by David Ortiz
Many things about the Twins had changed over the years, but the same manager was still in place. His name was Tom Kelly, and he was highly respected in the Twin Cities and throughout baseball. It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was the kind of guy who could make your life miserable if he didn’t like you. It also didn’t take me long to figure out that he didn’t like me. At all. This was going to require some problem-solving skills. This was going to be my biggest challenge yet in professional baseball.
In the spring of 1997, I was 21 years old. I had completed just one full season of minor league baseball. I was still learning the nuances of the game as well as the United States of America. So, no, I never expected to be in the major leagues that season. And I never dreamed that I’d have as many problems with a manager over the years as I did with Tom Kelly.
Anyone who was around the Twins knew that Kelly had never wanted to move on from Dave Hollins, the player I was traded for. Hollins was a veteran player, and maybe his departure showed the manager his own future in Minnesota: managing with fewer and fewer veteran players on the roster the longer he hung around. I can imagine it must have been frustrating for a two-time World Series–winning manager to see his team brought to its knees by age, trades, and cost-cutting.
I wasn’t thinking about any of those issues, though, when I showed up for spring training. I just wanted to hit and prove that I was ready to move on from A ball. I was crushing the ball that spring, and I can remember the Twins’ Double A manager, Al Newman, telling me, “I wish I could take you with me. You belong in Double A.” He said that because I wasn’t going with him, and I wasn’t happy about it. The Twins trained in Fort Myers, and I was staying right there. My hot spring had earned me a slight promotion, from Low A the year before in Wisconsin to High A and the Fort Myers Miracle in the Florida State League.
I still had a lot to learn, but I wanted to be challenged too. I knew my skills were beyond that league. It took a couple of months for the Twins to agree with me. That’s when the organization put me where I should have been all along: in Double A in New Britain, Connecticut. As I look back now, it’s clear how much tension there always seemed to be with the Twins: I saw myself as one kind of player and they usually had ideas different from mine. It wasn’t all bad, though, because of the relationships I had with my teammates and with members of other teams. That year I got to play with my boys Torii Hunter, Corey Koskie, Doug Mientkiewicz, and Javier Valentín, guys who remain friends of mine.
As for other teams, Akron had a first baseman named Sean Casey who was probably the friendliest player in the league. I’d get to first base and he’d want to talk baseball, the weather, pop culture, or anything that crossed his mind. It’s no wonder that he eventually became known as “the Mayor.” When we played in Portland, Maine, another player I looked for was Kevin Millar. He was a good hitter, but more than that, he usually said something that made me laugh. It was tough to dislike a personality like that. I was growing, and these were the players I was growing up with. And the growth was happening fast.
My first couple of games in Double A, I was hitless. Newman approached me on the team bus with a smile. “It’s not that easy hitting at this level, is it?” he said. It wasn’t in the beginning, but I quickly adjusted in the next two months. I averaged an extra-base hit every seven at-bats, led the team with a .585 slugging percentage, and earned my second promotion of the summer. I was on my way to Salt Lake City and Triple A. Just one phone call away from the big leagues. While I hadn’t thought of the highest level in the spring, it was within reach now. The Twins were having yet another losing season, one of the five worst teams in all of baseball. There wasn’t anyone on the roster known for being a power hitter. The team leaders in home runs were Marty Cordova and Matt Lawton, with 15 and 14.
I was a September call-up on a bad team, and there were no big plans for me in 1997. But since I had risen so fast through the system, and since there wasn’t another power hitter like me in the organization, I figured I would be sticking around for a while. It’s hard to believe that it happened so fast: three years after my first trip to the United States, and one year since being traded as a prospect in A ball, I was officially a major leaguer. I liked my chances in 1998.
The Twins, though, and everyone else in Minnesota, had other things on their minds. Such as survival. The team’s owner, a banker named Carl Pohldad, was upset that he couldn’t get political support for a new retractable-roof stadium. He made it no secret that he was negotiating to sell the team to a businessman who planned to move the team to North Carolina.
