Ortiz To Undergo More Tests After Irregular Heartbeat
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OAKLAND, CALIF. —The Red Sox have sent their top three sluggers back to Boston for medical tests, with Manny Ramirez and Wily Mo Pena heading east yesterday to join David Ortiz.
Ramirez has played in only one of Boston’s last five games because of a sore right knee and Pena has missed the last three games due to soreness in his left wrist. Ortiz was scheduled for more tests that were expected to take a few days.
Ortiz felt heart palpitations about 10 days ago and again before Monday night’s game in Oakland, where he was a late scratch from the lineup. He returned to Boston for more tests, the Red Sox medical director, Thomas Gill, said yesterday.
“He will get a clean bill of health before he plays again,” manager Terry Francona said Monday in Oakland. “The games are important, but we have a responsibility to do what’s right.”
Ortiz was admitted to a hospital on August 19 for a full examination and tests. Based on the results of those tests, he was cleared to return when he felt better.
“David had not experienced any additional episodes of palpitations until Monday evening,” Gill said. “With the recurrence of these symptoms, we would like David to be fully examined and tested before he is allowed to return to the field.”
For the reeling Red Sox, losing Ortiz and the others served as a reminder that this is only baseball in the big picture of life.
“You just hope everything is OK,” infielder Mark Loretta, who discussed his own mother’s heart problems with Big Papi before the slugger left town, said. “Hopefully they rule out anything and that it’s just stress or fatigue or the two. … Baseball kind of takes a little bit of a back seat when you’re talking about things of this nature.
“It’s very unique. In all my years, you’ve seen injuries and you talk about how every team has injuries, but we’re beyond that stage.”
Ortiz, one of the top contenders for the AL MVP award, is batting .287 with a league-leading 47 homers and 121 RBIs. Ramirez leads the team with a .326 average and also has 34 homers and 100 RBIs; Pena, who went on the DL for seven weeks in May for surgery on his left wrist, has 11 homers and 38 RBIs in just 217 atbats.
“Certainly I like the fact that he’s not playing, but I don’t like the fact that he’s not playing for that reason,” the Yankees’ manager, Joe Torre, said in New York.
