Maybe it’s just that I’ve had more time to sit around and take in sports news the last few days, but I can’t remember seeing this much coverage of a home run celebration ever. For everyone who doesn’t know, David Ortiz plays for the Red Sox and basically doesn’t do much besides hit home runs, a part of the game at which he has been incredibly good. In a game against the Yankees on Tuesday night, Ortiz hit another home run and taunted the Yankees by flipping his bat super-aggressively.
Apparently he didn’t apologize about it after the game, which made things worse.
What’s the big deal here? There isn’t one. This isn’t a story, The Red Sox are on fire right now and that’s a story. The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is pretty historic and right now it’s going to be a two-team race for the AL East and that also is a story. David Ortiz has made an entire career out of DH-ing and largely just swinging for the fences. This is also a story. Ortiz flipping his bat after a home run isn’t.
The most important part of this whole she-bang-a-bang is this: When I first heard about this story, I mistakenly heard that after hitting the home run against the Yankees, David Ortiz did a BACK flip. That isn’t a joke. I thought the story was being reported because that is truly a celebration that is over-the-line, and more importantly, a miracle of modern physics. Have you seen the guy before? He’s literally a bear. If he had hit that home run, stared right into the eyes of the Yank’s pitcher, jumped a few feet into the air, rotated his huge body nimbly, nailed the landing and THEN trotted around the basepath, I would have been floored. With all the attention his real celebration (which was exactly 0.00001 of a big deal) got, I was genuinely expecting to see him do a back flip when I finally saw the replay.
To help you get as excited as I was, I took a few minutes to create a rough sketch of what I thought the backflip would look like. Hopefully you’ll understand.
Top: What the David Ortiz bat flip incident looked like in real life. Bottom: What it could have looked like.
I mis-heard the same thing on the radio!
Thank you for vindicating my misunderstanding. I think maybe I wanted it to be “back flip” so bad that I couldn’t possibly have heard “bat flip.”
Until Selig introduces an extra pyaloff spot just for teams that win 90 games, no matter of where they end up in the standings, winning 90 games a year means nothing. It’s about how you compare against other teams, most importantly in your division. If the Rays can win 90 games a year with a $50m payroll, but the Sox/Yanks win 95 games a year in the $150,000,000+ range, then it doesn’t really mean much, does it? Unless we are now playing for pride. It’s a shame, because if the Rays even only added $15 million (alot for the rays, but compared to NY/BOS ..) they could surely fill another hole or two and bump that 90 to 95 wins. For example, even a league average SS would have brought an extra 2 wins after the garbage performances the AAA trio put up for most of the year, and that’s if he just played league average, it would be more if he were an actual good player who had a moderately good year. The cost of a veteran SS would have been absolutely justified.And I don’t care about how other teams can’t beat NY/BOS. Most of those aren’t in the division (who cares what the orioles do against the division ) and can get by without it. The Rays CAN’T. They have to at least hold their head above water against them unfortunately. It’s nice to say that it doesn’t matter what those 2 teams do and we can just do our own thing but we know that’s not true.