It ain't over
SOMEWHERE IN this favored land a Bill James-wannabe is doubtless prospecting in old baseball box scores to find a player in the last century, or even in the one before that, who won more games for his team with a last-inning hit than David Ortiz has for the Red Sox. But even if there is a player with that distinction, he will have come out of a bygone baseball era in which pitchers often went all nine innings, so a hitter will have had three or four at-bats to figure out the pitcher's stuff before he delivered his decisive blow.
Ortiz has built his extraordinary record of walk-off hits, most of them home runs, against the fresh arms of relief pitchers that he is usually seeing for the first time in that game. In the last few years, Fenway's spoiled fans have witnessed one of the greatest pitchers of the modern era -- Pedro Martinez -- as well as Ortiz, who might just be the best late-inning clutch hitter ever.
There is a temptation to compare Ortiz with players from other sports who share his uncanny ability to come through in a game's last seconds: Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and Magic Johnson in basketball; quarterbacks like Tom Brady and John Elway and field-goal kickers like Adam Vinatieri in football.
The difference between these go-to guys and a clutch hitter in baseball is the element of chance introduced by the lineup. While a basketball or football team can always put the ball in the money player's hands when it counts, a baseball team can't. It is the serendipity of the lineup that determines whether the batter at the plate at the crucial moment is Ortiz or, for instance, Mark Loretta, who responded Wednesday night with his own game-winning double against Cleveland.
In the late innings of a close game in which the Red Sox trail, Sox fans are much less likely than fans elsewhere to head for the exits to beat the traffic home. They study their scorecards and calculate whether Ortiz will get one last opportunity to bring his strength and concentration to bear on the task of getting a base hit, which even the best players fail at two-thirds of the time.
The luck of the lineup elevates the drama when it turns out that the fates have smiled on Boston and put Ortiz in the batting box, with Manny Ramírez in the on-deck circle to make the opposing team think twice about intentionally walking Ortiz. More times than any Sox fan has a right to expect, Ortiz returns the fates' smile with one of his own after he delivers the hit or home run that is needed. Chance brings Ortiz to bat when the chips are down, but then his skill takes chance out of the equation and makes the opposing manager wish he had walked him after all. Reggie Jackson's playoff performances made him Mr. October. Ortiz is Mr. Ninth Inning.
