An Open Letter To David Ortiz

Dear Papi,

You're the most popular player on a team that's won three World Series in the last decade.

You're beloved by a fan base that covers an entire region of the country.

An entire fan base is greasing the machinery for your Hall of Fame case, a fan base so starved for success before you won it all that one of its most well-known and devout followers offered half his gonads for a title.

You're so unconditionally revered that detonating a gerund form of the F-Bomb during a solemn ceremony before a national audience including women, children and Southern Baptists earned you further adulation.

And yet, you need to take a chill pill. You seem angry, and you seem to be spraying your anger wantonly, willy-nilly, at no one and everyone simultaneously.

You're upset that some baseball fans suspect you might have used steroids to enhance your play. You're ticked that enduring success has spoiled the underdog sheen, that some outside of Red Sox Nation who may have cheered Boston's 2004 and 2007 titles have moved on to the less entitled. You're annoyed that the baseball media is becoming immune to your charms.

Papi, lighten up. The steroid talk is as irrelevant as it is inevitable, given your apparent failed test in '03, your body type and your mid-career breakout. You need to stop reading Twitter, a forum for any half-wit to spew his uncorroborated venom. Twitter is a death trap for your social-emotional IQ.

More to the point, you need to lay off the venom yourself. You doth protest too much, too vigorously, too profanely and indiscriminately. You're the guy who broke the curse; stop bringing up new ones. Sure, you have enemies; so did Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Babe Ruth -- and you're not half of any one of them. Focus on your admirers, who are legion, even if they're unconvinced by the argument that you've passed 80 drug tests. That was the diamond frame of Lance Armstrong's ride and he turned out to be Beelzebub in Spandex.

As for the Hall of Fame, no one likes a campaigner, especially one still under contract to actually, you know, play. Okay, so you don't really play, unless you're visiting a National League park. But you are under contract to hit home runs, which is the best Hall of Fame argument you can make.

The thing is, you're an extremely fringey HOF candidate. You couldn't win a starting job during your first five seasons and didn't become a star until age 27. Your defensive inability has cost your teams 19 wins, which has to be considered when your case is made. That's even before we consider the whole steroid question, whatever it's worth.

So rather than argue ungracefully for a bust, strengthen your case on the field. You've got some bonafides -- the 12 years of mashing, the .304 lifetime TAv, the leadership, the undeniably clutch play. Let that, and your minions, carry your Hall of Fame water. You're a New England legend with $143 million American in career earnings. That's a long way from the squalor and ignominy of Santo Domingo's streets.

So be happy, Papi. That's the best revenge anyway.

The Bryant Kerfuffle: A Shakespearean Tale

In the absence of baseball news, there brews a tempest in a teapot about Cubs prospect Kris Bryant. Bryant is the Cubs' third baseman of the future, a future that by all accounts should start on Opening Day.

Instead, Bryant will toil in Triple-A for two weeks so that his service time clock isn't wound and ticking. That will allow Chicago brass to dictate his wages for one extra year and delay his eventual free agency likewise. 

Prompting Twitter to go all a-twitter. This is emblematic:






Yeah, sure you will. Until they make the playoffs, and then you'll forget that Kris Bryant only made 146 starts instead of 153 back in '15.

The Cubs are simply exploiting a quirk in service time rules that makes this kind of gerrymandering not just possible but wise. Not just wise but unimpeachable. Not just unimpeachable but obvious. Losing 10 games of a rookie's contributions will save the team millions of dollars over time if he lives up to expectations. 

Many have brayed a similar donkey call about the MLBPA. Who do they think negotiated the rules that made this move necessary? It's called collective bargaining because the two sides do it together.

This dust-up is magnified by Bryant's cartoonish Spring Training. He has popped more in-game dingers than the Florida Marlins and has authored a 25-at-bat line of .480/.552/1.520, including one gargantuan long ball against King Felix Hernandez. 

But none of that alters the reality with which the Cubs have to deal, and that is that 12 days of banishment keeps their phenom on the team through 2021.

Perhaps the best final word comes from the Astros' George Springer, who was last Spring's Kris Bryant, until the season began and he commenced to fan like a deck of cards.