Why David Ortiz has more in common with Sandy Koufax than Ted Williams

What's this .097 hitter have in common with Ortiz?

He's not a pitcher, he's not a Dodger, but the final months of David Ortiz's career are more closely mirroring those of Sandy Koufax than Ted Williams.

Long before Ortiz hit his 522nd lifetime home run on July 1 to pass the total hit by Williams, people were linking the two Red Sox icons. No less an authority than Carl Yastrzemski has called them the two greatest players in franchise history, and all but die-hard Yaz fans would agree.

When it comes to swan songs, however, the comparisons don't measure up. Ted played his final year for a moribund Red Sox team that finished 7th in the American League, and his 29 homers and .316 average meant nothing beyond padding his Hall of Fame statistics. He gave fans some final thrills at age 42 -- including, famously, a bullpen blast in his last at-bat -- but the Fenway stands that day and many others were largely empty.

Pressure? For Williams, in 1960, there was none.

Less than 11,000 saw Ted's last HR live.

Ortiz is playing under far different circumstances. The Red Sox near the All-Star break in the thick of the AL East and Wild Card races, meaning each Big Papi hit -- even, in one memorable case, a game-saving triple -- has far more importance. On a team filled with budding superstars, it is still Ortiz opposing pitchers fear most in crunch time. Fenway is regularly jammed to capacity with demanding Boston fans.

Whereas Williams was truly a lion in winter during his final season, emerging from hibernation to accumulate just 310 at-bats, Ortiz is playing nearly every day and leads the AL in OPS. True, he has yet to take the field on defense, but what he's doing at the plate is still remarkable for a 40-year-old. One could make a strong argument that Big Papi has been the league MVP over the first half-sesaon, and he is slated to start at DH for the AL in next week's All-Star Game.

It's enough to make a guy change his mind about retirement, but Ortiz insists that won't be the case. He is too proud and too smart to chance playing one year too long and leaving fans with a less-then-flattering image of a .220, 12-homer campaign. Plus, in addition to the normal aches that can hamper a ballplayer of his age and size, he has severe pain in his feet  that clubhouse onlookers confirm he hides behind his gregarious persona.

Here's where Koufax comes in.

Fifty years ago, the Dodgers hurler dubbed "The Left Hand of God" faced his own physical challenges. Although the he was just 30 in 1966, Koufax's arthritic left elbow caused him constant pain on and off the mound. His arm remained bent at a 22.5-degree angle between starts, and he had suits specially tailored to hide the deformity, Doctors warned him that he could permanently damage his arm by continuing to hurl 300 innings a year.

Koufax on ice -- a common occurrence in '66. 

But, like this year's Red Sox, the Los Angeles Dodgers of '66 were a contending team -- in fact, the defending World Series champs -- in a tight pennant race. There were other strong players on the club, and two future Hall of Fame pitchers in Don Drysdale and rookie Don Sutton behind him in the rotation, but Sandy was clearly the star. As with Ortiz, nobody performed better when the pressure was greatest.

This stayed true down the stretch in '66. The pain never lessened, but Koufax kept winning -- going 8-2 with an 1.78 ERA and 8 complete games in his final 11 starts. On the last day of the season, with the National League championship on the line, he beat Phillies ace Jim Bunning with a 10-strikeout performance on two days rest.

In addition to helping the Dodgers to the World Series, where they lost to Baltimore, Koufax led the league in wins (at 27-9), ERA (1.73), strikeouts (317), Bar Mitzvah invitations, and marriage proposals. He won his third Cy Young Award in four years, and only a career season from Roberto Clemente denied Sandy NL MVP honors as well.

Then, shocking the sports world, Koufax walked away. In a hastily called press conference, he stated that "I've got a lot of years to live after baseball and I would like to live them with the complete use of my body."

There will be no such surprise announcement from Ortiz. Everybody knows he is retiring. But, like Koufax, and unlike Williams, Big Papi is doing so on a team that could very well be playing important games in September -- and maybe October.

In the end, that's far more important than any home run.

Will Ortiz's last season also end with bunting?

The 1975 Red Sox helped save baseball -- and my childhood

Forty years ago tonight the Red Sox and Reds played what is routinely cited as one of the greatest games in sports history. Filled with high drama and compelling characters, Game 6 of the 1975 World Series set TV viewership records and jump-started baseball's popularity -- which had waned with the rise of the NFL and Monday Night Football.

Some say Game 6 saved the National Pastime. It definitely helped save me.

