Perhaps Rob Parker was right – maybe the good David Ortiz
isn’t going to walk through that door again.
Physically, sure, but psychologically?
That’s not our Papi.
And that terrifies me.
We touched on Big Papi’s Big Blowup in the Morning Dump. Trust me, I’m not trying to sensationalize
this story by bringing it up again, but I think it’s worth looking at further. In better times, if you had told me Ortiz exploded
his venom all over the press corp I would never have believed it. It just wasn’t in his character. Even tough questions were batted back with
his charismatic smile and a well-placed joke.
He was not only approachable, he was lovable. He was able to perfectly balance the enormous
pressures resting on his shoulders with the sense that baseball is truly just a
game. Sure, he had his ups and downs,
but he owned Boston and Boston had his back.
Revisiting a link from our Morning Dump, our old friend
Gordon Edes took an excellent look at Papi and shed some light on what may have
triggered the outburst over at EspnBoston.com:
Tuesday night, it all became too
much for David Ortiz. Behind his Big Papi persona, Ortiz in happier days would
have mocked his inquisitors with good-natured insults and deflected the tougher
questions with insouciant bravado and brio.
On the blowup itself:
Of course, it's grossly unfair to
raise the specter of that misery returning based on seven hitless at-bats in
the season's first two games. But when the question did come, when Ortiz was
reminded that last season's start would be a topic du jour, he reacted with
fury.
"Good," he said, turning
to face the reporters encircling him. "You guys wait 'til [expletive]
happens, then you can talk [expletive]. Two [expletive] games, and already you
[expletives] are going crazy.
Youk, always the voice of reason, put the whole ordeal into
perspective:
"That's something you've got
to ask him," said first baseman Kevin Youkilis, who was unaware of Ortiz's
outburst. "If David's getting frustrated about it, that's something I
haven't seen. I think he gets frustrated when he's going good and getting outs
too.
"We're all like that. I don't
know. He's going to be fine. He's going to hit in the end. Two games, I know
people are going to put pressure on him because of what happened last year, but
he'll bounce out of it."
"All it takes is a couple of
bloops, a couple of line drives, to fall in and he's 4-for-4," Youkilis
said. "When he's hitting line drives to right field and center field and
left field, that's when he's going well. He just has to go up there and have
good at-bats. He'll be fine."
Mike Cameron chimed in with this excellent nugget. One I hope he shared directly with David last
night:
"Times like this, he has to
remember there are a lot of good players around him."
Two games is a terrible sample-size to judge anybody by, so this
really should be a non-issue. In fact,
Ortiz shouldn’t have been batting against CC regardless, so we shouldn’t count
those at-bats against him.
The old Ortiz would’ve recognized this, cracked a joke about
facing a lefty and assured his fans and teammates that he’d get ‘em next
time. He most definitely wouldn’t have
angrily dropped the MF’er on the press.
It’s been said that Hope Springs Eternal. The beauty of baseball is that each Opening
Day brings with it a clean slate and the thought that This Is Our Year. Unfortunately, it looks like Papi is still
lugging around last year’s baggage, and it may be a tad bit too heavy for him
to carry.
Assuming Francona throws him out there against Pettite
tonight, here’s hoping David jacks one out of the park and rounds third with
his trademark grin. I’d love nothing
more than this whole post to have been a gigantic waste of mine, and your time. My worries
completely unfounded.
Please David, make that happen.
