This has become the young season of David Ortiz's discontent, in which he seems to have aged before our eyes, this likeable man who just a couple of years ago was one of the greatest clutch hitters in Boston Red Sox history.
But so far, all of that seems long ago and far away, as gone as yesterday's heroics. What we see now is an aging player who -- until he went 2-for-5 with a home run and a double Wednesday night -- looked lost at the plate, a song out of rhyme, complete with all the theories that fly around like batting practice fastballs: his mechanics got out of synch with last year's wrist injury; it's become mental; he needs glasses, he's got personal issues; he's older than he's letting on.
Pick any theory you want. They're all out there.
The question of this young baseball season.
And the biggest theory -- the one building momentum?
That he was once on performance-enhancing drugs and now he's not, as unfortunate and unfair as that might be.
In a sense, it's inevitable, the fallout of all the recent home-run heroes who have been found to have feet of clay, their accomplishments sullied, their reputations tarnished. Jose Canseco. Mark McGwire. Sammy Sosa. Rafael Palmeiro. Barry Bonds. Gary Sheffield. Alex Rodriguez. Manny Ramirez.
The fallout is that anyone who puts up big numbers, and then somehow doesn't, is suspect. Ortiz is the new poster child, fair or not. He is because until he was hurt last year, he was one of the most feared sluggers in the game. He is the new poster child because he looked as lost at the plate as lost can be, the center of all the discussion, the centerpiece of the biggest question in baseball:
What's the matter with Big Papi?
This is the inevitable result of what baseball has done to itself, the inevitable result of the union that fought drug testing and the owners who didn't want to ask too many questions as home runs rocketed out of ballparks and fans kept running through turnstiles to see them.
Welcome to the new era.
And it doesn't matter that Ortiz has said he's never done steroids. He is suspect because everyone is now suspect. This, too, is the climate that's been created. No one believes anyone anymore. We've all been lied to so often. We've seen guys lie to a congressional committee. We've seen A-Rod lie on "60 Minutes.'' We've heard too many bogus press conferences, and too many self-serving interviews to really believe anybody on this subject anymore.
That's unfortunate.
It's especially unfortunate if you're David Ortiz.
Maybe this really is a mechanics thing with Ortiz. Maybe it's become mental. Maybe it's the residue of last year's wrist injury. Maybe he really is 43 instead of 33. Maybe it's a little of all of the above.
Or maybe it's simply that, for whatever reason, he's lost it.
No one is great forever. It's the part of sports that rarely gets talked about, and only in hushed tones, like talking about the aged relative who now talks to himself in empty rooms. We want our sports heroes to be young and strong forever. We want them to be timeless, heroic forever. If it's summer, it must be Big Papi going deep, right?
Until he doesn't.
We saw it happen to George Scott in the 1970s. We saw it happen to Jim Rice and Dale Murphy in the 1980s. We've seen it happen innumerable times to lesser talents both here and in other places. One day they were in their prime, the next they weren't, and then it was just a matter of time before they retired. Until better training and better nutrition seemed to extend a player's productive years. Until it all got complicated with performance-enhancing drugs, so that we had Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens doing things in their 40s that people in their 40s were not supposed to be doing.
So now it's as though no one is supposed to grow old, or see their skills diminish.
So that now we look at Ortiz and it all looks so strange, a picture out of focus.
The truly unfortunate thing is that even if this is the case, it won't be accepted. There will still be the rumors that he was on something and now he's not, fair or not.
That's the new landscape, baseball's new Scarlet Letter, and it's going to be branded on anyone who once put up big power numbers and now no longer does. This is what the lords of the game have done through their failure to deal with the steroids problem until it blew up in their face, tarnished the game's records and turned fans into skeptics.
This is the climate that baseball has created, one in which everyone's suspect.
Big Papi is just the first victim.
(Contact Bill Reynolds at breynold@projo.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The Providence Journal
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