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by David Ortiz


  I was also asked to do my first two endorsements. One was for D’Angelo, a local sandwich shop. The other one was for Comcast. I was honored that someone trusted me enough to make me their spokesman. I took it seriously.

  I knew it was going to be a busy off-season. I was 29 and a veteran, so there weren’t many things in the game capable of surprising me. For example, I guessed that a few of my boys from the World Series team, Johnny Damon, Kevin Millar, and Bill Mueller, had probably played their final games for the Red Sox. I also had listened to and been around Manny enough to understand that he might ask to be traded, again, at any time.

  There was one fight that I didn’t see coming, though. It was between Larry Lucchino, president of the Red Sox, and Theo Epstein, the general manager. An in-house war. It was about money and power. It reached the point where Theo decided he didn’t want to work for the organization if Larry, and ownership, wouldn’t allow him to do his job the way he wanted. He resigned almost one year after we’d been on the field in St. Louis, passing around the World Series trophy.

  I found it interesting. I had spent so much time thinking about how the clubhouse would be different without some of our players. It never occurred to me that the GM wouldn’t be there.

  This all went down at the end of October, close to Halloween. When the media started to figure out what was going on, many of them camped outside of Fenway to get comments from Theo. But he didn’t want to talk, so he escaped by putting on a gorilla costume and walking by everyone, unnoticed. I didn’t take sides, although I saw the situation for what it was: Theo had the title of GM, but in some ways he was the puppet. He was the shield who took the heat when things went wrong, even if they weren’t his decisions. I remember thinking, Theo manned the fuck up and left town. Wow. That took some balls. I knew he’d be all right because he was the young executive who had helped the Red Sox win the World Series.

  The Theo story was big. With every move, it seemed like the organization was trying to do something even bigger to top it. One of those moves happened around Thanksgiving. We traded a couple of kids in their early twenties, Hanley Ramírez and Aníbal Sánchez, to the Marlins in exchange for Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell. Beckett was a kid himself. He was a 25-year-old ace pitcher, and it made a lot of sense for us to get him. Lowell was a good third baseman with a sizable contract, so he was going to have the job here, not Mueller, in 2006. Kevin Youkilis was going to replace Kevin Millar at first. Just as that news was settling in, it got topped by something else. Johnny left. For the Yankees.

  It was hard to watch the team come apart so quickly. When we won it all, we knew that one of the things that made it special was the changing nature of baseball. None of us was crazy enough to think that the whole team could come back and we’d go on a run for a few years. You never think that. But the end never looks and feels the way you think it will. I know for a fact that Johnny wanted to stay with the Red Sox, and I thought it would happen. He did so much for the team, from providing the Idiot look with the long hair and scruffy beard, to seeing a lot of pitches as our leadoff guy, to being prepared to play at all times in any condition.

  But realistically, he had to leave. Red Sox fans weren’t going to see it that way because he went to the only team they couldn’t reasonably understand him going to. But the Yankees guaranteed him $12 million more than the Red Sox did. Playing for that team not only assured him more money and visibility, but meant that he’d be in the playoffs year after year.

  There was a lot happening, which was usually the case with Boston baseball. It was easy to get lost in the incredible environment, especially in late 2005 and early 2006. As a prominent member of the Red Sox, I often thought of things from the perspective of the New York–Boston rivalry. The back-and-forth sniping from fans and ownership happened year-round. I never allowed myself to become so intensely involved in it that I couldn’t talk to their players or anything like that. But at times I needed to be reminded that the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry wasn’t just about baseball. It brought a lot of national and international attention to us all, and we had an opportunity to use that platform in baseball and beyond.

  I can’t say that I arrived at that revelation on my own. It started to click for me when a family friend told me about the work she was doing. Hearing about it moved me deeply.