As the ’98 season began, that was the big question in Minnesota and throughout baseball: Is this the last year of the Minnesota Twins? The combination of the uncertainty, the losing, and the worst attendance in the entire American League made for a low-energy atmosphere. I could understand why they wanted a new stadium. The Metrodome was boring. It was nothing like the excitement I had seen as a kid when I fell in love watching Kirby Puckett.
Playing for Kelly made it even more miserable.
I know he’s recognized as a good baseball man, but he struck me as a guy who believed his players were dumb fucks. I’ll give you an example. The Metrodome was known for being a tough place to track the ball, as well as for its fast, unpredictable turf. You could be working hard, concentrating hard, and embarrassing things still could happen to you on the field. There was a game where Kelly thought the team was too sloppy, so he ordered the players onto the field after the game. Come on. It’s major league baseball. I’d never seen anyone do that before, and I haven’t seen anyone do it since. He didn’t do well with mistakes, and there were lots of mistakes as our team gradually got younger. I walked on eggshells around him. I didn’t like playing the way he wanted me to play. He loved those Punch and Judy, spray-the-ball-all-over-the-field hitters. He absolutely loved that kind of stuff. I’m not going to be putting the ball on the turf and moving runners over. I’m a big, left-handed power hitter who is supposed to drive in runs. That was my approach.
The approach seemed to be working fine the first month of the 1998 season. I hit four home runs and drove in 20 in our first 34 games, and I also led our team in slugging percentage. I felt great. I even got a compliment from Kelly, who told the people covering the team that I brought “pizazz” to the game. Unfortunately, I hurt my right wrist in a game against Tampa and broke it a week later in New York. I missed three months just as the weather was changing, when I believed I was going to become even more productive. Not only did the injury affect my season, as I finished the year with just nine home runs, but it made a shaky relationship with Kelly even worse.
I couldn’t believe what happened the next year in spring training. The only significant thing that had changed in Minnesota was that the team was staying. There wasn’t a new stadium in the works at that time, but at least Charlotte wasn’t gaining the Twins. So it was back to the Metrodome again for yet another season of the worst attendance in the league. On the field, the team was even younger than the year before. Every single pitcher who started a game was in his twenties. Not one start, all year, from anyone over 30. Isn’t that amazing? Anyway, the lineup featured some of my boys, like Torii Hunter and Todd Walker. Matt Lawton and Marty Cordova were there too, along with Ron Coomer, but for the third year in a row there wasn’t an everyday player who slugged .500 or better.
You might be wondering why I wasn’t that guy. Me too. This was a team desperately in need of, to use Kelly’s word, pizazz. Yet, at the end of spring training, the Twins sent me to Triple A. When I’d made it from A ball to the big leagues in 1997, I thought my minor league days were over. Two years later, even after my wrist injury, it was clear to everyone that I was a 23-year-old hitter who belonged in the big leagues.
The Twins disagreed. I was one of the first cuts, and they used a poor batting average in spring training against me. I still get angry about it to this day. I put it all on Kelly. I think about his mentality at the time
, and the games that he played with me. If I were of a lesser mind, if I didn’t possess the inner strength that I have, it could have broken me. And just being very honest, it rocked me a bit. The message the organization was sending me was that I wasn’t worth shit. I’d hit .277 for them the year before, with a hand that never fully healed, and they quickly sent me down like that? After I was supposed to be part of the organization’s future? Way to build up my confidence, sending me down after a handful of at-bats in the spring.
