Papi

by David Ortiz

  Everything I did that night was different, and I was more subdued than anyone who knew me had been used to seeing. I didn’t mistake that restraint for maturity, the idea that I’d suddenly grown up and lost my appetite for all the fun things I usually did. That wasn’t it. Something was troubling me, and at the time I didn’t know what it was.

  I eventually got back to my own place, slept there, and called my mother on New Year’s Day 2002. She said she was planning to call a driver she knew so he could take her to visit her brothers and sisters. My sister and I found out later that the driver first declined to take her. He had worked an overnight shift and said he was too tired to make the trip. Thirty minutes later, because of his love for her, he called back and said he couldn’t tell her no.

  That’s how everyone felt about my mother. She had a lot of charisma; people were drawn to her personality. She connected with people easily too. If she knew you for 15 minutes and you told her you had a problem, she would immediately help you solve it, as if she’d known you all your life. It was difficult for anyone to leave her stranded when she was in need, so the driver and my mother took that drive across the island to see her family.

  As she was visiting her brothers and sisters, I was at my own house, talking with my father. Some of my friends wanted me to go to the beach, where a lot of people would go on New Year’s Day. I wasn’t up to it. Later in the day, I drove my father back to his own house. I can remember every detail of sitting there, talking to my father, and having our conversation interrupted by a phone call. It was from a guy named Carlos, who was dating my sister at the time.

  Carlos said he had been driving on the highway and had seen a terrible accident. He told me where it was and said I should get there quickly. I can still hear his voice now, how he had too much respect for me and my family to tell me what he already knew. He tried to be gentle. “Angela had an accident,” he said, “and she’s not looking too good.”

  He didn’t want to tell me. He knew that she was dead. He just wanted me to get there.

  The location he told me was about 20 minutes away from my father’s house. My dad heard the entire conversation, so we sped away from his house and toward the location that Carlos described. We got there in about seven minutes, saw the wreckage, and were told what had happened. The driver had fallen asleep on the way home. My mother had been asleep as well, sitting in the backseat of the car on the right side. There was a dump truck parked on the side of the highway, and they ran into it. The driver was in critical condition and almost died. My mother died instantly.

  A huge part of me was gone, taken away from me so suddenly that it did not seem real. I was shattered, and I have no idea how I even found the strength to stand through it all. I remember everything, step by step, like it happened yesterday. I’ll tell you something that my sister and I still talk about to this day: When it was time to identify my mother’s body, which was unrecognizable in so many ways, do you know how we knew it was her? She was wearing my Vikings jersey, the one I had seen hanging in the closet. We still talk about that now. We can look back and see all the mysterious things that happened over those couple of days. She’d insisted on that trip to see her family, and that had been her good-bye to them. My good-bye had happened the night before, wearing that black suit in sadness.

  I trust God, and I know that He worked with me and my family during our mourning. We were all trying to stand up without someone who had been such a pillar for us, so important to so many people. My mom was the youngest of all her brothers and sisters, and the one who had looked out for her the most was my uncle. He was much older than she was, and he had been given instructions by their own mother many years earlier. She died when my mom was eight, and before she passed she told my uncle, “You have to raise La Nina now. I’ll be watching.”

  La Nina. The little girl. That’s how my uncle saw my mother. It wasn’t a typical brother-sister relationship. He would check on her every Sunday and spend all day at her house. I remember my uncle at the funeral, looking up to the sky and crying, “Why her?” His son, my cousin, had died two years earlier in a bad jet skiing accident. He was still struggling from that, and then there was the death of my mother.

  I looked around at the funeral and saw so many people who loved her, and were so heartbroken by her passing, that I instinctively felt that I had to be the strong one and couldn’t grieve. I could feel my aunts and uncles leaning on me, looking to me for direction. Somehow I was able to give the appearance that I was keeping it all together, but I wasn’t the same. I kept thinking that none of this was real.

  It started to hit me after winter ball, when I began to get ready for my last spring training with the Twins. My mother was a part of my spring routines. She would always drive me to the airport as I left for the States. And then she would come to Fort Myers to celebrate her birthday, March 4. There would always be cake, and my teammates and I would give her a lot of attention.

  But on March 4, 2002, she wasn’t there. That was my first real struggle—accepting that she was not coming back. I’d kept so much to myself, working so hard to be contained for other people, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I lost it.

  One day I was walking slowly, alone, probably in a fog without knowing it. I missed my mother so much. Her goodness. Her advice. Her cooking. Her smile. Her mere presence. When I found myself standing alone in the Twins’ parking lot, the memories overwhelmed me and I started bawling. I didn’t know who saw me, and it didn’t matter because I couldn’t stop crying. My mother, my heart, was gone. Those tears had been stored up for months, since New Year’s Day, and I was finally allowing them to be released.

  One of the groundskeepers must have seen me and told my teammates. I looked up and saw Torii Hunter and others, coming out to hug and support me. Torii had been there at all of those birthday parties with my mother, and he understood her impact on my life. All I could do, going forward, was honor her with my work. I decided that every one of my home runs would be capped off with me pointing to heaven in remembrance of Angela, because I know that’s where she is now.

