by David Ortiz
I never graduated from collegio, though, and with good reason: a week and a half after my 17th birthday, I signed with the Seattle Mariners. Four years after being spared from going to work, it was time to do it now. The days were long. I’d wake up at five, take the bus across town to get to the Mariners’ facility at seven, stay there working and training until three, and then get back home around dinnertime. There was so much joy from my parents, who had worked so hard and made so many sacrifices just to get to that day. For years my father had guided me with the big leagues in mind. Consider that this is a man who, even now, speaks no English. He doesn’t even say “Hi.” But long before I signed with the Mariners, my father would tell me that I needed to learn English because I was going to need it at some point in my career. Truly, he saw a map for me when I was too young to see it for myself.
What I did know was that there was another center fielder in baseball besides Puckett who I needed to pay attention to—the Mariners’ Ken Griffey Jr. When I watched him play, I thought that he was the Michael Jordan of the sport. He was so smooth, and he made it look easy. When I signed, Griffey was only 23 years old, yet he already had earned three Gold Gloves. He’d also earned a lot more than the $10,000 I signed for.
My parents got that money, bought me a nice stereo system so I could listen to my beloved music, and took the rest. They saved some of it, paid off some bills, and made a couple of purchases. That was it. Gone. It was a reminder of two critical things for me. One—and this is how I was raised—if you have something, give it to your parents. They had always supported me and done everything they could to make things better. The other thing? With the money arriving and departing so quickly, the message was clear.
I had to keep hustling.
1
The Desert
As soon as I got the phone call, I knew what was on my father’s mind. He didn’t spell it out for me, and I’m glad he didn’t, because I understood what he wanted to hear.
“Que esta pasando?”
That’s all he had to say—“what’s going on?”—and the rest of the conversation was up to me. My father wanted to be assured that I wasn’t going to quit baseball in the summer of 1994. He needed to know that I wasn’t going to wither in the Arizona desert, as some of my teammates from the Dominican already had. I was 18 years old, away from home for the first time in my life, striving to get by with a limited understanding of English, and absolutely baking during our midday games in Peoria, a Phoenix suburb.
It was Rookie League baseball through and through, and if people couldn’t see that they weren’t paying attention. Our games were played in front of a few friends and family and a lot of empty seats. It was hard to blame anyone for staying away. It was always over 100 degrees when we played; most days it was about 105, but it wasn’t unusual for the temperature to rise to 110 or 115. It was uncomfortable, but the heat was easy compared to everything else.
Listen, I didn’t know anything—about life or baseball. When I left Santo Domingo for Miami, and then Miami for Dallas, and finally Dallas for Phoenix, those were the first three planes I’d ever been on. I’d followed my father’s advice and taken some English classes, but I quickly found out that the best way to learn the language is to screw it up and then be corrected by someone you trust. You can’t take the corrections personally.
We all lived at a hotel, and I remember that there was a soda machine that we used. One of the new guys from the Dominican went there and tried to get a Coke. Keep in mind that it was one of those machines where you could put money in and it would tell you how much more was needed. My teammate was missing 10 cents. One dime. The word dime in Spanish means “tell me.” He was putting his money in and saw the word DIME flash slowly in digitized red, so he asked us what it meant.
I explained that the machine wanted him to get closer and tell it the drink he wanted. Fortunately, he believed me. That led to at least 10 minutes of wild entertainment in the desert. He would say in a speaking voice, “Coca-Cola.” And I would tell him that he wasn’t being loud and clear enough. “Coca-Cola,” he would say again, screaming this time.
On and on it went. We’d tell him to get louder. We’d tell him to switch the drink. We’d tell him to say it with authority. “Coca-Cola, dammit!” A few of us were dying laughing at this point, even as we continued to tell our friend that he was one good shout away from getting the soda of his choice.
Another time we had a teammate who couldn’t wait an extra minute or two for us to go to McDonald’s with him. Whenever I went there with guys from the Dominican, I was usually the translator. As rough as my English was, it was better than theirs. But my man was hungry, so he went ahead of us to get his chicken sandwich. The only problem for him was that he didn’t know how to say “chicken sandwich” in English. We couldn’t believe what we saw when we walked into McDonald’s. He was basically playing charades at the register, flapping his arms like a chicken would, and then motioning to his mouth as if he were eating a sandwich. The cashier had no idea what he was saying and doing and gave him a puzzled look. But we knew. Once again, our laughter went on for a while. It was an adjustment period for everyone, and fun was one of the most universal ways to get through it.
The food there? Bland.
I was used to the rich, varied flavors of Dominican food. In Arizona, we’d get some plain scrambled eggs for breakfast and a piece of tough meat for dinner. We were young, but we were pro baseball players. We could just solve the problem and buy whatever we wanted to eat, right?
Not really.
Our pay was $118 every two weeks. We would have to make magic with that money and stretch $59 per week. You could go out at night, but doing that almost guaranteed that you’d be broke long before payday. We splurged a couple of times every two weeks. One of our treats was McDonald’s, which was like America’s Top Steakhouse to us. If it wasn’t McDonald’s, we’d go to a Chinese restaurant that featured an important phrase: “all you can eat.” For $4.99, we could feast. We used to go in there and clean that place out.
