The perfect ending for David Ortiz is a farewell tour that we remember as a victory tour
At age 40, Big Papi remains the heart of the Red Sox and at the heart of the batting order.
David Ortiz looks back as he walks off a field after taking batting practice at a spring training workout in Fort Myers, Fla.
[fragment number=0] COMMENTARY
Being that it is the month that brought my sixth birthday, my recollections of November 1975 are a scattering of sepia-toned mental postcards. I remember the warm, loving presence of mom, my dad helping me race and sort my crate of Matchbox cars, our cat Mrs. Robinson, and the smell of our sweet new AMC Gremlin.
Remembrances of specific days from that time flittered away as soon as I closed my eyes each night. When you’re so young, you don’t know to cling to the memories, that you’ll hunger to revisit them again some day. But from what the trusty ol’ Internet can tell me, it seems like one day that month, Nov. 18, might have been pretty groovy.
If you turned your eyes toward the sky that Tuesday evening, you’d have seen a total lunar eclipse — or by cooler parlance, a blood moon — which can occur a couple of times a year or every couple of years. The cover of Sports Illustrated that week showed an image of a hockey brawl with the ominous headline, “A Violent Sport Turns Vicious.’’ Elton John’s “Island Girl’’ held off The Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes’’ for the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100. Somewhere in Belle, West Virginia, a future NBA point guard was born. Jason Williams would grow up to be known as White Chocolate and go on to a dazzling if unsteady 12-year NBA career.
Not a bad collection of notables for a random 24 hours, right? And that’s not all. White Chocolate wasn’t the most prominent athlete born that day under that blood moon. While Red Sox fans were surely still reliving and lamenting the outcome of the spectacular 1975 World Series played the month before, the man who would play a most prominent role in ending their decades-long championship drought arrived in the world. On Nov. 18, 1975, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the one and only David Americo (Arias) Ortiz was born.
My point of all of this? As usual, I don’t have one, but rather scattered fragments of one: Blood moons are far-out … White Chocolate was cool, too … Damn, the ‘70s were a long time ago … I wish I could go back for just a day (summer of ’78, please — just one day) … I’m nostalgic and so very ancient (did I mention Ken Griffey Jr. turned 6 a day after I did?) … And most relevant, David Ortiz, still the slugger who remains the heart of the Red Sox and the key man in the heart of their order, is a still active inspiration for nostalgia, ancient by professional athlete standards but hitting like his prime hasn’t already come and gone.
As Ortiz readies for what he says is his final season, there will be plenty of time for misty watercolor memories. He will accept cheesy parting gifts from all of the rivals he’s tormented through the years (you know Yankees fans will cheer him — they take pride in the perception of class). NESN will air reels upon reels of all of his highlights during his 14 franchise-altering seasons with the Red Sox. And if he hits like he usually does — say, if he sends 30 or so baseballs soaring toward the moon, blood or otherwise — we’ll hope he decides to stay a little longer, even if it means the farewell tour came a year too soon and the gifts must be sheepishly returned.
That’s what will be lost in all of the irresistable retrospectives on Ortiz’s career, which I presume will begin right around the delivery of the season’s first pitch. His past was wonderful, unprecedented in Red Sox lore when you consider his role in winning three championships in our [expletive] city.
He is worthy of every celebration and salute. But let’s not put him in the past just yet. Because the Red Sox need him in the moment.
The Red Sox should have a very capable lineup this year, especially if a few uncertainties break their way. Despite a last-place finish in the American League East, they were fourth in the AL in runs per game a season ago (4.72). Ortiz, who hit 37 homers with a .913 OPS, was an enormous part of that. So too were the Red Sox’ two best players: Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts. They were collectively outstanding in their mutual age-23 seasons, but it’s unfair to expect similar leaps in improvement this year. Without putting any remarkable possibilities past those two, I’m not expecting them to bound toward true superstardom just yet, either. If they match their performances of a year ago or incrementally improve upon them, that’s reasonable enough.
The rest of the lineup card could be filled out with a question mark after each name. Can Dustin Pedroia stay healthy? Will Hanley Ramirez hit for power beyond April this year? Does Pablo Sandoval have anything left? Can Jackie Bradley Jr., Rusney Castillo, and Blake Swihart hit with consistency?
Some of those questions will be answered in the affirmative. But not all of them. And the longer you ponder that lineup, the clearer the reality becomes: The Red Sox are depending on Ortiz to provide plenty of fireworks on his own farewell tour. He cannot start slow. And he cannot get hurt. This team needs him, still.
Maybe all of that adds up to a reasonable expectation. He looks like he’s in fantastic shape. (Perhaps Red Sox owner John Henry meant that Papi, and not Panda, had 17 percent body fat?) Various projection systems do like his chances of submitting a fine season. Dan Szymborski’s ZiPs projection at FanGraphs.com puts him at 30 homers with a .264/.350/.523 slash line. Baseball Prospectus’s Pecota has him at .278/.363/.513 with 31 homers. Using Tom Tango’s Marcels system, Baseball-Reference.com projects he’ll slash .265/.349/.513 with 30 homers.
I think we’d all accept any one of those projections right now as his final numbers if we could. I imagine he would too, because very few players in the history of baseball have even approached numbers like that after their 40th birthday.
Ortiz walloped 37 homers last season at age 39. Darrell Evans holds the record for homers by a player aged 40-plus with 34 for the ’87 Tigers. Only six players in history have hit more than 25 homers in a season at age 40 or older. Barry Bonds did it in 2006 an ‘07 at the height of his large-noggin freakishness.
Ortiz posted a .913 OPS last season in 614 plate appearances. Only five players have had an OPS above .900 and more than 450 plate appearances in a season at 40 or older. The first two such seasons on the list are the aforementioned absurd Bonds years. The others were authored by legends such as Stan Musial (.924, 1962, 41 years old), Ty Cobb (.921, 1927, age 40), Willie Mays (.907, 1971, age 40), and … well, this guy’s not quite a legend, but he was a first-ballot choice to the Hall of Very Good: Harold Baines (.919, 1999, age 40).
Ortiz drove in 108 runs last season. The record for RBIs in a season by a player 40 or older is that same number: Dave Winfield plated 108 runners for the ’92 Blue Jays, at age 40.
That’s not just a similarity. It’s the ideal outcome, for only a cursory inspection of his Baseball-reference.com page is required to recognize that replicating Winfield’s ’92 season would be one hell of a final act for Ortiz.
Winfield hit 26 homers, so his power remained intact. He had 676 plate appearances, so his body remained intact. He finished fifth in the MVP balloting, so his importance and reputation remained intact.
Oh, and this: Winfield doubled in the go-ahead runs in the 11th inning of the sixth game of the World Series, giving the Blue Jays a 4-2 lead in a game they would win 4-3, clinching their first of back-to-back titles.
Yeah, I’d say a similar age-40 season would be the perfect walk-off into the sunset for Ortiz. He arrived in the world in 1975, a month after an unforgettable Red Sox thrill ride ended with defeat in the final scene. He arrived in Boston in April 2003, and after one more round of suffering for Red Sox fans that October, he led the charge to make sure everything changed the next fall.
Wouldn’t it be fitting if, after he has taken his final casual trot around the bases, Ortiz’s farewell tour is better remembered as a victory tour?
It would be one more among those David Ortiz memories that we know to clutch forever.
Chad Finn can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeChadFinn.
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