  She told me about the hospital she worked at in the Dominican, Plaza de la Salud Hospital de Ninos. She was constantly around children who had a variety of heart ailments. When I went to visit, I saw a little boy who brought me to tears. He was about two years old, around the same age as my son. I could barely see his face because it was covered with a mask, and there were tubes and machines all around him. I was overcome with many emotions, including guilt. Why wasn’t I doing something to help out here? How could I do more to help in other places? I’m sure that a lot of those kids came from poor families like mine. If we’d had any medical issues when I was growing up, I don’t know how my parents could have paid those bills.

  That visit to the hospital haunted me. I felt I should have been doing a little extra to try to make things better. I kept thinking, I wish I knew how to be a better helper . . . all I know is that working with kids is something I love doing. My problem, at first, was that I didn’t know how to ask for help without it being misinterpreted. I wanted no credit whatsoever for what I was doing, but I wanted to lend my name to the cause so I could maximize exposure to bring in money. What was the best way to do that? I believe in God, and I believe that God gave me my talent not just to entertain people by playing baseball but to help those in need. It’s not me; it’s Him. He’s the one who causes people to do good things. I told my agents that I wanted to be thoughtful about a mission. What’s the best way to raise awareness and money so we can save lives? That’s all I care about. Seeing those sick kids was like seeing members of my own family.

  That day the idea for my Children’s Fund was born. Did I know what I was doing? Of course not. I had never heard of 501(c)(3)s and 501(a)(3)s. I had a lot to learn about tax codes and the proper umbrellas under which to place charitable giving. But my focus had shifted to using baseball to better lives.

  Looking at life from that view made it easier to accept whatever was happening with the Red Sox. I looked at the situation between Theo and Larry and gained a valuable business lesson from it. Nearly three months after resigning from the organization, Theo returned with a new title, more responsibility, and more money. I saw where he was coming from, and I was inspired by his willingness to stick to his principles. I believed that players, if they had the leverage, should do the same thing to get what they’d earned. It wasn’t always presented that way in the media when players did it, but you can’t let the media or anyone else tell you what your life is supposed to be.

  I was happy with our team at the beginning of 2006. We had a new center fielder to replace Johnny, Coco Crisp, and a shortstop, Alex Gonzalez, who took the place of Edgar Rentería. The 2005 season had been tough for Rentería in the field, but that wasn’t going to happen with Gonzalez. He was smooth and fluid, one of the best glove men I’d ever seen. I thought our starting pitching would be good with Beckett, Curt Schilling, Tim Wakefield, and Jon Lester, the kid who was almost traded to Texas with Manny Ramírez. There was another reason for excitement, and it was probably part of the reason Theo was lured back to Boston. He said he wanted to mix veterans with prospects from the system. It was time for the prospects to grow up. He probably didn’t want that to happen without being around to see it.

  There was a young pitcher in the bullpen, Jonathan Papelbon, whose fastball was awesome, and other emerging players in the organization, besides Lester and Papelbon, were just a year or two away from helping us. No matter who they brought in, the lineup was built around Manny and me. I never knew specifically how each season would look, but I was confident that we’d both be all right with us protecting one another.

  It wasn’t just fun to watch Manny. He was also a great teacher for anyo
ne who wanted to know more about hitting. He always had an understanding of what was going to be thrown at him during the game, and he was prepared for it. If you watched him in batting practice, you saw that he never worked without a plan. His entire workout was based on what he was likely to get in a game.

  For me, no matter what I got in the game, the results seemed to be going in the same direction. Up and out. Early in the season, I got into one of those grooves where everything I hit was in the air. I didn’t question it. I thought I’d just go with that flow. I’d hit 40-plus home runs the last two seasons. I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t hit 50 in 2006.

  The first few months of the season didn’t go exactly as planned, but it was close. Papelbon took the closer’s job from Foulke and was immediately one of the best relievers in the league. Beckett clearly had superior talent, but that’s not enough in the American League East. Some National League pitchers are surprised at how deep the lineups are in the AL, and how many hitter’s parks there are. Plus, batters quickly adjust to what you’re doing. They watch video, talk to teammates, do whatever it takes to figure out what you’re doing. At times Beckett struggled with knowing the hitters, and he fought to push his ERA below the high fours most of the summer. But his AL debut was phenomenal, and he dominated batters with his stuff. He had some moxie about him too, and that never hurts.

