John Henry uttered one word when told the numbers.

"Wow," he said.

And then he uttered another.

"Wow," he said again.

If you think the Red Sox' owner is being spectacularly inarticulate, well, see if you can do better. Here -- courtesy of New York-based author Allan Wood, Red Sox fan extraordinaire who has written a book about the franchise's next-to-last championship team (Babe Ruth and the 1918 Red Sox) and maintains a daily blog about the Sox ("The Joy of Sox," located at joyofsox.blogspot.com) -- are some facts about David Ortiz:

Since the beginning of the 2004 playoffs, Ortiz has been to the plate 19 times in potential walkoff situations . . . which is to say, situations like Monday night's, when a hit wins the game.

If you take away the five walks Ortiz has drawn in those 19 plate appearances, he's left with 14 official at-bats in what we can call "walkoff situations".

He's gotten 11 hits in those 14 at-bats.

That's a .786 average. Repeat: .786.

Seven of the 11 hits have been home runs.

He has 20 RBI in those 14 at-bats.

In addition, Wood reports that a projo.com bulletin-board poster named Franco has determined that the Red Sox have had 13 walkoff wins since the beginning of the 2004 playoffs. Ortiz delivered the winning hit in 11 of them. In the other two he walked, once intentionally.

How would you describe all that?

"All you can do is laugh," Wood wrote last night after Ortiz' lastest feat, a three-run homer Monday night that have the Red Sox a 9-8 victory over the Indians. "He cannot possibly be human."

Henry -- who, with fellow owner Tom Werner and team president Larry Lucchino, has already given Ortiz a plaque declaring him to be "the greatest clutch hitter in Red Sox history" -- actually did have more to say than 'wow.'

"That's not just going [11-for-14]," he said, "that's winning [11] times. That's unbelievable."

In his book Feeding The Monster, author Seth Mnookin described one of three times Ortiz did fail since October 2004: A popup to second base with the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of the ninth of Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, which left the Yankees and Red Sox tied and headed into extra innings. (Dave Roberts' historic stolen base, followed by Bill Mueller's game-tying single, had come earlier that inning.) In the Sox dugout, Mnookin reported, Ortiz was inconsolable.

"You can't do it every time," catcher Jason Varitek told him, according to Mnookin. "It's not humanly possible to get a hit every single time in these situations."

But Ortiz is proving Varitek wrong. Ninety minutes later, in the bottom of the 12th, Ortiz homered off Paul Quantrill -- his second walkoff homer of the postseason. (He had clinched the ALDS against the Angels with a 10th-inning homer off Jarrod Washburn 10 days earlier.) The next night, in the 14th inning, he singled home the winning run off Esteban Loiaza in a brilliant, 10-pitch at-bat described in great detail over two pages of the book by Mnookin.

And from that point on, Ortiz has been virtually unstoppable. According to Wood, Ortiz has gone 8-for-9 in walkoff situations, with four walks, in 2005 and '06. The only out he's made over those two years was a groundball to second in the ninth inning of a tie game on June 26 at Fenway Park against the Phillies. And he wound up winning that game with a walkoff single to left-center field in the 12th.

He's making a mockery of the strain of baseball analysis which says clutch hitting, for the most part, doesn't exist, that success in clutch situations is more random luck than skill.

Mnookin also has his own Red Sox blog (www.sethmnookin.com), and his June 13 entry -- written after Ortiz had beaten the Rangers with a two-out, three-run homer -- discusses clutch hittting with Sox advisor Bill James, the father of modern baseball analysis. James, too, once believed clutch hitting didn't exist; since then, he's changed his stance.

"I'm still not sure exactly how to measure clutch hitting," Mnookin quotes James as saying in a 2005 conversation. "That doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

Mnookin then wrote: "Here James, generally an understated man, paused for a moment."

"Watching Ortiz," James said, "it's hard to think it doesn't."

Wow.

Journal sports writer Sean McAdam contributed to this report.

amartone@projo.com / (401) 277-7345