As bad as that was, that wasn’t even the worst of it. While I was in Triple A, my teammates and opposing players would look at me and say, “What in the hell are you doing here? You’re a big leaguer playing the year in Triple A.” My girlfriend Tiffany essentially kept a bag packed for me, ready for a grab-and-go at any time. She shopped day to day, rather than week to week, because she was always expecting me to get the call. We lived in the same apartment complex where many of my teammates lived, and their wives and girlfriends would tell Tiffany that they too thought I would be leaving soon. My numbers said it all: 68 extra-base hits, 110 runs batted in, and a slugging percentage just under .600 in 130 games. Remember, the big league team still had no power hitters. Yet the Twins left me in Salt Lake City the entire season. I even started to hear that the decision-makers in Minnesota were saying that I was dogging it in Triple A. It was so insulting. I don’t know if those reports were coming from scouts or from Phil Roof, my Triple A manager, but if they thought that I was dogging it, what did they expect my numbers to be with “effort”?
My opinion of the organization was probably sealed at the end of the ’99 season. My team in Salt Lake had made the Pacific Coast League playoffs. The Twins hadn’t come close to calling me up all year, and they still didn’t do it on September 1. I thought, naturally, that I wasn’t going to the big leagues at all, so I put everything I had into our Triple A playoff series against Edmonton. Maybe I took it too far: caught in the scramble of a rundown, I injured the ACL in my left knee as well as my left ankle.
According to the trainers, I needed surgery and my season was over. But I was our best hitter, and we were in the playoffs. I went back to the hotel, took some anti-inflammatories, and told Phil Roof that I was available for the next game. Despite hitting a couple of homers on a bad leg, I didn’t have enough to carry the team in that series. We lost, and I thought I had plenty of time to get myself together in the off-season because my baseball season was over.
Except that it wasn’t.
After ignoring me the entire spring and summer, the Twins called me up when I was at my most vulnerable and ineffective. I was shocked. What were they thinking? I knew I was hurt, my Triple A manager knew, and so did everyone in Minnesota. When they called me up, I spent the next couple of weeks doing nothing but therapy. I didn’t take batting practice, I didn’t run the bases, I did nothing. Just therapy. One day the trainer saw me running in the outfield and determined that I was well enough to play. So, sure enough, Kelly put me into a game. My season should have been over. I was at a disadvantage, and it showed in my 25 at-bats. I didn’t get a hit. Not one. Five walks, zero hits.
Sending me down for the year, calling me up when I was hurt, and then actually playing me while I was hurt—those were all low blows. It was as if they were saying, Fuck you, man. It was a real doghouse, and I didn’t appreciate it. There was no use protesting. Kelly wasn’t going anywhere, even after his seventh consecutive losing season. No one knew just how talented we were as young guys, so people didn’t hold his record against him. Besides, he was a link to the past, the man who had guided the Twins to the only championships in franchise history.
I had a decision to make. I could fight Kelly, or I could learn to make him happy. So I kissed his ass for a couple of years and became the biggest slap hitter you’ll ever see. Even that wasn’t enough, not entirely. He never fully embraced me by entrusting me with either the first base or designated hitter job and saying, “Figure it out.” No, I was always splitting the job with someone. It was tough because these were friends of mine and I had nothing against them. The problem was with Kelly. He once made a comment about me—essentially that they didn’t know what to do with me and that no one wanted me. That was interesting to hear. One off-season in the Dominican, I saw Felipe Alou. He told me that his franchise, the Montreal Expos, had made calls about me, but the Twins weren’t going to trade me.
So what were they trying to do? Maybe it was their attempt to humble me or prove to me that I couldn’t do anything without them. As long as Kelly stayed there, I was never going to be the player that I should have been, coming into my prime years. He saw me as a part-timer. I saw myself as a player who needed to be included in the lineup daily, no matter who was on the mound. Since I wasn’t writing out the lineups, I was a part-timer in 2000, when the Twins had their eighth straight losing season. I was also a part-timer in 2001, the season that broke a couple of strongholds.
First, it snapped the parade of losing, as the Twins finished with an 85-win regular season. It also ended the 15-year reign of “TK,” which is what a lot of baseball people called Kelly. He retired to much praise at the conclusion of the 2001 season. The Twins were all that I knew in major league baseball, so I had no evidence to support my thought that there had to be something better than what I had experienced. I was hopeful, but I really didn’t know.