  I had 30 home runs by the All-Star Game, which I made for the third year in a row. Manny had 24 homers and was an All-Star too. Once again, as a team, we were going back and forth with the Yankees atop the division and on our way to the playoffs. At the trading deadline, July 31, we led the East by one game over New York.

  Then it was time for the intersection of baseball and real life, with frightening news coming from both directions. It was ironic that it happened on that day, the night of my first Children’s Fund event in Boston. The mayor of Boston, my friend Tom Menino, came out to support the fund-raiser at a club called Rumor. It was a modest beginning, and we raised just $75,000, but we were on our way to helping those with heart trouble. The irony was that I was just a few weeks away from being evaluated for heart irregularities myself. As scary as that sounds, it wasn’t the most serious issue facing our team. It also wasn’t the loss of our captain, Jason Varitek, who was out with a knee injury for five weeks.

  After I felt a strange sensation in my chest that was described as “heart palpitations,” I spent some time in the hospital and then went back when I felt the same sensation ten days later. After a thorough evaluation, I was given a clean bill of health. But it was no time to celebrate my good news when I heard about Jon Lester. The pitcher, just 22, had swollen lymph nodes, and what was feared turned out to be true. He had cancer—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  The season had lost not only its importance but its relevance as well. We started a vicious reverse slide through the standings and ended up far out of playoff contention. Individually, I still continued to crush home runs. I broke the Red Sox record of 50, set by Jimmie Foxx in 1938. I finished with 54. I tied Babe Ruth for number of road homers, at 32. I’m not much for measuring the significance of an achievement as it’s happening. What I usually do is take a few weeks or months, sometimes even years, and look back on what’s been done. I couldn’t do that this time.

  You hear so many stories about the history of Fenway, the oldest park in the American League. They’ve been playing baseball there forever. It made me pause. I’d broken a team record that had stood longer than my father had been alive? And even if it was just for a game, I was in the same sentence as Babe Ruth? I was grateful for everything, individually, that the 2006 season provided.

  But the numbers have always been secondary. After we won in 2004, I didn’t think that was enough for my career. I wanted more. I was also concerned about my teammates, on and off the field. I wanted to know that Jon Lester was going to be okay. I wanted to know who the organization was going to bring in to replace Trot Nixon and Mark Loretta, who weren’t going to be re-signed to play right field and second base. Of course, there were the annual Manny questions. Did he want to come back? Did they want him to come back?

  As more and more players from 2003 and 2004 started to be phased out, I could have made equal arguments for two ways of thinking. One was to anticipate that the same thing that had happened to Pedro and Nomar and Johnny was going to happen to me. The other was to feel empowered as one of the few veterans in the clubhouse who knew what it was like to win in Boston.

  I felt empowered.

  I knew Theo had spent the fall of 2005 in a front-office dispute that caused him to leave. Now that he had returned, I was hopeful that he and I would see some things the same way. Maybe he’d be willing to talk to me, GM to player, about winning plans for 2007.

  11

  Coasting

  There were several times in my career when I didn’t understand what Theo Epstein was thinking and I had no interest in talking with him. It was nothing personal. Theo the smart and passionate Red Sox fan was cool with me. But Theo the numbers-crunching Red Sox executive was a real motherfucker when it came to negotiating my contracts.

  I felt like he drove a hard bargain when it came to his own players. When it came to free agents who had no history with the Red Sox, he was likely to keep handing out the cash until they eventually said yes. I didn’t like it, but I understood. That’s the unfair reality of the free agent market. It’s not a time when the best players get paid; it’s a time when the best available players get paid. I knew it was a system that I couldn’t change, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pissed about the situation every now and then. I’ll tell you what always made me feel better about my big-spending team: we had an opportunity to compete for all the top free agents, and ultimately that gave me a better chance to win a championship.

