''He wouldn't do it," Snow said of Bonds. ''I don't think he ever did. Maybe once."
Alex Cora once played shortstop for the Dodgers, the Giants' hated rivals. Barry bunt? Cora gave it his best ''Are you kidding me?" look.
''He didn't even try to go the other way against the shift," Cora said. ''He did it once [hit to left field]. He gave me a look like, 'C'mon, why the shift? I said, 'Hey, we'd rather have you hit a double than you hit a home run.'
''He could have gone [to left] at will, but he doesn't get paid to do that."
Rudy Seanez pitched for the Padres, the team against which Bonds has hit 81 of his 709 home runs, by far the most he's hit against any team. Barry bunt?
''I've never seen it," Seanez said. ''Hit to left? Not intentionally."
Ted Williams, of course, faced the most famous shift of all, the Boudreau shift, named after its designer, Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau, and got ripped for not going the other way more often. But the only inside-the-park home run of his career, which came in a pennant-clinching 1-0 win over the Indians in 1946, flew over the head of a left fielder playing shallow in the shift.
''I remember when [Ty] Cobb criticized me for not trying to punch the ball to left field away from Boudreau's shift," Williams once said to his most famous biographer, John Underwood. ''Boy, I thought Cobb was an old crab."
The Sox gathered yesterday not to condemn Ortiz but to praise him, though Big Papi's two-run home run in the first inning, which he hit to left, away from the stacked deck on the right side, proved to be of much greater value to the Sox in yesterday's win than the bunt, the second bunt single of Ortiz's career.
As a stratagem, Kevin Youkilis's hit-and-run single in the eighth, which led to the team's fifth run, also meant more to this win. But as a conversation starter, there was no beating The Bunt.
''We were saying on the bench, if he bunts it a little harder, he'll have a double," Snow said. ''Instead of laying it down, just push it with a little oomph, because Glaus is way over. That thing would roll all the way to the wall, especially on the turf.
''He could hit .400 if he did that. He could be the first guy [since Williams] to hit .400."