I was in the stands at Fenway that cold October evening, and wish I remembered it better. It was well past an 8-year-old's bedtime, and most of my recollections of the evening revolve around the pregame -- when I joined the multitudes shouting "Looie! Looie!" into cardboard megaphones as we watched ace Luis Tiant warm up in the Boston bullpen -- and the climax -- lots of screaming, hugging, and organ playing after Carlton Fisk's shot to left field banged off the foul pole for a game-winning homer.

The 7-6 Red Sox win only temporarily staved off a Cincinnati celebration the next night in Game 7 , but the feats of Pudge, El Tiante, and their teammates during that season and beyond had a lasting impact on me -- providing a way to survive and then escape from the darkest force of my childhood.

Before '75, the Red Sox were not on my radar screen. My big brother Adam played in the Newton Central Little League, and I went to his games, but my father was an MIT-educated engineer who liked to joke that he "wasn't created with a sports gene." Dad could build or fix anything but looked like Felix Unger when throwing a ball.  

Baseball was never on the radio or the TV, and I connected with my father by building plastic model cars in his basement workshop. I'm not sure I even knew who Carlton Fisk was then, but I could tell any two Ford Thunderbirds apart by studying the taillights of my AMI replicas. At the time that was good enough.

Pre-Sox stats: A full-length taillight on the '66.

Then, on Friday the 13th of January, 1975, my parents sat me and Adam down on his bed to tell us they were splitting up after 13 years of marriage. My mother claims I said something mature like "Well, if you don't get along well together, at least this way you can stay friends," but at age 7 I certainly couldn't grasp the seriousness of what was going on. 

Dad moved the next day from our house in leafy Newton to an apartment abutting Routh 95 in Burlington, where the three of us hanged out every weekend watching late-night TV and eating burgers and creamed corn. Adam and I slept head-to-toe on a living room couch, like Richie's big brother Chuck and his college roommates on "Happy Days." 

For Adam, then nearly 11, it must have been scary and sad to see our father starting his life over. For me it felt like an adventure.

Beacon Village: Fun far from Fenway.

We didn't listen or watch baseball at "dad's house," but by the time the Red Sox clinched the American League East that September the games started appearing on the big Zenith in our den. Mom had a boyfriend, and he had plenty of sports genes.

Jack was big and strong, a jock-turned-lawyer and a rabid Sox fan. He had the games on no matter what he was doing; he even had a huge set of headphones with a built-in radio that he wore while mowing the lawn. I still made Rydell models in the shop, but Jack never went down there. To connect with the new man in the house, I had to watch the games too.

So I did -- and got hooked.

While my own baseball skills were and remained mediocre at best, I found I had a natural affinity for understanding the game and its history. Jack, who had played in high school and beyond, explained some of the finer points, and I began listening to the Sox on my clock radio as I fell asleep and then poring through boxscores in the next morning's Globe. Tiant, Fisk, Rice, Lynn, Yastrzemski -- these heroes provided the language I figured would win Jack over. 

"Hey, Looie got the win last night," I'd say to Jack as we passed heading to and from the bathroom, and I'd feel, briefly, like his equal.

When Luis was winning, life was easier.

Dad briefly took over as the baseball man in the family that October, when a friend of a friend hooked him up with tickets to all four home games in the Red Sox-Reds World Series. These were, I believe, my first visits to Fenway Park, but it was not the start of a trend; once the series and season were over we rarely went back.

A clear dichotomy formed in the years that followed. Weekends at dad's house from spring through early fall were fun-filled with mini-bikes and James Bond movies and burgers, while the weekdays back in Newton were for baseball. Dad married his girlfriend Judy, who was and is a great stepmom but also lacks a sports gene. Mom married Jack, assuring that the Red Sox would always be on at her house.

Hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

As I got older and began to understand a little how the real world worked, I learned one had to be careful when watching and listening to games with Jack. 

If the Red Sox were winning, he smiled and laughed and was your buddy; if they were losing the smile disappeared and he filled up his big glass from the liquor cabinet more often. He never took me and Adam to games or even played catch with us -- those honors were reserved for his own son -- so this hit-or-miss bonding was the best I was going to get.

Sprawled out on the shag carpet in front of the TV, with Jack in the dark leather recliner behind me, I prayed for wins. After Bucky Dent in '78 and the dismantling of the club that soon followed, the drunk, angry moods became more common. It wasn't just the slumping Sox, I learned later; Jack's once flourishing law career was also on a downward trend. 