  Despite what happened with the Twins’ decision-makers, what I valued most about our team was the relationships. We were a bunch of kids, we’d been promoted together in the minors, and we were having fun. We also cared about one another. That was one of the reasons I felt lucky to know these guys, because I knew that our relationships would carry us beyond baseball.

  The season began just as we expected. We were a good team, so we won 13 of our first 19 games. I was slugging well over .500 with four April home runs. And then it happened. Again. This time it was an injury to my left knee, an injury that was going to require surgery and lead me back to the disabled list. Yes, things were turning around for the team, but not so much for me. Once again, I was going to need to regain the momentum I’d lost after being out for close to a month. I knew I could hit, but I could feel the organization beginning to wonder if I would ever be able to put together a complete and productive season.

  The good news was that the team kept winning while I was gone, and we won after I returned. It took me nearly two months to recapture my hot start, but once I did my average climbed from .237 on July 1 to .282 on August 1. I’ll tell you what else happened in that month: we started to run away with the division. No one was even close to us. On August 1, we led the division by 15 games, and by the end of the year we were the division champs, 20 games ahead of Cleveland and 13 ahead of the second-place Chicago White Sox.

  It felt great to be going to the playoffs, with players I loved. It was the first time in my career that I’d finished with 20 home runs, and my on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) was .839. My boys Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones had 29 and 27 home runs. Think about those years when the Twins’ home run leaders were in the midteens; now we had three players with at least 20. We started to bring some people back to the park too. Our attendance wasn’t great, but we also weren’t last in the league in that category anymore.

&nbs
p; But there was a problem, beyond losing the American League Championship Series to the Angels in five games. The problem was that the Twins still were not big spenders, and they had a lot of decisions to make. They were going to have to either pay me $2 million, trade me, or release me. That seems crazy to say now, with all the money in baseball and the sacrifices teams make to acquire power hitters. Today there isn’t one team in baseball that would release a slugger rather than pay him a couple of million dollars. It was a different time in baseball back then. It was the steroid era, and many teams believed that there were many ways to find a guy who could give them 20 home runs.

  I knew I was more than that, though. I got those 20 without 500 at-bats. If I ever got a chance to play every day, I knew I could do much more. That was the issue for Gardenhire and Twins general manager Terry Ryan. Were they willing to commit to me as a full-time player, at the age of 27, and use part of the limited budget to pay me? Their answer was a firm no. They called around and tried to trade me. They didn’t get what they were looking for. So as I tried to enjoy the off-season in the Dominican, I got the news from my agent.

  I was released.

  That was it. I was no longer a Twin, no longer guaranteed to be teammates with the players I had lived with in the minors and the majors. It was a strange feeling. I knew I was going to find a job somewhere else, but I was devastated. It was like being separated from my brothers. The extremes we’d been through made it emotional for me. It’s one thing to leave a winning team, but it’s even worse when you leave a winning team after experiencing the depths of losing with them too. We’d been through a lot. We’d had a lot of good times at home and on the road, laughing, going out to eat, catching each other in practical jokes.

  It was a hard reality to accept: I was now a guy who had been released by an organization, and not because I sucked. I was released because they didn’t have the balls to pay me. Two million dollars was nothing for them. And yet they decided to let me go. I believed that I was a talented player who was about to break out. The Twins didn’t want to go through that process with me. Instead, they replaced me on the roster with a player named José Morban. He was a shortstop they got in the Rule 5 draft, a player who had never competed above High A ball in the minors. Yet Ron Gardenhire told the Minneapolis Star Tribune: “He sounds like a hell of a player. From talking with all of our people, they were really excited and hoping we could get this kid.” They picked him over me, simple as that. What I needed to find was some team that would see past the injuries and focus on what I could bring to a team and its clubhouse.

  I still remember the petty incidents. Once, after the 1998 season, Gardenhire said his good-byes to players and staff and then came to me and said, “See you next year . . . if you’re still here.” I was like, damn. He probably doesn’t remember that, but I do. I don’t forget things. All I know is that the following year I was working on my timing in spring training and, in a ridiculous move, they sent me down to Salt Lake City.

  I remember the silly stuff they used to do with my family. I had been with Tiffany for six years, and we had a life together. We weren’t married, though, and the organization seemed to view that as less-than somehow. We were parents, we loved each other, and we were around each other constantly, but I guess that didn’t matter to them without the marriage license.

  There had been lots of trade rumors about me after the World Series and into early November. I was even thinking about those rumors on one of the best days of my life, November 16, 2002. On a rainy Saturday afternoon, on Fort Myers Beach, Tiffany and I finally did get married. We’d talked about being together for life within our first two weeks of being together, and now we were making it official. Many of my Twins teammates were there, and I remember emotionally telling Corey Koskie, “I think I’m going to be playing somewhere else in 2003.”

  Even though I’d said it, I wasn’t prepared for it. The way I imagined it happening was all wrong too. As November became December, I’d go over scenarios on how it would happen. There would be a phone call, I thought, telling me I’d been traded to Miami or Chicago or New York. Yes, I thought I’d be traded. Not released.

