David Ortiz’s Dugout Phone Murder Will Live on Forever

By Monday morning, the sports punditry had fully picked over David Ortiz’s violent confrontation with a dugout phone after being ejected from Saturday night’s game with the Orioles. Meanwhile, Ortiz added fuel to the theory that a dugout phone’s death only makes him stronger. His next game in, he went four for four, knocking out a two-run homer to solidify the Sox victory.

Still, the Boston Globe’s Peter Cardafo writes, “His teammates, his manager, and his coaches shouldn’t make light of it. It was ugly and nobody wants to see it again.” Indeed, in a civilized world where we don’t want our children picking up tricks from our blindly enraged sports heroes, that’s probably true. But … tell that to the blogging community on Tumblr, where people just can’t stop watching the trainwreck.

Indeed, you might argue that the looping .gif format might have been invented lo those many years ago simply so that someday, we could mindlessly watch Ortiz go to town on the dugout phone over and over and over… Ok, so that probably wasn’t the intention of its inventors (who pronounced it with a soft “g” as in Jiff, just saying…) but it sure is a nice execution. And so the folks on Tumblr have gif’ed Ortiz in as many ways as you can imagine.

They’ve done it on fast-forward:

And in slow-motion:

And the Goldilocks’s of Tumblr gif’ed him just right.

Perhaps most appropriately, they Hulk’ed him.

And they pitched ripoffs of cheesy D-list film that would feature a tornado of enraged David Oritzs. (Make that movie!)

The dugout phone lived an unappreciated life of drudgery and toil. But in death, at least, it finds immortality. It can rest in Dugout Phone heaven in peace knowing that much, at least.