This week, Sports Illustrated had two fine baseball writers, Nate Silver and Tom Verducci, draw up lists of the players with whom they’d choose to start a team. Verducci limited himself to players 25 and younger, while Silver had more expansive yet idiosyncratic criteria. As would be expected, the lists differed in emphasis but converged on some important points. (Who has a word to say against the greatness of Florida’s Miguel Cabrera or Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore?) Perusing the lists it’s impossible not to be stunned by the amount of superb young talent in the game right now, and glad at how well distributed it is.

Naturally, the lists inspired some scoffing on my part. Silver heretically ranks Florida’s Hanley Ramirez a hair above Jose Reyes, for instance, and Verducci has Minnesota catcher Joe Mauer as only the sixth-best player under 25, whereas I think he’s probably the best player in the American League. These are fairly minor differences, but there is no point at all to drawing up a list of baseball players if no one is going to become indignant and hostile over minor shades of opinion.

This, of course, is the value of such exercises. If you take it seriously, it forces you to examine your assumptions. Verducci ranks Cabrera as the best young player in the game — despite his complete lack of defensive value — because he has hit as well as Hank Aaron did through age 23. It’s a more than defensible position. The only player who hit close to so well this young and didn’t end up as an alltime great is Tony Conigliaro, and he didn’t fulfill his early promise because he was hit in the face with a pitched ball. Still, I disagree, and would take Reyes or Mauer over Cabrera. Cabrera, barring injury, will almost certainly be a Hall-of-Fame hitter, but Reyes has a real chance at developing into a more durable and faster Barry Larkin, while Mauer is comparable to Pudge Rodriguez with an extra 60 points of on-base percentage. You can always pay up for a great hitter, but if Reyes and Mauer can maintain the level they’ve reached they’ll be irreplaceable. Walking back through why I disagree with Verducci, it seems I value certainty quite a bit less than I thought. The earth will not tremble at the revelation, but it’s always useful to identify a prejudice you didn’t know you had.

It’s possibly more useful to single out prejudices you don’t have that you thought you had, though, and that’s what happened when I realized that I would, without hesitation, pick David Ortiz if I could start a team with any player in baseball.

This makes no sense, on several levels. Ortiz doesn’t play the field, and he doesn’t run. He’s 31, and huge, and past players his size who hit as he does, such as Willie McCovey, Mo Vaughn, and Boog Powell, tended not to age very gracefully. There are younger players capable of three-dimensional baseball, some of whom hit almost as well as Ortiz does, if not better; there are younger players at difficult defensive positions who are great now and show nearly unlimited potential, and there’s Johan Santana, who is currently in a prime comparable to Sandy Koufax’s. A rational argument cannot really be made in favor of Ortiz.

None of that matters. I’d take Ortiz, mythic clutch hitter of legend and proud leader of a benighted Boston Red Sox franchise, without looking back — this despite thinking that team chemistry is a lot of nonsense and there isn’t any such thing as a clutch hitter. Part of the reason is that while I may not believe in such a thing as a clutch hitter, there exists Ortiz, hero (or villain) of the 2004 ALCS, a man who last year stroked five walk-off hits and tied up several more games, the last man anyone would want to see at the plate with their team’s season on the line. He lifts all the weight of statistical proofs and the accumulated detritus that comes with paying far too much attention to baseball, and, as Mariano Rivera and Pedro Martinez have done at times, simply reduces it to what you get in the late minutes of basketball games, when one man is capable of dominating a single game by force of will. It’s a beautiful thing, and it’s made him a legend.

Who better to represent my hypothetical team than a player with this kind of grace, mystique, and good humor, and who happens to be at worst one of the five best hitters in the game? Ortiz, who comes across as the most natural and solid of guys, is essentially incapable of doing wrong, on the field or in the world. If there’s a chance to do something absurdly dramatic, he’ll do it. Along with the 44-year-old UFC heavyweight champion, Randy Couture, Ortiz is one of two athletes who inspire the kind of irrational awe athletes used to arouse (before we knew far too much about them and studied the mechanics of their games far too closely). He’s a genuine folk hero. Why pick anyone else?

I don’t really believe in the moral virtue of professional athletes, clutch hitting, the tangible value of leadership, or the idea that ballplayers are worth much to their teams past their on-field contributions and the quantifiable impact of their reputations on their team’s brand equity. Then I watch Ortiz hit and I see someone who seems as close as a modern ballplayer can be to being a great man. I’ll call him the most valuable property in the game with a straight face. A list of ballplayers might expose some prejudices; Ortiz simply makes them disappear.

tmarchman@nysun.com