  The end of the 2006 season was one of those times when I didn’t mind talking to Theo. And as I talked with him, giving my opinion on what we needed in 2007, I got the feeling that he was genuinely listening to what I had to say. I knew that he had his own thoughts on how to improve a team that didn’t crack 90 wins and missed the playoffs for the first time in four years. He was going to fill at least one of our holes, second base, with a rookie named Dustin Pedroia. But when I talked with him, I asked for more pitching.

  As long as I had Manny batting behind me, it was going to be hard for any team to deal with our lineup. Manny had gone through another round of trade requests in 2006, and once again the Red Sox had decided that he was too valuable for a swap. It was going to be at least one more year of Manny being Manny in Boston. I told Theo that if we could get another starter and more help in the bullpen, there was no reason why we couldn’t get back to the playoffs and the World Series. I didn’t think we were that far away.

  I felt like I was seeing our team in a similar way to how Theo did. Then he surprised me. It turned out he was seeing players who hadn’t even crossed my mind. One of them was a celebrated pitcher from Japan named Daisuke Matsuzaka. There was a lot of hype around him before he ever threw a major league pitch. Because of the multiple pitches and flawless control that he supposedly had, some people had started calling him “the Greg Maddux of Japan.”

  What made Matsuzaka more intriguing was the process required to sign him. Each interested team had to declare how much it was willing to spend in a blind bid. Brian Cashman, the GM of the Yankees, put in a bid of $33 million. Theo’s was $51.1 million. Once again, there was that easy money with players who hadn’t proven a thing in Boston. The Red Sox were willing to give up stacks of cash simply to negotiate with him, and they’d have to give up a lot more when it was time for the actual contract. I felt many emotions, all at the same time: awed, unappreciated, hopeful. This is how I can explain that. Awed because the Red Sox and Yankees had combined to bid $84 million on a pitcher who might be able to pitch in the big leagues; unappreciated because I brought more than “designated hitter” to the Red Sox and they knew it, yet at contract time I was just a DH; hopeful
because, hey, all would be good with me if we won.

  By the time we got to spring training, our spending spree had brought in Dice-K, Julio Lugo, J. D. Drew, J. C. Romero, and Hideki Okajima. The pitchers weren’t the only new additions to the staff. There was also a new pitching coach, John Farrell, who had left a front-office job in Cleveland to be on the field daily with Tito Francona, one of his best friends.

  Sometimes the spring can tell you right away what kind of chemistry you’re going to have as a team. I knew we had a good balance immediately, and I didn’t figure it out due to something deep. It was actually our response to silliness that let me know our collective personality was accepting and relaxed. It began with, of all things, a car auction. A story had been going around that Manny, who loved collecting vintage cars, was trying to sell a classic Lincoln Continental. He was scheduled to be at an auction in New Jersey when he was supposed to be at spring training in Florida. Instead of flipping out, it seemed that everyone had some laughs with it, and as it turned out, Manny arrived in camp when he was supposed to.

  A month later, Manny was at it again. Once again, the “incident” inspired more comedy than frustration. This time he was putting a gas grill on eBay, along with an autographed baseball. The bids for it didn’t approach Dice-K levels, but they went as high as eBay would allow before the gas grill was eventually withdrawn from the site.

  We left Fort Myers with smiles, and there wouldn’t be many occasions all season that would make us want to change them. I was impressed with a couple of our new players, for completely different reasons. The rookie second baseman, Pedroia, worried me at first. I’d watch him struggle at the plate and think, Damn, I don’t know if he’s gonna make it. There was a stretch in April and May when he went 5-for-42 for a .119 batting average. Then he did something that I’ve never seen. He went on a 35-for-76 tear, good for a .460 batting average.

 

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