Hall of Famer's attack on Shohei Ohtani's MVP candidacy will enrage Dodgers fans

The race for NL MVP is already heated with three weeks left in the regular season and the entire month of October to get through. With Mookie Betts on the shelf for a few months with a broken hand, Shohei Ohtani looked like the indisputable winner, but then Francisco Lindor came out of nowhere to threaten for the crown. The discourse will only get louder as Ohtani gets closer to 50-50 and Lindor leads the Mets towards a postseason spot.

The talk online can get ugly, but that's par for the course. It's one thing when a random Twitter use wants to weigh in and call one player names for the benefit of the other, but it's another thing entirely when legendary Hall of Famers do it.

In an interview with Marca, originally published in early August but somehow going viral a month later, first-balloter David Ortiz, who never won an MVP award despite eight legitimate candidacies, said of Ohtani, "They always had a 'issues' not to give me the MVP because I was a designated hitter. I'm going to see what they're going to say this year when Ohtani, the 'pretty girl' of MLB, is in the race."

He didn't stop there, saying, "Every day [MLB] is encouraging Ohtani to reach 50-50, while players like Francisco Lindor are being held back."

David Ortiz makes himself look really bad with take on Shohei Ohtani-Francisco Lindor MVP race

Ortiz was obviously trying to say that Ohtani is the face of MLB and the league is probably rooting for him to win MVP from a monetary standpoint, so his every move is put on blast by their social media team. That's not wrong, but the way Ortiz put it was perhaps the most inelegant and ungenerous way to phrase it. No one is disputing that Ohtani is baseball's darling, but "pretty girl"? What are we, twelve?

There seems to be a wave of thought lately that's trying to downplay Ohtani's chase for 50-50, as if it's not something that no one has ever done before. Jon Heyman did it, dismissively calling Ohtani "50-50 man," and it's hard to tell if anyone who resorts to this line of argument is just doing it to rage bait, or if they actually believe it. Either way, Major League Baseball was founded over 120 years ago. None of the hundreds of thousands of players who have been in and out of the game have ever hit 50 home runs and stolen 50 bases in a single season, not even when players were seeing pitches that traveled a lot slower than 94 MPH. Why is a 50-50 season suddenly being treated as it's an incredibly ordinary thing to do? If expanded bases were entirely responsible for the steals, then everyone would be doing it. And expanded bases certainly have nothing to do with the 50 dingers!

If anyone should empathize with Ohtani's fight in this race, it's Ortiz, who spent the last 12 years of his career as a DH, with only 66 appearances on the field. There's talk about "anti-Mets bias" and "West Coast bias," the latter of which categorically does not exist, but how is the fact that no pure DH has ever won MVP somehow being overlooked?

It was a bad take and a bad look for Ortiz, who decided to add his voice to the noise and rile up Mets fans and/or Dodgers haters who are probably just going to end up disappointed anyway. All of the odds are still in Ohtani's favor, and the second he gets to 50-50, the award will be locked up. Sorry (we guess), Big Papi.