Vlad suffered a serious injury - obviously not the same as Ortiz’s awful first two months. Check out Vlad’s numbers from last year…looks like a “soft landing” instead of a “cliff dive” to me.

As a Boston fan, it sure is puzzling….Giambi was practically dead a couple years ago, but somehow rebounded to become semi-productive before departing NY. If I remember correctly, he went to the minors for a while before he got a grip. They might need to convince Ortiz to do the same.

At the age of 24, after hitting .303 with an OPS of .838 the previous year, Red Sox first baseman George Scott hit .171, with an OBA of .235 and a .237 slugging percentage in 350 at bats. He started in a slump and never came out of it. No injury was ever reported. No explanation ever materialized. If Boomer had been 33, writers would have said that he had gotten old. If it was 2009 and not 1968, some people would have said he had been on steroids. Scott bounced all the way back in a couple of years and ended up winning some home run titles.

The point is, sometimes strange things just happen, and the fact that they haven’t happened before or in the same way or to the same degree doesn’t prove, by itself, that something’s fishy. Anomolies exist, and Ortiz may simply be a super rare case of a player who just suddenly lost “it,’ whatever “it” is, at 33, and never found it again. Then the next time this happens, someone will say, well, it’s like what happened to David Ortiz.

I don’t think it’s racist when you have this kind of history.

How many USA born players have been found to have lied about their age?  0

How many Dominican born players (with poor central computer records, and simple documentation) have been found to have lied about their age? somewhere between 10 to 100 (including minor leaguers)

Thanks, Joe. Now I know I’m not crazy. Just sloppy at reading stat sheets.

I have no idea which is more likely. What happened to Steve Blass? Why did Steve Stone go from mediocrity to ace-for-a-year to mediocrity again? Do you have a theory about Scott? Have you ever seen anything like Cliff Lee from 2007 to 2008? Rich Gedman went from a top offensive catcher to a bum in one season: why? This happens in other fields all the time: a great writer suddenly has writer’s block. A great composer suddenly can’t come up with ideas, and nobody knows why. Brilliant talent is inherently mysterious, isn’t it? The “best” athletes are not always the most successful—-what is that “X-Factor’?  I’m just saying that “No reason we can identify” is just as likely an explanation as the ones you suggest.

That seems to me to be using profiling over character. Everything we know about Ortiz is that he is an honest guy with integrity—-unlike Manny, unlike A-Rod, unlike Tejada, unlike Canseco. When the Dominican who’s been banned from clubhouses on steroid suspicions was being slammed in the press, Ortiz came right out and said that he trained in his facility and knew him as a straight guy. That’s gutsy and principled: he knew admitting his association would be used to impugn him, and defended the guy anyway. Ortiz’s demonstrated character should count for more than his ethnicity or body type when you’re looking for reasons. He’s earned the right to have lying and cheating put at the bottom of the list.

Re: Blass—he has company NOW. When it happened, nobody could find a comparison. Stone: that begs the question. He threw all those innings BECAUSE he was pitching like never before. Scott: good theory, but there’s zilch to support it. The Red Sox went over him carefully for injuries because they would have loved to disable him. Scott claims he was healthy. Lee: Again, begs the question. Most pitchers show “flashes,” but how many ever stunk so badly they were sent to the minors and then came back to win a Cy Young the next year? Gedman wasn’t great, maybe, but he was regarded as one of the top two catchers in the AL, he was young, and there were no injuries. Suddenly he was waiver fodder.

If you say so. I don’t find any of those very persuasive rebuttals.

Nobody EVER has thought Manny Ramirez was trustworthy. He has reneged on commitments and lied his whole career. You can be cynical about character if you want, but media scrutiny usually—-not always but usually—-lets the phonies shine through and the good guys reveal themselves. Ortiz’s rep is not manufactured. He is genuinely respected across the game, and Manny has never been respected unless he had a bat in his hand.

Don’t intentionally misunderstand me, please. Obviously, there are reasons for a sudden, major change in performance skill. They don’t have to be obvious, bright line reasons. Some people are older physically at 33 than others at 40. The most incremental physiological changes suddenly reach a threshold, and you no longer can turn on a fastball. Accumulated injuries and age change your mechanics sufficiently that what once worked does no longer. That’s a natural process, and one hell of a lot more logical and fair a diagnosis in the absence of more than attributing dishonesty to an individual who has shown no evidence that he would stoop to it.