Thursday, October 16, 2008

Oh, THAT'S what he meant

David Ortiz just hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the seventh inning of Game 5 to cut the Tampa Bay lead to 7-4. (B.J. Upton, Carlos Pena and Evan Longoria all hit early home runs for the Rays.)

It gave me -- a guy who wrote this story for today's newspaper -- reason to look back at one quote:

"The problem is that everyone is focused on Papi not hitting," Ortiz said Tuesday "I'll tell you the truth: In both of these series, with Anaheim and now with the Rays, Papi does not come up there with men on base all the time. I might come to hit maybe four or five times in the whole series, and I'm not going to change the game when you have a lead by nine, 10 runs."

He'd actually come up with a man on base eight or nine time in his first 17 plate appearances in the series. What he'd never done, though, was come up with men on base -- more than one. And when he came to the plate with Coco Crisp on third and Dustin Pedroia on first, he ripped a 97 mile-an-hour fastball into the right-field seats.

Look at the quote again. He said "men" on base. Not "a man" on base.

When that guy gets specific, he gets specific.

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