Time for another drink.

It was best just to stay away, and I found I could momentarily forget about him and the scare he put into me by listening to Ken Coleman call the Sox games on WHDH -- "850 on your AM dial." If there was no game on, I could sing along to Jim Croche or Don MacLean albums with my mom. She made sure I felt loved, and when Jack was in one of his dark moods I guess I did the same for her.

By the early '80s, when Yastrzemski was winding down, I had given up any chance of bonding with the big guy across the hall. I still loved baseball, and began taking the Green Line from Boston College to Kenmore Square with friends in a rite of passage that allowed me to escape the tension at home by making a new home at Fenway. Occasionally dad got there with me -- one game he took me and 10 buddies to right after my Bar Mitzvah remains a great memory -- but the Red Sox were mostly "my" thing. That was fine.

Yaz retired in October 1983, but the last links to the '75 team, Dwight Evans and Jim Rice, were still going strong when I left for college a couple years later. The next summer I returned just as the Red Sox and young pitching phenom Roger Clemens were heating up. 

It was the type of club that even Jack and I might have enjoyed together, but by this point Mom had finally endured enough. He was on the way out, and when he meekly offered me great tickets to a few games that August -- not to go with him, just free seats -- I politely refused. I'd rather grab a standing-room spot balanced atop the guardrails behind the last row of Section 25 with my friends than take his weak-ass handouts.

By '86, I'd rather hang here than with him.

I have no idea where Jack is now; the last I heard about him, he had done some time in jail and been disbarred for stealing money from clients. I occasionally Google him but nothing comes up other than a few short stories and court documents describing his incarceration. I know people who know one of his other ex-wives, and a few calls would likely unearth his whereabouts. But I don't make them.

Mom found a guy worthy of her love -- and ours -- and they had a great decade together before he died of cancer. She and dad did indeed stay friendly and still get together with Adam and my families often. Ballgames are usually on in the background; Dad and Judy still have not developed sports genes, but they'll go to their grandkids' games.

Jack is about 80 now; I imagine the next time I read his name -- if I ever do -- will be in an obituary. Forty years after he entered my life, and nearly 30 years after he left it, the fear and anger are long gone. What's left are the memories of a great team, and a love for the game that I developed in 1975 out of desperation -- but has remained far beyond its original intent.

Maybe Jack never took me to Fenway, but now I can go whenever I want. I tend to look at it not as revenge, but it feels sweet just the same. 

Like a fly ball heading deep to left, staying fair, and making us believe anything is possible. 

  


  
    

Why Jacoby Ellsbury Should Be Re-Signed: One Expert's View

Ells was El Fuego in the ALDS.

By channeling playoff heroes Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson during Boston's ALDS win over the Rays, potential free agent Jacoby Ellsbury made his best case yet for a lucrative, long-term contract. 

He hit (9-for-18), ran (4 steals, 7 runs), and fielded with grace, showing no lingering effects of his recent foot injury. With the exception of when David Ortiz faced David Price, Ellsbury was the best player on the field, and the enthusiasm he displayed when scoring the late, go-ahead run in the clincher was wonderful to see. 

Thursday, as Boston baseball experts and fans spent the off-day debating the pros and cons of giving a deal in the neighborhood of seven years and $140 million to an injury-prone player who just turned 30 -- and whose single biggest asset, speed, is often the first thing to fall off with age -- I decided to approach the No. 1 Ellsbury expert in the Fenway Reflections home office for yet another view.

Definitely cuter without the beard.

"Yes. he's SOOOOOOOO cute," Rachel Alpert-Wisnia stated when posed with the should-he-be-signed-or-should-he-be-left-to-go question over breakfast. "When he has the beard he looks yuck, but when he doesn't have the beard he looks yeahhhhh!!"

Lest you think Alpert-Wisnia, a 9-year-old veteran in the Newton Girls Softball League, is just another "pink hat" who cares only for Ellsbury's looks, keep in mind that she actually wears a blue hat and knows team chemistry is key whether you're in the majors or fourth grade.

"He's been part of the Red Sox for a really long time, and he's made friends with all the guys," Alpert-Wisnia added as she reached for her backpack. "I think he should stay because if he leaves he might lose those friendships."

Rachel ready for action.

This is a keen insight, especially considering that the strong relationships on this squad are thought to be a key reason it has overachieved to a level unseen in Red Sox Nation since the 1967 "Impossible Dream" team. That karma -- which will be on display again Saturday night at Fenway Park in the ALCS opener against Detroit -- should be preserved as much as possible.

