Written by Mark Vorkunov at New York Times.com
David Ortiz ambled up to home plate in the seventh inning Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium in a situation he has often confronted.
Over his career, he has made a generation’s worth of memories for Red Sox fans by bullying their once-imperious rival. Ortiz helped lead the unforgettable comeback in the 2004 American League Championship Series, breaking a famed curse. On Tuesday, the stakes were important but not monumental — he could launch the hit that brought Boston the American League East title and inched the Yankees closer to mathematical elimination.
In the first inning, with the game barely underway, the fans greeted him with a mix of applause and jeers. This three-game series is most likely his final trip to Yankee Stadium before he retires at the end of this season, and the mixed reaction was a reflection of the feelings of Yankees fans. In the seventh, however, he was greeted with a familiar enmity — the chorus of boos that Ortiz said he prefers. The Yankees, having already blown a three-run lead and now caught in a tie game with Red Sox runners on first and second base, were teetering.
“I’m like, what are the chances that he’s coming up in this situation?” Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said, recalling his thoughts. “It’s just kind of the way fate had it tonight.”
When Girardi uttered those words after the game, he had the security of knowing the result. He could chuckle about the sequence that led to the Yankees’ 6-4 win over the Red Sox, with Ortiz failing in the seventh and again in the ninth, when he struck out to end the game. At that point, Girardi knew that Boston had not clinched the division title in New York and the Yankees’ playoff hopes, however dim, remained flickering as they remained four games behind the Baltimore Orioles for the A.L.’s second wild-card spot, with five games left in the regular season.
But in the moment, as Ortiz stood in the left-handed batter’s box in the seventh, the outcome was most definitely in doubt. Girardi left Blake Parker, a 31-year-old right-handed pitcher the club picked up off waivers last month, on the mound.
Parker began the at-bat with two off-speed pitches to work an 0-2 count and then threw two more — one that Ortiz took for a ball and another that he fouled off. Parker threw him another, a curveball that Ortiz bashed into the infield dirt for an inning-ending groundout to shortstop.
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