Why This Yankee Fan Agrees With David Ortiz

It pains me to write this, but I actually found myself cheering on Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz this week. No, it wasn’t for anything on the field, but for his very valid gripes about the press.

Since Ortiz has gone all of two games without a hit,  the DH had to deal with the entire Boston press corps Tuesday night interrogating him about those 0-for-7 numbers. And the usually jovial slugger was not happy about it:

“It’s not time to worry about that [stuff], not yet,” said Ortiz. “Look, dog, I’m not talking.”

For a very short period after that, Ortiz did talk, displaying some frustration toward the media.

“There’s … 160 games left,” said a near incredulous Ortiz. “[People] are going crazy. What’s up with that, man?

What’s up with that, indeed?

All too frequently, the media likes to make it as if baseball fans – particularly New York and Boston ones – are overly demanding. But as anybody who reads the papers knows, the reality is that it’s the media, not the fans, who try to make such drama over the first few games.

Like New York Post baseball columnist Joel Sherman. He suggested that new Yankee center fielder Curtis Granderson, who hit a home run in his very first at bat as a Yankee,  failed in that very same game because he didn’t get a game-winning hit off Jonathan Papelbon, only one of the best closers in the game.

This wasn’t the first time Sherman made such a snap judgment. Last year, Sherman chastised Mark Teixeira and CC Sabathia for their lousy Opening Day performances, writing that “no one wants to make a bad first impression as a Yankee because the hole is always a little deeper, so deep that many never truly escape.” Yes, because Game 1 made such a difference in the way those two players were perceived in New York, right?

Or the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy, who declared in Wednesday’s paper, after seven at-bats this season, that David Ortiz’s career is over:

The David Ortiz Dilemma is real. Big Papi went 0 for 4 last night and is hitless in the first two games. He made the final out of three innings. He struck out miserably with a man on second and two outs when the game was tied, 4-4, in the fifth.

Ortiz is going to be a thorn in the side of Terry Francona unless he starts hitting. If we could extract emotion and loyalty from the equation, Ortiz would not have started the opener against CC Sabathia and he would not start tonight against Andy Pettitte. Granted, Ortiz has good lifetime numbers against Pettitte (18 for 49, .367, 1 homer, 10 RBIs) but that was then and this is now.

Ortiz can’t hit lefties anymore. He says he has nothing to prove. He’s wrong. He says he’s going to be here next year. Wrong again. We love the Big Fella, but it looks very much like it’s over.

A few points:

* Ortiz only drove in 18 runs in the first two months of 2009. He didn’t hit a homer last year until May 20. His 2009 batting average was just .238. Yet he still finished with 28 homers, and 99 RBIs, and an OBP of .332.  His career wasn’t over then, and it’s not over now, not after two games.

* Last year, Ortiz went two-for-five (.400) with three walks and three RBI in nine plate appearances against Pettitte. So much for that was then, and this is now. Oh, and Pettitte is a lefty.

* As for Shaughnessy suggesting that Ortiz should have sat on Opening Day vs. Sabathia, Ortiz actually hit slightly better against the lefty last year than his batting averages against the rest of MLB (.250 vs .238), with a similar on-base percentage (.333 vs .332.)

Shaughnessy isn’t the only Boston sportswriter to read such gloom and doom into just two games.  Although the Boston Herald’s Steve Buckley acknowledges it’s still early, he also wonders, “If Ortiz struggles in the early going, how long can the Red Sox afford to wait? All of April? Deep into May?”

“Big Papi under siege is a wounded animal,” writes ESPN.com’s Gordon Edes about Ortiz:

Surely, Ortiz had to have known that it would be open season on him until he proved once and for all that talk of the six-week homerless drought that comprised his dreadful start last season was not worth resurrecting in 2010.

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..

While I do think the media gave Ortiz  too much of a pass last year about him reportedly testing positive for PEDs in 2003, they are being way too harsh on him now

If this is mid-May, and Ortiz is still struggling, maybe it’s time to start the whispers about his career being over. But given the way he turned around his season last year, and given how cooperative and friendly he has been with the press for his career, Ortiz should have earned more than one game of goodwill before the media started writing his obituary.  Even this Yankee fan can see that.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons