David Ortiz tosses his bat as he watches the flight of his three-run home run in the fifth inning of a baseball game against the Detroit Tigers at Fenway Park. AP Photo
Although we’ll see at least another week or so of baseball, Sunday represents the last regular-season game David Ortiz will play — unless he does an about-face.
There is no question that Ortiz is among the two or three most significant baseball players of his own era, even taking into consideration that he’s primarily a designated hitter.
Let’s not minimize this. As a DH, Ortiz is not at risk to suffer the injuries one can accumulate diving for ground balls or running into walls. He hasn’t had to put a bad error behind him in time to get up and hit. These are all formidable challenges in baseball.
Ortiz didn’t have to play first base very often during his career … only in three World Series and a handful of games in National League parks during the season. Though to be fair, his defense didn’t hurt the club, and it may have even helped it in 2004 when he threw to third in time to nail St. Louis pitcher Jeff Suppan.
As Perry Mason might have said, all of the above is irrelevant. Sports are not measured exclusively by statistics. They are so much more than that. Our best athletes are also transcendent figures. They don’t just get enough hits for a .300 average, or run for 100 yards a game routinely. They do these things when they matter most. They hit grand slams in the late innings when their team is behind by four runs. They lead their teams on two fourth-quarter drives en route to winning the Super Bowl. They do what David Ortiz did in the 2013 ALCS, and what Tom Brady did against Seattle.
The best athletes lift you out of your seats and leave you with your mouth open in awe. How many times did Michael Jordan do something totally, outrageously impossible while he was leading the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships? How many deadly-clutch shots did Larry Bird hit?
Baseball is unique to other sports in that it has a well-chronicled past, and its legends of that past seem to grow in stature as the years pass. If you were to measure the legend of Babe Ruth in feet and inches, he’d be about 15 feet tall by now. And until Jordan came along, The Babe was the consensus pick as the No. 1 athlete of the 20th century.
But in an end-of-the-century poll done by the Boston Globe, The Babe was No. 2, and Jordan was No. 1. And he was runner-up to Willie Mays as best all-time baseball player.
Why? Because the legends cast such a huge shadow that we miss the obvious when it appears right before our own eyes. Ortiz willed the Red Sox to that 2013 world championship. He certainly had a huge hand in the other two as well, but as literally as you can possibly make it, he carried the Red Sox to that third one. He was the very definition of a transcendent figure — which is defined as a person “going beyond the limits of ordinary experience.” And that’s what makes the legends legendary.
The Red Sox have had, in my lifetime, five such players: Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Ortiz. I shouldn’t count Williams as being of my lifetime because I was only 7 years old when he retired in 1960. However, he is central to this discussion.
Ted Williams has always been the consensus pick as the best Red Sox player of all-time. There’s never, ever been a serious debate, even though there are those who feel Yastrzemski should have the honor.
At the very least, there should be more debate. For all Williams’ greatness, he won the fewest American League pennants of the three: one. Yastrzemski won two, and Ortiz three (with the possibility of one more).
Williams has the gaudy stats: the last player to hit .400, and the .344 lifetime batting average. But is he the greatest hitter who ever lived based solely on those statistics, or is it because that’s what he kept telling everybody until it became an unimpeachable truth?
I didn’t see Williams in his prime, but even with his .406 season, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with any player who had a more important year than Yastrzemski did in 1967 when his transcendence willed the Red Sox to an almost-worst-to-first for the ages … or, at least, for two years, when the ‘69 Mets pulled it off.
I tend to measure athletes as “the sum of their parts.” So, I measure Williams’ hitting feats against the fact that the Red Sox won just one pennant during his career, and that he batted under .200 in the World Series, which the club lost.
Yastrzemski fared better, and 1967 is, almost 50 years later, mythical. But Yaz, too, missed the prize.
We in Boston are, right now, living in an era that has been rich in championships. We no longer have to celebrate the “almost” as something sacred, even if those “almosts” were thrilling. We’ve had enough of the real thing, with four Super Bowl titles, three World Series championships, and an NBA title and Stanley Cup each, that all future exploits must be measured through that prism.
Ortiz’s teams not only won three world championships, he was a, if not the, central figure in at least two of them. He knocked in the winning run in two of the four games in the ALCS win against the Yankees in 2004, and, well, 2013 was only three years ago. Suffice it to say, no Big Papi, No Boston Strong World Championship.
Ted Williams has a tunnel, David Ortiz will get a bridge. But as he rides off into the sunset, he will leave, at the moment, as the best player in Red Sox history.