  I feel like they fucked me. That’s the best way I can describe it. I was released on December 16, 2002, exactly one month after my wedding. Who gets released then? It was a difficult time to find a job, which is why I’d said to Terry Ryan during the season, “If you’re going to release me, please just do it right after the playoffs.”

  I was good to that organization. I was one of the players who kept the clubhouse loose. I approached my teammates with humility, and I was loved by everyone. Why release me in December? I thought it was a trashy way to do business, and I couldn’t help thinking that they’d done it on purpose.

  When I got the news, I was in the Dominican. One of the first calls I made was to Tiffany. Our daughter Alex wasn’t quite two years old, and now we had no idea where we’d be in 2003. But Tiffany can be a smart-ass at times. When I called her at her mother’s house in Wisconsin and told her what had happened, she said, “Good. Now we can apply for a job in Boston.”

  She loved the city and Fenway Park, although one time she commented that a parking space in Boston costs roughly the same as a house in Minnesota. I told her that there were no job applications in baseball, which she already knew, but that Boston was a possibility.

  One of the reasons it was an option was because of my friend Pedro Martínez. We had the same agent, and we’d been introduced to each other years earlier. We’d had lunch, and I was impressed by Pedro’s recall and thoughtfulness. He said that as a pitcher he always kept track of players who were becoming hitting threats, and that I was on his list.

  Nothing slipped by Pedro. I’d always hear from him about one item or another. Once he told me that he couldn’t believe I’d hit a homer off him in Minnesota. He said he’d thrown me a cutter and that I was the only tall man he knew in baseball who didn’t need to extend his hands to pull the ball. He explained that tall guys, power guys, want to extend their hands and pull it. He said he liked that I had been able to bring my hands in and pull it. He said that was special.

  He had lots of opinions on the game. As a fellow big leaguer from the Dominican, he had a theory that most Latin players could hit fastballs because the constant challenges present in winter ball exposed them to so many fastballs. I was always fascinated by his detailed analysis of the game.

  Shortly after my release, I was sitting in a restaurant in the Dominican with some friends of mine. Pedro saw me and said, “Compa [buddy], come eat with us.” I was on the phone, so I put my hand up as if to say wait a second. I guess I was on the call longer than Pedro expected, so he came over and asked what was going on. I told him I’d been released by the Twins. I’ll never forget his response.

  “That’s great,” he said, with that big smile of his.

  I made a face at him. Good? How so? I’d just gotten married and had a family to support, and now I had no job.

  “No, no,” Pedro clarified. “I’m saying it’s great because now you get a chance to play with me in Boston.”

  Once Pedro put his mind to something, nothing else got in the way. From afar, the Red Sox appeared to be a bold team. I knew they had a lot of money to spend, and I didn’t see anyone on their roster I couldn’t beat out for a job. Pedro started making calls like he was a general manager trying to make a deal. He called the new general manager, 28-year-old Theo Epstein. He also repeatedly reached out to Larry Lucchino, the team president. He left messages with them that all ended the same way: “Please call me back.” He got tired of waiting and contacted Jack McCormick, the traveling secretary. He got McCormick on the phone and said the words that certainly didn’t hurt my cause: “I’m sorry to be disturbing you this time of night, Jack. I need to get ahold of Theo. Get this message to him: David Ortiz got released and he can be our new first baseman.”

  It had a chance to be a really good fit. The Red Sox had won 93 games in 2002, but they
missed the playoffs. They wanted to upgrade their hitting to supplement Manny Ramírez and Nomar Garciaparra. On the day they signed me, for one year and $1.25 million, Epstein told a Boston Globe reporter, “We think, all the scouts think, he has a very high ceiling. You’re looking at a player with the potential to be a middle-of-the-lineup bat in the big leagues.” It was nice of him to say, but I wasn’t promised a thing. Between me, Kevin Millar, Bill Mueller, Todd Walker—a teammate of mine in Minnesota—and Jeremy Giambi, Epstein had spent just over $10 million for five new players. Plus, Shea Hillenbrand was already in place with the ability to play first and third. The competition for first base, designated hitter, and third base was going to be intense in spring training.

  At least I knew exactly where to go in the spring. The Twins trained in Fort Myers and, as luck would have it, so did the Red Sox. So all I had to do was travel across town when it was time to get ready for the 2003 season. But that was the only similarity between the Twins and the Red Sox. As soon as I looked around the Boston clubhouse, I knew I had to become a different player. Everywhere I looked I saw someone working his ass off trying to improve—Manny and Nomar, Jason Varitek, even crazy Derek Lowe. Everyone was working on something, trying to get better.

  If the Twins hadn’t released me, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see how a team like that functions. I wouldn’t have known that there was something much better out there for me. You never miss what you never had, right? It was eye-opening for me. I was looking at a guy like Manny, already one of the best right-handed hitters ever, already an All-Star, and he was busting his tail. I said to myself, David Ortiz, you had better get your act together and get to work. I had been blind to that part of the game, the work that goes into it before and after the game. I talked to myself a lot that spring, just saying, all the time, I get it now.