It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

On bad days, Ortiz sits in the dugout, admitting he now views not only the baseball world but also the entire fame game with a harder, more skeptical eye. For one thing, there’s a gnawing disappointment because rapper Jay-Z is suing him over copyright infringement. (Ortiz has a nightclub in the Dominican Republic with the same name — 40/40 — as Jay-Z’s in New York, a misunderstanding Ortiz says could have been handled “with a phone call.”) For another, the satirical website The Onion is piling on. (“Personnel close to the Red Sox front office noted yesterday that Ortiz is being paid one-twelfth of the team’s total payroll, adding that they were just saying, is all,” according to an article under the headline “David Ortiz Getting Paid $13 Million, By The Way.”)