BOSTON — David Ortiz went 4-for-4 on Sunday and reached base in all five of his plate appearances. He drove in three of the Red Sox’s five runs in a series-clinching win over the Cleveland Indians and launched his 514th career home run.
Yet somehow, his day still ended in mild disappointment.
The Red Sox designated hitter needed only a triple for the cycle when he came to bat in the eighth inning. Of course, that’s a tall task for a 40-year-old guy like Ortiz, but it looked like he was going to pull off the improbable when he hit the ball to about the only place in Fenway Park that would give him a shot at three bases.
Alas, Ortiz’s dreams of his first career cycle died when the ball jumped into the stands for a measly ground-rule double.
“When I went to hit, (the cycle) wasn’t in my mind,” Ortiz said after the game. “But when I went around first base and saw everybody going crazy, I was like, ‘Oh, I better get it going.’ But things happen for a reason, you know?”
A cycle wasn’t in the cards for Big Papi, but just about everything else was Sunday. In a game in which his team left 12 men on base, Ortiz came up clutch, hitting an RBI single in the first inning to put Boston on the board, lacing an RBI double in the second to give the Sox a 3-2 lead and padding that lead with a solo homer in the fifth.
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The DH’s big day was the latest chapter in what has been a storybook final season to date. He leads the American League with a 1.092 OPS, is second in the AL with 37 RBIs and fourth with a .329 batting average.
Ortiz’s success at an advanced age has surprised some, but he credits the rest of Boston’s red-hot offense — Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley Jr. are first and second in the AL with .346 and .342 batting averages, respectively — for helping him see better pitches to hit.
“When you see a guy (like Bradley) hitting in the nine hole and getting intentionally walked, that means we’re kind of pulling from every part of the lineup,” Ortiz said. “That’s good, because it kind of takes the attention a little way away from me from the pitchers, and they make more mistakes.”
The latest of those mistakes, a 3-1 eighth-inning fastball from Indians reliever Austin Adams, nearly gave Ortiz an epic cycle. And if you don’t think he was going to try to get to third base no matter what, you don’t know Big Papi.
“When I hit that ball, everybody was running to the (front of) the dugout, waving at me like, ‘Get going, Papi! Get going!'” Ortiz said. “They said, ‘Man, we were so disappointed when we saw the ball go into the stands.’ Because it’s the kind of moment where you’ve got to try. Especially when you’re up by three runs, ninth inning, and you’re kind of hoping to hit a triple.
“So, I was going to let it fly and see what happened if the ball stayed on the field.”
It didn’t, and Ortiz had to settled for the 26th four-hit game of his 20-year career. Get ’em next time, David.
Thumbnail photo via Greg M. Cooper/USA TODAY Sports Images