I did know that I was going to be more free in 2002. No more acting like a singles hitter. No more unreasonable stays in the minors. No more Tom Kelly. My new manager was Ron Gardenhire, and I got the feeling that no matter what kind of leader he turned out to be, he was going to be better for me than Kelly was. It couldn’t possibly be worse.
I knew it was going to be a year of great change for me in baseball, a change that would alter the way other people looked at me, as well as the way I looked at myself. I couldn’t have imagined that the change would be so deep, beyond the game, affecting me more than a game ever could. I was young, but I’d seen a lot in my life. Yet, in 2002, it was one of the few times I could feel myself crumbling as I thought, I can’t believe this is happening.
3
Crossroads
My favorite part of every baseball off-season was returning to the Dominican to see my mother Angela. I adored her and tried to do everything she asked. If I had plans to go out with my boys and my mom said, “Son, I don’t want you to go,” then I’d stay home. That was the relationship.
I respected all the things she and my father had done to make sure my sister and I had a decent life, so I wanted to repay that love every chance I got. At Christmas, we were always together as a family. My mother was a phenomenal cook, and I think she passed those genes on to me. I’m telling you, anything that she put her hands on was money. Rice, beef, chicken, fish. It was all good, and I’d often be there watching her make it. Christmas was when sisters and cousins and even neighbors would come by. They were full of love and laughter, and they’d make amazing meals that would take your speech and breath away, meals that let you know just how much they cared. There would also be music, dancing, and talking for hours and hours.
I loved it, and it was a reminder that no matter what had happened in the 2001 season, or any season, I had dozens of people who supported and loved me unconditionally.
I was 26 in the winter of 2001, Tiffany and I had been together five years and had two girls, and I had my own place in the Dominican. But that never stopped me from visiting with my mother, and even staying over if that was what she wanted me to do. I’d usually go to her house dressed casually, either in jeans or shorts. But something different came over me before I went to see her on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2001. I’d never suited up to hang out at Mom’s house, but there I was, standing in front of my closet, pulling out and holding up suits to decide which one I’d wear that day.
The blue one came out first. Then the gray. Then the pinstripes. I went through a lot of options and colors, not even thinking about what I was doing. I finally settle
d on a black one. I put on a white shirt, a tie, and that black suit and drove to my mother’s house. When she saw me, she smiled and raised her eyebrows.
“Damn, boy,” she said. “What’s up with this suit thing?”
“You know, Mom. I just want to look good for you,” I said.
There was something different about the night, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I was quiet inside. I love my music, loud and happy music, and my mom knew that. I’d go there and put it on, turn it up, play it for hours. But when my mother asked me if I was going to play anything, I told her I wasn’t up for it. Her place had two levels, with a living room and kitchen downstairs and all the bedrooms on the second floor. Around nine o’clock at night, I went to take a nap in one of the bedrooms. That was strange, because I’d never done that either.
The way things were developing, and the way I was feeling, I should have known that life as I knew it was about to be altered forever.
When I woke up from the nap, the first thing I saw was a jersey that belonged to me, hanging in the closet. It was a Minnesota Vikings game-day model, number 84. For Randy Moss. I’d picked one up after his first year with the Vikings. Seeing it made me smile, because that was a great example of my mother’s style. She was a tall woman who, even at the age of 46, had a little hip-hop swagger to her. She liked to wear some of my things, and she was proud that her son was a professional athlete.
I’ll never forget the dinner we had that night. The food was perfect, as it usually was, but the atmosphere wasn’t as festive as normal. A couple of friends of mine had asked me to stop by a party they were going to, and I’d initially agreed to do it. I said good-bye to my mother, drove away from the house, and went all the way to the party. But when I was steps away from the entrance to the place, I decided I didn’t want to go in.