I had some fun moments, but what stood out to me was that I had never felt so isolated before. I had been surrounded constantly by family at home, comforted by familiar sights, tastes, and smells, by the rhythmic pace of the island. The adjustment to American culture would have been challenging all by itself, but it also included playing pro baseball. All these new experiences combined could have been overwhelming, and that was one of the reasons my father was calling me. Another reason was that word had traveled quickly: people back home had learned that a few of my Dominican teammates decided that the march through the lowest level of the minors wasn’t for them.
It could have been the food. It could have been the heat. It could have been the lack of guarantees and security. Some guys talked about venturing to New York, and others went back to the Dominican. For me, I remember it vividly. I was holding the phone, and I could hear that loaded question from my father. Que esta pasando? He was worried. He was nearly 3,000 miles away from me, but I could feel his concern, as if he were sitting right next to me. I was on my way to manhood after that conversation, because I was able to recognize the stakes and verbalize my plan.
“I’m staying,” I told him. “I’m you guys’ future, and I have one goal: make it to the big leagues. I’m strong. I’m not quitting.”
I can’t say that I heard him exhale, but I know that he did. He was agonizing over what I was going to say on that call.
Once we got past that hurdle, there was the business of actually playing baseball. This is going to sound strange to you, but I promise that it’s true: I was so raw that I didn’t yet understand some fundamental parts of the game. For example, I had no idea about batting averages. Isn’t that crazy? Here I was, a professional baseball player, and I didn’t understand the importance of batting .300. In fact, I didn’t know anything about it my entire first year. I hit just a couple of home runs in about 50 games and hit around .250. It wasn’t until the next season, as I ov
erheard a coach talking, that I got it. The coach must have thought I was setting up a prank when I approached and asked, “So hitting .300 is a big deal in baseball?” He looked at me and said, “Of course!”
He saw that I was genuinely asking about it, so he explained it to me. Before that conversation, I had always had the mentality of having fun playing, doing what my coaches told me to do, and then trusting that anything after that would take care of itself. I guess they never came out and told me to hit over .300 and slug over .500. Now I had more of a plan. My second season in Arizona, I hit .332.
It was 1995 and I was just 19 years old. The star of the Mariners organization, Ken Griffey Jr., was in the majors by the time he was 19, but I knew that wasn’t going to be my story. Griffey and his father were generous to me. They used to take care of the Latin players, bring us to nice restaurants, make sure we had good food. I was in awe of how real and earnest they were. Think about what they had combined to accomplish as a father-and-son baseball family and you come up with everything: World Series titles, All-Star Games, Gold Gloves, an MVP, millions of dollars. I respected them so much, and at 19, I was amazed that Junior had actually been in the majors at my age. I was admiring that accomplishment, not envying it, because I never dreamed of being in the big leagues that quickly. I was still learning the game as a young first baseman, and when I looked up—way up—at the guys playing my position in Seattle, I saw a pair of slugging Martinezes: Tino at first base and Edgar at designated hitter. The 1995 Mariners had no reason to obsess over impressive minor leaguers like me. Instead, they were charging toward the playoffs with hopes of making it to the World Series.
For me, I never imagined that my next stop, literally in a midwestern ghost town, would be my last full year in the minors. I was happy to finally be out of the desert, but it was as if my American education was going from one extreme to the other: from the excess heat of Arizona to the frequent chill of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. My new team was the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers of the Midwest League. The stadium was in Grand Chute, officially listed as a ghost town; the major city in the area is Appleton.
It was the first time I’d ever seen snow. I remember looking around and wondering to no one in particular, “What is this? Do they really play baseball here?” The stadium was loaded with snow. They brought us players in to clear some of it away. Two days later, there was a huge snowstorm that canceled all the work we’d done.
I had five roommates, all Dominican, living in a two-bedroom apartment. Every time one of us made a phone call home, we’d put a clock in front of him to time it. It was an outrageous bill, and it was in my name. Another guy would have the cable, one would have the phone, and another the electric. That summer they disconnected the air conditioning unit, and it must have been the hottest summer ever. We’d share one fan. Take turns with it. Move it from one room to the next. It was inconvenient at the time, but those are the things that help me appreciate what I have now.
I was still translating for some of my teammates in Appleton, and the assignment was much more complicated. And rewarding, in a weird way. My teammate Dámaso Marté was dating an absolutely beautiful woman. They got along great and wanted to talk with each other often. But the problem was that Dámaso didn’t speak English and she didn’t speak Spanish. That’s where I came in, to translate their conversations. Wherever they went, I would go as well. The only reason I did it was so my man Dámaso could be hooked up with a beautiful woman.
The manager of the team, Mike Goff, was someone who looked out for us. I remember him pulling some Latino and African American players to the side. He wanted us to be safe, and he wanted us to be mindful of the racist people he knew about in town. He told us to be aware of the Ku Klux Klan. He probably said that because of a situation that had happened before. Who knows? But I never saw anything racist in that town. Ever. Even going around the town, I never bumped into any racist situations. Goff had been the manager for years, though, and I guarantee that some situation had happened that he wanted us to be aware of. There’s always some clown who pops up with something.