Greed, a vice apparently missing from this year's Boston club, should be another key factor in Ellsbury's decision, Alpert-Wisnia insisted. 

"Why be greedy, when you can still make a lot of money here, and you know it's a cool team?" she queried. Rachel didn't seem to share my assertion that Mo Vaughn probably wishes he could take back his own choice to leave Boston for the greener pastures of Anaheim, but perhaps that's because the Hit Dog retired in 2003, the year before she was born.

Hello, Jacoby!

Ellsbury is currently a big part of Rachel's day. Each morning when she wakes up, the first thing she does is say "Hello, Jacoby" to the Toops baseball card taped to the front of her pink Lego alarm clock. When she goes to Red Sox games, it's a bright white Ellsbury home jersey she puts on over her tee-shirt du jour.

"We get used to guys when they stay on the team," Alert-Wisnia added. "We know what they are like." Asked for an example, she fist-pumped her heart and pointed to the sky, ala Big Papi. I knew exactly what she meant. How many of us kids of the 1970s could recite the Red Sox lineup and each batter's mannerisms by heart, because players stayed with teams much longer then? I can still see Yaz tugging up his pants and spinning his bat, and Fisk crouching menacingly over the plate.

Rachel is glad Dustin Pedroia is likely to still be here when she's in high school, but she wants Ellsbury to stick around, too.

At least until she's old enough to marry him.   

Stick around, Jacoby, for Rachel's sake.

   

Once Bloodied, Captain Carl Yastrzemski Gets Bronzed

Yaz enjoys his day (Associated Press)

I couldn't find my "Yaz Day" shirt yesterday morning, but that was okay -- someone else who spent the past 30 years saving the white tee with the caricature that more closely resembled Governor Mike Dukakis than Captain Carl Yastrzemski managed to dig hers out. It was the least she could do given the circumstances.

Hers still fits -- mine not so much.

They unveiled a statue for Yastrzemski yesterday at Fenway Park, just a few feet away from the bronze likeness of the man he followed in left field for the Red Sox: Ted Williams. Yaz and Teddy Ballgame, together at last outside Gate B. 

After a week that marked the coronation of the 2013 Boston club, an immensely likable and surprisingly talented team that went from last place to an Al East title in one year, Sox fans got to take a short trip back to when the only thing atop the Green Monster was a net and one man spent parts of six presidential administrations guarding it.

Legends from Left: Rice, Ted, Yaz (Justyn Farano)

It had been a rainy morning but there were far more cameras than umbrellas being held up when the festivities got underway at 11 a.m. People complain a lot these days about the "Pink Hatification" of Fenway, but it was definitely a hard-core, blue-collar crowd of several hundred that gathered around the roped-off area where Yaz's family, several teammates, and current Red Sox players were assembled for the ceremony.  

Siblings Mavis and Jim McGetrick, standing right beside me, were a perfect example. They drove up from Providence wearing matching white Yaz painter's hats, each emblazoned with his uniform number eight on top and lined on the sides with some of the stats that helped define the day's honoree: 3,000 hits, 400 home runs, 7 gold gloves, and the 1967 MVP and Triple Crown awards. 

Mavis and Jim still have their pennant too.

The McGetricks also came north toting a boombox of the vintage used by John Cusack to win over Ione Skye in "Say Anything." What did they have in the cassette deck? What else but "The Man They Call Yaz," the Jess Cain tune that flew up the Boston radio charts during the summer of '67 and was later captured on the "Impossible Dream" album found under countless Christmas trees that December.

Another guy behind the McGetricks recalled being a freshman at BU and heading to Fenway for four straight nights in September of 1979 as a slumping Yaz remained stuck on 2,999 hits. He finally got his 3000th against the Yankees, a ground ball that skipped slowly past slick-fielding second baseman Willie Randolph on the Captain's last at-bat before a road trip. Though never proven, the non-play was likely one example in the long, heated Red Sox-Yankees rivalry when respect trumped hatred. Number 3000 was a hit meant to come at home.

His feats in '79 -- when he also had his 400th home run -- were historic, but  1967 was clearly Yastrzemski's most memorable year. In addition to his league-leading 44 homers, 121 RBI, and .326 batting average, he led the upstart Sox to the World Series with a .437 mark in the final 20 pressure-packed games of the greatest pennant race in American League history. He played left field with style and excellence, diving in front of and against the Wall and routinely nailing baserunners who dared to take an extra bag. On the bases himself he was daring but always smart.

