Papi

by David Ortiz

  On June 11, I got emotional as I stood there with the others reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I thought of what is said in the Pledge, and even what isn’t said. That’s the part that got me. As a new citizen, I felt as though the country was saying, “We trust you.” I was so appreciative. I brought my family in for a hug and held on tight. I knew I’d be spending a lot of time with them that day, and that later they’d be there watching the game.

  The wrist injury hadn’t gotten any better. What had happened Memorial Day weekend was that the sheath covering the tendons in my left wrist had been dislodged on a hard swing. My pain threshold is high, but this wasn’t just about pain, it was also about the mechanics of my wrist. It just didn’t feel right. After reaching a full count, the damaged wrist felt so awkward that I had to come out of the game.

  I had no guesses on what it was. I knew it was bad, though. My wrist felt terrible. Things got even more frustrating when I talked with the doctors and was told about the healing and treatment plan for the wrist. There would be no surgery or resetting. I was just going to have to wear a cast and be patient. “Is that it?” I’d asked. “Nothing else?”

  That was it, and it was nerve-racking.

  I’d begun the season slowly, hitting just .184 in April. I was starting to get hot in May. I hit eight home runs and eight doubles, drew 18 walks, and drove in 22 runs. Not a bad month at all. We were playing good baseball, but there was a twist to the season that we weren’t used to. We had company. It wasn’t just the Red Sox and Yankees anymore. The team that had spent nearly a decade at the bottom of the division, the Tampa Bay Rays, was challenging for the East title. We needed all the slugging I could give us, and I was starting to do that. But at the precise moment when my team needed me, I could only observe.

  That seemed like the story of what the season would be for the Red Sox. Some things were damaged far beyond repair, and we could only watch them play out. I knew at least a month before everyone else that Manny had reached a breaking point with the Red Sox. There was no way the relationship could last any longer. It was hard for me to watch because of who Manny was to me and how I felt about winning games.

  I just couldn’t crush Manny like some people did. He was only four years older than me, but I looked up to him as a hitter. He was a genius at the plate. All you have to do is ask the pitchers. They’ll tell you that he could be fooled, like all of us, but he couldn’t be fooled for long. He studied a pitcher’s strengths and then worked until that strength wasn’t as reliable for the pitcher as it had been in the past. I loved that about him.

  The other stuff was tough. I wanted to win every night, and when he was there, winning was more likely. Now flip that around: when he wasn’t there, it made it a lot harder for us to be successful. Manny would change his mind like day changing to night. He had spent the beginning of spring training saying that he wanted the Red Sox to pick up the option years on his contract and he wanted to finish his career in Boston. He joked and smiled a lot. Then, right before I got hurt, he started to change. It was clear to me that he was sick of New England, more fed up than he’d ever been, and wanted to get out. Over the years, Tito had called meetings with a few veterans to talk about Manny, and he’d tell us that he could easily take Manny out of the lineup. But he warned us that we would have to be okay with how that would look on the field. Most of the time, we agreed to put some humor on his actions and keep it moving.

  But I knew Manny, and this was different. He wasn’t giving anyone a choice.

  On opening night of the NBA Finals between the Celtics and Lakers, the Red Sox moved first pitch of our game with Tampa up an hour so we wouldn’t have a conflict with the Celtics. Instead, it turned out that we had a conflict with ourselves. Everyone was aware of how intense Kevin Youkilis, our first baseman, could be when he played. He was known for throwing anything in sight when things didn’t go his way during an at-bat. Even before there was any trouble with Youkilis, Manny would tell me, “If he ever hits me with a helmet or anything, I’m going to have to hit him back.”

  Youkilis didn’t hit Manny with a stray bat, helmet, or anything else in the fifth inning that night against Tampa. But Manny slapped at him anyway, and they had to be separated in the dugout. Nothing like that had ever happened with Manny before, but it faded quickly over the next couple of weeks. The city was entertained and distracted by other things. The Celtics won the Finals and had a parade, just eight months after we had celebrated winning the World Series over the Rockies. And we were back in first place, even without me in the middle of the lineup.

  The end, unofficially, came on a Friday night in Houston. I don’t think Manny did it on purpose, but once it happened he understood that there was no coming back from it. He’d asked Jack McCormick, our traveling secretary, who had been with the Red Sox for a dozen years, to find 16 tickets for that night’s game. Jack didn’t think he’d be able to find that many, and an argument broke out. Then Jack was on the floor, put there by a Manny push. It didn’t go any further than that, but that was far enough.

