Since even David Ortiz and his doctors can’t know for sure, it certainly isn’t the place of any sportswriter to speculate much on how Ortiz’s hospitalization for an irregular heartbeat will affect the Boston slugger’s career. The possibilities vary widely; at worst it could end his playing days, at best it’s a minor annoyance brought on by stress or too much coffee. Obviously everyone, even the most diehard Yankee fan, would hope for the latter, and not just in the sense that everyone wishes good health for all.

Ortiz has in just a few years made himself one of the sport’s living legends, doing things no one has ever before seen and making the game look easy in the same way ballplayers like Barry Bonds, Greg Maddux, Tony Gwynn, and Rickey Henderson have in their various ways, and done it all with unmatched charisma. At times it seems anyone with a nice smile can be called an ambassador for the sport, but that’s exactly what Ortiz is.

Ortiz’s sudden absence from the Red Sox, though — and who in the game seems stronger and less likely to be hospitalized twice in two weeks with heart palpitations? — does raise a big issue for the Sox, and for the Yankees as well. This team, even dating back to 2003, has been disproportionately reliant on Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, a pair of monstrous hitters whose complete dominance has allowed the Sox to get away with some rather sketchy experiments in roster construction. Given the inherent fragility of a team that leans so heavily on two players, should the Sox really act like perennial contenders? And should the Yankees, in their planning, really assume that the Sox will be a 90–plus win team for the foreseeable future?

Asking the question is, to some extent, answering it. Whatever their strengths, Ortiz and Ramirez are not players like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, whose athleticism and all-around play make them excellent bets to remain MVP-level talents past the age when many of their peers have started washing out. Ortiz is 30, Ramirez 34, both are large men, and neither is particularly athletic. They certainly could age well, but they’re also the type of players liable to simply collapsing, all at once. Everyone can think of players like Mo Vaughn, Boog Powell, and Frank Thomas who fit a basically similar profile and didn’t last, due either to injury, diminished performance, or both. Structuring a team around two such players is a high risk, high reward way to go about things that’s obviously paid off for the Sox but isn’t going to do so forever.

The counter argument to this is that the Sox front office is unusually sophisticated and adept — but if that’s so, how to explain the accident that is Ortiz and Ramirez? The Red Sox signed Ortiz in 2003 as one of three players—Kevin Millar and the immortal Jeremy Giambi being the others—whom they thought had good upsides and could cheaply fill the first base/designated hitter role. Ortiz did nothing at first with the Red Sox, and it was just good luck that he got a shot to do anything at all — Giambi was slotted ahead of him, and only his complete failure opened up a real chance for Ortiz. In different circumstances he’d be playing in Japan right now.Theo Epstein and his advisers get credit for what Ortiz has done, but they also got really, really lucky, too.

With Ramirez, of course, they’ve been even luckier. Proceeding from the assumption that he was a big risk to collapse and that his contract was overvalued (reasonable supposition), they have repeatedly tried to trade him or give him away by putting him on waivers, seemingly only giving up on the effort this past winter. Again, they get credit for having him around, but you can only give them so much considering they were willing to literally give him away and then spend his salary on a mix of lesser talents, the sort of strategy that led to the collapse of their pitching staff when they let Pedro Martinez walk as a free agent, thinking it wiser to have a 50-cent piece and two quarters rather than one dollar bill.

The upshot for the Yankees is that, in looking ahead over the next few years, they probably don’t have to build a 100-win team to beat the Sox. There’s no one on the Sox remotely ready to replace either Ortiz or Ramirez, and very few players who could even conceivably become available in trade or as free agents who could do so.

This doesn’t mean that the Yankees shouldn’t build the best team possible, but that the pressure of having to beat out a similarly powerful juggernaut for a playoff spot probably isn’t going to be there as much as it has been over the last few years.That makes a difference when deciding whether to do something that’s good in the short term and bad in the long term, something for the team to ponder after October, as it heads toward yet another set of pivotal choices while glaring in Carl Pavano’s direction.