This guy took care of me, but he was hard on me. Goff would give me a fine for anything. He was intense, but one of our lighter moments together came following his ejection from a game. I thought he’d left the dugout and gone back to the clubhouse. Instead, he’d taken the mascot’s uniform and was wearing it so he could remain on the field. Everyone knew the mascot was called “Thing.” At one point I was lingering on the field and I heard Thing say, “Get your ass back in the dugout.” When I heard Goff’s voice, I understood what he’d done and started laughing.
Our team was close, so many of us lived and socialized together. One night a teammate wanted to meet up with some girls he knew at a club called the Fire Alarm. It was ladies’ night, and it was $3 for all you could drink. I’d been paying attention to one of the girls. We talked, we joked, we played a couple of games of pool. I couldn’t focus on anyone else, and I got the feeling that she didn’t mind the attention I was giving her.
I found out that she was a local girl, from a small town called Kaukauna. She was a photography student in Madison and happened to be home for the weekend. I hadn’t been drinking much, but whatever I did have must have been strong enough—enough to make me feel like I had Superman’s cape on. When I saw the young woman dancing in a group, I moved across the floor and asked her a question.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I said.
“No,” she answered.
“Well, you do now,” I replied.
She smiled. I knew right then I had something special with Tiffany Brick. She teased me for wearing what she described as a construction-site worker’s outfit: long shorts and a bright-orange vest, with no shirt underneath. We danced the rest of the night. Eventually I learned how she spent the next day. She went to the local library and researched the Dominican Republic. She had a feeling that we would be spending a lot of time together, and she wanted to learn as much about me and my country as she could.
She was right about spending time together. Tiffany had been a great athlete in high school, voted Most Athletic Girl, and she still played fast-pitch softball. I would go to her games when I could and see her use her speed to get on base. When my team was on the road, she adjusted her schedule so she could see me. I met her parents, two brothers, and sister. She had never flown before, and we talked about her visiting the Dominican one day soon.
We had quickly fallen in love.
At one point during the summer, my roommates were having guests come in from Michigan, so our small apartment was overflowing and hot. Tiffany told me to stay at her house, although she was nervous about what her mother would say. I’d clicked with her mom when I’d met her before. When we woke up, we found out how Mom felt about me staying there for a couple of days: while we were sleeping, her mother had gotten on her bike, picked up some groceries, and returned to make a huge breakfast. It was obvious that Tiffany was going to be more than my girlfriend. I think we even mentioned the word “marriage” within the first two weeks of meeting each other.
I remember Tiffany asking what my other plan was if baseball didn’t work out. I told her that my father was great with his hands, and that I came from a family of mechanics. Like my father, I was also great with my hands. My hands on the bat. I never had a thought that baseball wouldn’t work out because I had confidence that it would. And to make life easier for my family, it had to.
2
Tom Kelly and Me
I had been doing something right on the field, because my season had been my best one yet as a pro. I was one of the top players in the league, hitting .322 with 32 doubles and 18 home runs. It felt good to have success, make a little bit more money—we were up to about $400 per week—and let my family know that I was getting a step closer to the dream.
At the end of the season, I found that I had made more money than I thought, and that I was closer to the majors than I thought.
The Timber Ratt
lers had made the playoffs. Goff called me into his office and handed me an envelope. It had all the fine money he had taken from me during the season. He gave it back to me.
“You know why I was so hard on you?” he asked. “Because you’re going to be a major league baseball player. You gotta get your shit right before you get there. Good luck.”
Our minor league season was over, but there was a full month of major league baseball to be played. I had done well in Wisconsin, but not to the point where I was thinking about having my name mentioned in the same sentence with a big leaguer. I was focused on getting back to the Dominican, training, and getting ready for my next challenge, most likely in Double A. But when I got back home, I received some news that filled me with pride.
I had been traded to the Minnesota Twins.
Some players are confused and unsettled by trades, but I wasn’t. What stood out to me was that an established power hitter in the big leagues, third baseman Dave Hollins, had been traded straight-up for me, a kid in A ball. It built up my confidence. I was glad that Minnesota thought that highly of me.
At the time, I didn’t have a handle on who the Twins were and what was systematically happening to them. Kirby Puckett had put the Twins on the map for me, but he wasn’t going to be a teammate of mine. About six weeks before I was traded, Puckett announced his retirement after playing 12 seasons with Minnesota. He had developed glaucoma in his right eye, and his career was abruptly over at the age of 36. The Twins from that 1991 World Series I watched were not the Twins I was going to in 1996. The team had a winning record in 1992, but then followed that season with four consecutive losing ones. The team’s front office was told to cut payroll, which made it possible for a lot of young and cheap players to get to the big leagues.
That was the good news for me, and I was excited about it. The Twins wanted to see what they had traded for, so it wasn’t long before they brought me to the Instructional League in Fort Myers, Florida, and watched me take batting practice. Shortly after that, they put me on their 40-man roster. In spite of all these positive developments, though, it wasn’t all positive.