Sox Beat: Papi homers, and all's right with the world

BOSTON – “Look at that!” David Ortiz said out of nowhere, interrupting his own answer about the swing that ended his season-long home-run drought to gesture toward the other side of the locker room. “That’s crazy!”

A dozen heads turned at once toward the direction he was pointing. What was it? Something on one of the TV screens? A highlight of the home run he’d hit into the center-field bleachers, perhaps?

“It’s (pitcher Josh) Beckett naked over there in the corner,” Ortiz said, a playful smile spreading across his face.

Rest easy, Red Sox Nation. The mind of David Ortiz is no longer on his inability to hit home runs; it’s right back in the gutter.

With one swing on one misplaced Brett Cecil fastball, Ortiz abruptly silenced all those voices who had called for him to be demoted, to be benched, to be shipped to a retirement home somewhere to live out the rest of his days.

In doing so, he shared with the Fenway Park faithful a moment as special as any in the seven seasons he’s worn a Red Sox uniform –- and that includes any one of his legendary postseason home runs.

An often fickle fan base that hasn’t hesitated to turn its aging stars –- from Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski to Nomar Garciaparra and Manny Ramirez –- stubbornly refused to turn on Ortiz over the last two days. After a road trip in which he’d left 12 runners on base in a single game and then taken an entire weekend off to clear his head, the cheers he received only grew louder every time he got to the plate.

“The fans, man –- they’ve been cheering for me every at-bat,” he said. “Even when you don’t get it done, the next time you come in, it’s the same thing. To me, it means a lot.”

By the time he dug into the batter’s box in the fifth inning yesterday, a groundout and a strikeout already to his credit, the fans were beside themselves with desperation. Ortiz had failed to deliver on his Roy Hobbs moment on Tuesday. Could it happen again?

(Ortiz, for his part, was willing to try anything: “I was about to hit right-handed,” he said with a laugh.)

The inning had started off well. Veteran catcher Jason Varitek had hit his second home run of the game, a solo shot into the third row of the center-field bleachers. Jacoby Ellsbury had walked and come oh-so-close to scoring from first base on a Dustin Pedroia double.

Pedroia, though, still was perched on third base and represented a chance for Ortiz to drive in just his fourth run in the month of May.

Ortiz took a fastball for a ball. He then took a hack at another fastball and fouled it off.

The third pitch was a 90-mile-an-hour fastball out over the plate. It was a fastball he normally would hit hard –- but so, too, was the fastball on which he’d struck out in the third inning. He’d missed that fastball, striking out for the 33rd time this season.

He didn’t miss this one.

The roars began, it seemed, even before the ball left his bat. The roars only grew louder as Toronto outfielders Vernon Wells and Travis Snider converged on the spot where the Green Monster meets the center-field wall, a spot 379 feet from home plate. And the roars grew loudest of all when the ball settled into the camera well in the first row of the bleachers.

Home run.

Cheers turned to delirium as Ortiz crossed home plate and embraced Kevin Youkilis, and as he endured a few seconds of the silent treatment in the dugout before two dozen white uniforms piled on him in the type of celebration no one ever will see again in the fifth inning of a mid-May baseball game.

One of those cheering fans was Ortiz’s father, Enrique, who had flown to Boston on Tuesday and passed along a few words of encouragement.

“Hey, Son, it’s not going to get worse than this,” he told perhaps the most beloved slugger in Red Sox history. “Go out there and have fun and forget about what happened in the past. Just go out there and do what you know how to do.”

That, finally, got Ortiz out of his own head. The goose egg in the home-run column didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was having fun –- and having fun is what Ortiz does better than anyone else.

Brian MacPherson covers the Red Sox for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News.