FORT MYERS, Fla. — Picked up pieces while wondering if the Red Sox are going to promote “Zakim” and “Tobin” nights at Fenway this summer in honor of their 2020 Bridge Year.
■ Everybody loves Big Papi. He’s Boston Baseball’s Father Christmas. He was a clutch and dominant player, great to fans, and stood up for our city in 2013. All of Boston prayed for him when he was shot in the Dominican Republic in June. It’s great to see him looking healthy. But his first day back in Sox camp last week was not his finest hour.
Ortiz is part of Sox management now and Big Papi has become Big House Man. Now that Ortiz is taking the side of Sox ownership on every issue, are we supposed to forget how he groaned about his contract and disrespect from his bosses almost every year? Ortiz insists that the Mookie trade was a good trade. That the Sox had no choice. Got it.
But when a member of the Red Sox brass (Ortiz is identified as a “special assistant” to Fenway Sports Group in the club directory) calls Mike Fiers a “snitch” while the Boston Red Sox are the subject of an ongoing MLB investigation regarding cheating allegations, it borders on witness intimidation.
Truth has never been an enemy of baseball fans. We could have used a little more of it during the steroid era and Ortiz has considerable exposure in this area.
This brings us to the unusual relationship Ortiz shares with commissioner Rob Manfred. While Papi was railing against Fiers this week, he went out of his way to tell everybody to back off the commissioner. This is a demonstration we have all come to know as “quid pro quo”. On the day of Ortiz’s final regular-season game in 2016 (Remember those final days? Five Ortiz celebrations and eight losses over the final nine games?)
Manfred came to Boston and delivered what amounted to a presidential pardon of Ortiz’s failed drug test from 2003. Papi got a pass that nobody else ever got (Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, and Manny Ramirez were the other players whose names were leaked from the ’03 testing). Now here we are in the spring of 2020 and Ortiz is telling folks to leave Manfred alone. Swell.
Oh, and pardon me while I roll my eyes watching that soft, in-house video of Alex Verdugo rushing to embrace Big Papi in the Sox locker room last week. The Sox want you to forget all that nasty stuff you read about the guy they got in the Mookie Betts deal. Big Papi comes in handy for moments like this.
■ A radio station from Maine was surprised to grab an exclusive interview with Sox owner John Henry in the hours after Henry’s “Mookie Betts” Monday news conference. Henry agreed to sit with the crew from Maine, saying, “I’m trying to get away from these Boston guys.’’
■ Quiz: Name the only three major league pitchers who were named Rookie of the Year, then went on to win at least two Cy Young awards (answer below).
■ It was fun having the Tampa Bay Rays in Fort Myers on Saturday. Like looking in the mirror. A glance into the future of your team. Get used to a lot of change, Red Sox fans. Nobody sticks around too long in Tampa.
■ Could be a big week in the Fort. This may be the week in which we get MLB’s report on cheating allegations lodged against the 2018 Red Sox. Included in that report will be the announcement of the length of Alex Cora’s suspension. If Manfred goes easy on the Red Sox and Cora gets only a year, prepare for endless speculation that Cora will be back to manage the Red Sox in 2021. If Ron Roenicke is cleared by the report, you can expect the Sox to remove “interim” from Roenicke’s official title.
■ The Cooperstown implications of this cheating era have yet to be explored. The scandal is likely to kill Carlos Beltran’s Hall of Fame candidacy. The same could apply to Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, and any other Astro hitters who compile worthy resumes.
■ Knowing what pitch is coming does not always help a batter. I remember Pedro Martinez pitching live batting practice in Fort Myers at the turn of the century and great hitters would swing and miss even when Pedro yelled “changeup” as he went into his delivery.
■ After all these years, we still need to remind some fans not to be duped when they hear “Well Pete Rose only bet on his own team.’’ It’s a bogus argument. Rose bet on selective Reds games, but not every game when he was manager of the Reds. This means that he was compromising every game. Talk to some of the Reds relievers who were abused by Pete — depending on which games he was really trying to win and which games he didn’t really care about.
■ Andrew Benintendi doesn’t like leading off. “I was a .275 hitter in my freshman year at Arkansas because I changed everything to lead off,’’ he told me last year. The Sox wound up using Benintendi in the top spot in only 48 games in 2019. Roenicke on Saturday said, “Sometimes a guy changes what he does when we move him in the lineup, but we don’t want him to do that.’’
■ Spring training vignettes: Solo Jim Rice walking laps on the warning track every morning at empty JetBlue Park . . . Lifelong friends and competitors Luis Tiant and Tony Oliva and their wives playing nighttime dominoes in the lobby of their spring training residence hotel. Both Cuban stars have strong Hall of Fame credentials.
■ Anyone still buying the notion that the Red Sox emphasis on getting under the luxury tax threshold was a “media-driven” creation?
■ Meet the new JBJ, same as the old JBJ: Jackie Bradley Jr. struck out swinging in the bottom of the first and again in the third.
■ The Minneapolis Tribune’s Sid Hartman, the longest-ranking member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, turns 100 on March 15. He’s still writing four columns a week.
■ Quiz answer: Tom Seaver, Justin Verlander, and Jake deGrom.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at dshaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @dan_shaughnessy.