f*** did you piss him off, man?"
"I became a great hitter because of my mental preparation. This is a thinking man's game. You can be the strongest dude alive and you're not going to be able to hit a sinker with 40,000 people screaming at you. That's what really makes me mad when I think about the way I will be remembered. They're only going to remember my power. They're not going to remember the hours and hours and hours of work in the film room. They're not going to remember the BP. They're not going to remember me for my intelligence. Despite all I've done in this game, I'm just the big DH from the Dominican. They turn you into a character, man."
Ortiz has never exactly minded being a character, but he'd prefer you balance that with the work ethic. Baseball is a thinking person's game. It requires serious work for play, never mind how many people still think you have nothing to do but show up at the ballpark, put on the uniform, and play for nine innings. The work has become more sophisticated since the end of World War II, but even then the play required work, and lots of it.
David Ortiz would like nothing more than that you remember how easy it isn't to just step in against bullet train fastballs and parabolic curve balls and hit them, to the choo-choo train or even just off the Green Monster. And while you're at it, give a nod to his late mother, whom he lost in 2002, his final season in Minnesota.
"Losing her was something I couldn't figure out at the time," he told Sports Illustrated in 2006. "I was, like, lost and confused. When things weren't going good, she would always say, 'Son, you're always going to be my baby boy. Keep fighting. I love you.' Now, even though I don't have that voice, I feel that spirit to fight back when times are tough. My mom, she's still always there for me. Always."
Rest assured that Angela Rose Ortiz was there when Big Papi dropped the bombs in St. Pete Saturday. This one was easy. (Sort of. Only one other man in baseball history has hit Nos. 499 and 500 in the same game — Albert Pujols.) She's pulled her baby boy through plenty of tougher ones.
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