The David Ortiz Bridge at Brookline Ave. above the Mass Pike connects the Fenway Park neighborhood with Kenmore Square in Boston. From there, it’s about four hours to Cooperstown, NY, which will soon make home another lasting mark of Ortiz’s outsized legacy.
Ortiz, whose punches and swagger helped the Boston Red Sox become the most successful franchise of the new century, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday. In his first year of election, Ortiz was the only candidate to clear the 75 percent ballot required for election and received 77.9 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
The poll was the authors’ tenth and final verdict on the nominations of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, longtime superstars whose records have been tainted by ties to performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds, whose 762 home runs are the most in Major League Baseball history, received 66 percent of the vote, while Clemens, who won a record seven Cy Young Awards, received 65.2.
Two other prominent names also dropped the ballot: Curt Schilling, who had more than 3,000 strikeouts, and Sammy Sosa, who hit more than 600 home runs. Schilling, who has joked online about lynching journalists, received 58.6 percent of the vote, and Sosa, who has strong ties to steroid use, received just 18.5 percent. Like Bonds and Clemens, they could still be elected by small bodies in the years to come.
