This column originally ran in The Standard-Times on Aug. 24, 2014.
David Ortiz, the saving grace of your 2014 Red Sox
By Nick Tavares
What's a home run worth in a lost season?
Wednesday night was another Red Sox defeat, an 8-3 stumble doomed by Clay Buchholz's five-run fifth inning. It's been a rough season, and this wasn't a surprise, because last place doesn't happen by accident.
But before that, there was a little promise. Runs were scored in the first and second innings, and a solo home run by David Ortiz made it 3-0 before the wheels fell off. That homer was his 30th of the season, matching his 2013 total and raising his career number to 461.
These weird seasons that wind up lost to the standings aren't rare, and baseball is usually interesting enough to stay entertaining even when the team in your TV market is in the doldrums. There are the prospects to watch for the future, there's the simple pleasure of just enjoying a game and, sometimes, there's history. Ortiz is providing the latter by the fistful.
First, there's the continued production. At 38 and holding onto the DH slot for a 12th season, he's leading the team in home runs, RBI, and OPS, with no one else really threatening him in any of those categories.
Except for slow starts to the 2009 and '10 seasons, this has become the norm for Ortiz in his Boston tenure, and because of that, it's easy to take his continued presence for granted. The culture of sports radio boredom is to jump on any aberration and turn it annoying — contract talks, a glib answer to a reporter, etc. — in an effort to make things interesting, I suppose.
The most interesting part of baseball, though, is the baseball itself. And for the kind of player Ortiz is — a middle-of-the-order power threat without a glove to speak of — that he's kept this up this long is a generational phenomenon. And it's reflected in his career tallies.
As of Saturday morning, he's sitting comfortably in third place on the Sox' home run list with 403, behind Ted Williams (521) and Carl Yastrzemski (452). He's fifth on the walks list with 965, trailing Williams, Yastrzemski, Dwight Evans and Wade Boggs.
Going deeper, he sits fourth all time in slugging percentage at .568, with more at-bats than anyone on the list except Williams (first, .634) and Jim Rice (ninth, .502). If RBIs are your thing, he's fifth on that list, too, with 1,284, behind Yaz, Williams, Rice and Evans.
It's not the numbers or the rankings, though, which matter as much as the fact that Ortiz is constantly in this conversation, butting up against names like Williams and Yastrzemski, and he's still not washed up. He's hitting and adding to this already historic resume.
Growing up with the Red Sox more often bad than good, the continuing history of the game kept me as tuned in as anything. It was a little more of a stretch in the early 1990s, wondering where Mike Greenwell fit in the left field legacy and if Scott Cooper could be the next great Red Sox rookie infielder.
But it kept me glued to the record book (I literally had a book), watching how seasons stacked up, where players would land and where they fit with the greats of the past.
As a kid, this season would've been easy. The season unfolds, players are traded and the losses pile up, but watching Ortiz would've been a saving grace as he tacked hits, runs and homers onto his own record book.
The names "Williams" and "Yastrzemski" are the two constants in every Red Sox history lesson. They, too, got their share of unwarranted grief from reporters, and they also did their part to keep otherwise bad Red Sox teams interesting.
Ortiz hasn't had to do much of that in his career, but he's doing it this year. And as cool as his statue will one day be on Van Ness Street next to Ted and Yaz, it's much more fun to watch him make history in the present.
Nick Tavares' column appears Sundays in The Standard-Times and at SouthCoastToday.com. He can be reached at nick@nicktavares.com