It’s one of the big topics in baseball that everyone except for Red Sox fans, and the Red Sox themselves want to address. David Ortiz isn’t Big Papi anymore, and it appears to be more than just a slump, this problem just doesn’t seem fixable. But how? How does the man go from eating fastballs up then spitting them out over the Green Monster to being late on 89 mph fastballs? I’ll tell you why, and for Sox fans, it’s all too familiar, the man who basically broke the curse, is now cursed.
Don’t blame Ortiz, he didn’t do this to himself. It was done to him.
In a conversation with Bryan McBournie last week during Boston’s 10-5 shlacking of Detroit, Ortiz got a two-run double, joking I said to McBournie “well, Papi’s got his RBI quota for the month now.” Then after having a week to mull it over, McBournie realized the truth and came up with a more than believable theory. What if the attempted burying of an Ortiz jersey during the building of Yankee Stadium in order to curse the building, then having the plan discovered, actually backfired and cursed our beloved slugger?
Sounds crazy right? Well consider the basic transformation of Ortiz from a feared slugger into a kid who brought a whiffle ball bat to a baseball game, and the new Yankee Stadium from regular ballpark into a virtual launching pad. Yankee Stadium has stolen Big Papi’s powers. Still think I’m crazy? Consider 62 HRs hit into the right field stands in the first 28 games in New York. Ortiz was always great at blasting the bejesus out of a ball into right field, especially given how short of a HR distance it is in Fenway’s generous dimensions. Now Papi can’t hit the ball out of the infield, yet I’m pretty sure my grandmother could launch one into the NY grand stands if she took BP. Suspicious, I know.
Or maybe it’s a giant karma wave coming back on Boston to take down our super hero. Some Sox fans have become more obsessed with having the Yankees continue to lose, than enjoy the recent wave of Boston success. And some are taking it to extremes by trying to create curses then getting foiled in the process. There will always be a link between New York and Boston, but focusing on trying to make someone else continue their misery will only come back to bite you in the ass.
And maybe that’s where we as a fanbase are at with Big Papi. Maybe the baseball gods are damning us for having one of our own try and sabotage a routine and purely Yankee building. But they’re making us endure it in the most excrutiating of fashions, they’ve made our own god even less than human. And the only thing we have to say, is “curses.”