Yaz in 1967: The perfect player.

Yaz won games for the Sox in every way imaginable during '67, and reignited Boston's passion for baseball much like the 2013 team has done. The difference is that while it was only one bad September and one bad season that preceded this year's resurgence, the 1967 club was the first in more than 15 years to offer New England fans any September excitement. "Crowds" at Fenway of less than 10,000 fans were common in the mid-1960s; even after least year, it's hard to imagine such apathy ever being repeated.

For those of us born in the late 1960s, a period that coincided with Yaz's peak, our memories of Captain Carl are from his white jumpsuit years -- when he was no longer the best guy on the field but still had the ability to turn on a Ron Guidry fastball or throw out a Willie Wilson at second when the situation demanded. We copied his familiar bat twirl and pants tug, but our only images of him as the perfect player came from highlight films.

Yaz in '78: the Jumpsuit Years.

Yastrzemski was not as naturally gifted a hitter as Ted Williams, but he worked just as hard at the craft. One of the most powerful moments of yesterday's ceremony for me was when Yaz's longtime teammate Dwight Evans, another of my favorites as a kid, discussed how Yastrzemski would spend 40 minutes after spring training games taking extra batting practice.

"We didn't wear batting gloves then, and you'd see blood on the handle of the bat," Evans said. Such a tale might seem apocryphal with some ballplayers, but nobody doubted it was true in this case. Yaz was a dirt dog long before the term existed.

I joined Red Sox Nation in April of '67, just before Yastrzemski's magical sixth season began, and I was already into my junior year of high school when I headed on the Green Line to Fenway for his final two games on Oct. 1-2, 1983. I got my Yaz shirt and cap and souvenir program and hoped he'd bow out with a homer like Williams.

Things didn't go quite as dramatically. He managed just a single over the rainy weekend, and popped up on a terrible 3-and-0 pitch in his final at-bat. We didn't really care, however; it was how he ran around the entire ballpark waving goodbye that we would always remember.

Yaz Day: What we remember.

There were programs made up for ceremony too, and I was lucky to get one of the pile handed out to fans by none other than Dr. Chalres Steinberg right after the unveiling. Fans later got a Yaz baseball card as they entered the ballpark, but the neatest piece of memorabilia I picked up was a enlarged, mounted photograph taken at the exact moment depicted in the statue -- Yaz tipping his helmet to a roaring crowd during his last at-bat. 

A guy was selling prints dated and autographed by the photographer for $20 apiece, and when I approached him he said he took the picture himself from his box seat back in 1983. By then he was asking $10 a picture, as sales had not been going well; since I only had a twenty on me, I bought two and gave one to my friend Scott -- who was at Yaz Day with me in '83 and also on hand for Sunday's ceremony.

The $10 photo

In a short but moving speech to the crowd during his 1983 farewell, Yastrzemski mentioned seeing a sign in the crowd that read, "Say it ain't so, Yaz." Pausing, his voice cracked as he said, "I wish it wasn't." This spontaneous and poignant display of emotion from the usually stoic ballplayer earned a roar from the masses.

Mavis and Jim McGetrick remembered the moment perfectly, because they were the ones holding the sign in the left-field seats. They showed me a fading Polaroid to prove it, and Jim laughed and said he had a cassette of the speech with him too if I wanted to hear it.

Mavis (center) holds her sign in 1983....

...and yesterday.

By then it was time for Yaz's latest speech, and as his custom he kept it short. He got a bit choked up only once, when he mentioned how he wished his "biggest fan," his late son Carl Michael, could be there. He praised the current Boston team -- represented at the event by manager John Farrell, second baseman Dustin Pedroia, and current left fielders Daniel Nava and Jony Gomes -- and said it reminded him of the '67 crew. When he mentioned that the statue meant as much to him as being inducted into the Hall of Fame, the crowd applauded. 

Yaz admires his likeness (Kelvin Ma, Boston Herald).

There was no speech for Yaz at the ballgame after the ceremony, just a first-pitch strike to current Red Sox hero David Ortiz before the Boston-Toronto contest. Oritz later homered in the game, which finished in 2:13 -- a quick pace far more the norm back in Yastrzemski's day. 

Will Yaz be back one more time in 2013 to throw out a first pitch? If he is, there will likely be a National League team sitting in the visitor's dugout. That would suit Captain Carl just fine.

A hug for Papi. (David Butler II, USA Today)