David Ortiz, the Hall of Fame’s most intriguing case

Of all the candidates on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot – new or returning – David Ortiz is by far the most intriguing.

Based purely on the numbers, Ortiz is a slam-dunk selection.

He had 541 home runs. Only 16 men have hit more.

He drove in 1,768 runs. That ranks 23rd all-time.

He had a career .931 OPS. That’s top 40.

The Hall of Fame Monitor, a Bill James stat designed to assess a player’s Hall of Fame fitness, puts Ortiz at 171, with 100 being the normal threshold.

Ortiz gets the black ink vote. He led the league in home runs in 2006, and in RBIs in 2005 and 2006. He also gets the post-season vote, having played on Red Sox championship teams in 2004, 2007 and 2013.  Ortiz hit 17 post-season home runs, and was the MVP of both the 2004 ALCS and the 2013 World Series.

In that series against St. Louis, he batted .668 with six RBIs.

An assessment of the plus side of his candidacy would be incomplete without acknowledging the powerful intangible case. This is, after all, Big Papi we’re talking about. Being huge, lovable, flashy, gregarious, wearing all that gilt around his neck and playing in Fenway are pluses.

If that were all there was to it, Ortiz would be a slam-dunk electee. But with Bonds, Clemens, Ramirez, Sosa, and Sheffield all on the ballot and lingering below the 75 percent cutoff – several of them in their final season of eligibility – the steroids factor must be considered.

And perhaps nowhere is that factor more gray than it is with Ortiz.

Since the adoption of the formal drug testing policy in 2004, Ortiz never failed a test. So in the formal sense of the joint testing program, he’s clean.

But his name did surface among the more than 100 players reported to have tested positive in a 2003 drug survey. That survey, which was supposed to be conducted anonymously but whose results in 2009 were leaked to the New York Times, provided the basis for the conclusion – leading to the formal testing program – that steroid use was sufficiently rampant in the game to be of concern.

The Twins and Red Sox star has never denied testing positive in 2003, although others – including some notable names – have since come to his defense. One of them was commissioner Rob Manfred, who in a 2016 interview acknowledged questions about the accuracy/reliability of some of the 2003 tests.

To date, Hall voters who have made their ballots public appear to be of a mixed but largely positive mind regarding Ortiz. According to the latest report by Hall vote tracker Ryan Thibodaux, Ortiz is on pace at 81.2 percent.

In recent years, however, the early Hall vote has been disproportionately weighted toward those supporting the induction of known or suspected steroid users. When the full ballot count is revealed – about a month from now this voting season – totals for those candidates tend to fall between five and 10 percent.

Given that 2003 test, that’s a concern for Ortiz.

Trying to draw a pattern or correlation from the ballots made public to date is challenging. As of Dec. 27, there were 63 such ballots, the bulk of which included the names of Bonds, Clemens and Ortiz. A handful voted for none of the three.

But five voters included Bonds and/or Clemens – usually both – while omitting Ortiz. On the other hand, nine backed Ortiz’s election while omitting Bonds and Clemens.

What was the motivation of the nine who sided with Ortiz but against Bonds and Clemens? Hard to know.

Perhaps in their minds, they drew a distinction between the single and supposedly private test Ortiz failed and what they viewed as the more legitimate suspicions against Bonds and Clemens.

Perhaps they concluded that a vote for Bonds and Clemens was at this stage a wasted vote while a vote for Ortiz might be a difference maker. (This reasoning, for the record, seems unlikely. Only one of the nine voting for Ortiz but not Bonds had previously voted for Bonds.)

Perhaps they were simply more willing to forgive the more lovable Ortiz than the comparatively surly Bonds and/or Clemens.

There remains a long way for Ortiz to go. Thibodaux estimates that nearly 400 ballots will be cast by Friday’s deadline for submitting them, meaning nearly 300 will be needed for election. Ortiz’s raw vote count right now is just 54.

That means he’ll need to pull in about 73 percent of the outstanding ballots to remain above 75 percent. And as noted above, voters who wait until late in the process to reveal – or who do not reveal – tend to be tougher on suspected steroid users than those who get out early and publicly.

That’s why David Ortiz’s candidacy will be the most interesting to watch this year.