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wow, a post by NT that can actually separate the person from the issue? you mean some... logic? i'm strangely excited for what will materialize.

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yeah, career .823 OPS vs. lefties, which is skewed by two seasons where he was excellent against them, and the other 4.5 since 01 with only one (04, .784) over .740.

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the context in which you apply the "other 4.5" seasons is not proper. the context of the David Ortiz of now is one of baseball's best hitters. it is therefore unfair to pull numbers of seasons when he WASN'T that.

Since 03 Ortiz has been great. Here's his OPS v lefties starting since 03:

03: .674 in 116 AB
04: .784 OPS in 196 AB
05: .894 OPS in 205 AB
06: .988 OPS in 205 AB

Notice a trend? Ortiz first sucked hard against lefties, but his OPS rose in every single year since arriving in Boston. That is a downright inarguable indicator of progress -- Ortiz has performed better against lefties as he has seen more and more at-bats against them, reaching the point in the last two seasons where he was awesome against them.

So therefore you can reliably reach the conclusion that, yeah, Ortiz first was horrible against lefties, but as he saw them more often and since his time as a premier MLB hitter, he got better and better against them. So therefore he is now a "great" hitter against all types of pitchers.

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this year he's putting up a .694 and having some terrible ABs vs. lefty specialists in particular.

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The problem is it's a very small sample size -- hell, the year isn't even over yet -- combined with the fact that Ortiz is already having a down year by his measures. It's jumping the gun to definitively state that Ortiz is suddenly horrible against lefties again after four consecutive years of SUBSTANTIAL improvement that not-so-coincidentally coincided with Ortiz's arrival as one of the best hitters in the game.

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looking at his career numbers, those last two years look like an aberration, not the norm.

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When I look at his career numbers, I see a strong four-year trend of Ortiz learning to conquer and dominate lefties, and four months of "slumping" Ortiz in 07 isn't enough for me to change that opinion and start suggesting such a drastic alternative like bunting.

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he hasn't hit a home run off a LHP yet this year and is slugging a monstrous .330 vs them.

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You could also argue he's having bad luck. His contact rate this year v lefties is 77%; last year it was 76.5%, and in 05 it was 81.4%. So he's putting about the same amount of balls in play but is only hitting .259 against them as a result after hitting .278 and .302 against them the two previous years. There's a very large margin of error in your assessment simply due to the small sample size at play, and my example of contact rate is one such example of how. And I'd still take a .364 OBP over Ortiz randomly bunting against a shift.

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so yeah, let's just keep letting them overload the right side against him and take away like 10 hits a month with the shift, not like it seems to be hurting him or anything.

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Yeah, hurt him a ton in the past three or so years that he started dominating lefties over a much larger sample size.

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wouldn't want to waste his alex cora-like power by having him try to slap the ball to the opposite field once or twice a week instead of striking out on a slider a foot off the plate.

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And just when I was ready to give up the condescending snotty tone to actually legitimately debate something, you have to throw in the typical "Yeah, bitch!" tone at the end. Congrats, you still kept your image up. You're still that tough guy NT! that I love.