  We won that night’s game in Houston, and then dropped five in a row. Three of those losses were to Tampa, which regained control of first place and went ahead by three and a half games. We were sliding. We were five games back after a one-run loss at Yankee Stadium on July 6. Manny pinch-hit that day in the ninth inning against Mariano Rivera. I knew, because he’d gotten me many times, how masterful Mariano could be. When he faced Manny with the score tied at 4 in the ninth, he needed three pitches to get him out. Three called strikes. Manny never moved his bat. We lost the game in the bottom of the 10th.

  A lot of reporters and fans wondered if that strikeout was intentional. Did Manny really stand there to send a message to ownership and the front office? No one really knew. The fact that the question had to be asked was a sign that we were slipping, and it had nothing to do with the standings. We were too talented a team to miss the playoffs. But there was tension in the clubhouse. I wanted to get back in the lineup as fast as I could, and that would help some. Manny being granted his wish would also be healthy for everyone.

  The trading deadline was approaching, and my wrist was healed. But it just didn’t feel like it belonged to me. The first time I started taking swings, I remember thinking, I have no chance. I’m telling you, it was bad. I was getting a lot of massages and doing various wrist exercises. It was going to be a while before I felt like myself.

  It must have been an eye-opening time for Red Sox ownership and management. It was nearly August, the stretch run, and for different reasons they weren’t seeing the real David Ortiz and the real Manny Ramírez. Manny seemed to be making a deadline push to get what he wanted. He talked on his phone, during a game, by the Green Monster. Another time he said he was hurt. In yet another incident, he made himself available to reporters, in English and Spanish, and told them that he was sick of the Red Sox. He even said that “the Red Sox don’t deserve a player like me.”

  All of this happened in a three-week span, and then he was gone. On July 31, the Red Sox, Pirates, and Dodgers pulled off a three-team deal. We got Jason Bay. The Dodgers got Manny Ramírez. It was the best thing for everyone, even if it didn’t seem that way on the surface. Bay was a good player and teammate. Manny was a Hall of Famer. But he was a Hall of Famer who wanted to leave, and so it was clear that no one would see his true talent until he got what he wanted.

  I didn’t know what to think, short- and long-term. We needed to make the playoffs, and after I’d missed all of June and nearly all of July, I didn’t think my bat could carry us. And Manny was gone. That was the bad news. The good news was that Youkilis and Pedroia were having MVP-type seasons. Pedroia, in just his second year, was one of the respected leaders in the clubhouse. If I’d had an MVP vote, he would have been my choice.

  I tried not to think about how good we’d have been if we, not the Dodgers, could have had the focused Manny. Manny went to L.A. and destroyed National League pitching. His numbers were ridiculo
us. They were so ridiculous that it didn’t take long for him to be mentioned as a MVP candidate in the NL.

  This was my sixth year in Boston, and our team had been serious contenders for all six of those seasons. There were so many accomplished players I’d been able to call a teammate. Nomar. Pedro. Johnny. Manny. Some of the best players the game had ever seen, and then they were gone. It was never pleasant on the way out. Contract breakdowns. Cheap shots from the media. Hard feelings between players and the organization.

  Why was that? And was it going to happen to me?

  It was hard for me to envision that at the end of the 2008 season. I’d always wanted my contracts to have more money in them, and the Red Sox always wanted it to be less. That was the nature of business. It wasn’t personal. As for the media, I understood what their job was. Most of the time the media had been fair and respectful to me, so I didn’t have any problems there. Our team, even without Manny, didn’t give people much reason to complain.

  We lost the division to Tampa, but we still made the playoffs for the fifth time in the previous six seasons. In what was becoming an annual October series, we played the Angels in the first round. For the third time in five years, we eliminated them. Winning that round earned us a spot in the league championship series against Tampa.

  I had a lot of respect for that team. Their lineup never scared you, but their pitching was unbelievable. Their manager, Joe Maddon, was one of the first managers to use a defensive shift against me. He used to come up with some crazy shit. At times, honestly, his alignments would frustrate me and get me out of my game plan. One time he put on a shift and I got a mistake pitch. I hit it out and thought, You’re gonna have to put a shift in the stands to get that one. He was a great manager, and his team really played hard for him.

  I was playing hard in the postseason, but my swing was off. I had more walks than hits, and my slugging percentage was in the .300s. The Rays played a solid, and unpredictable, series. We beat them in Game 1, but they won the next three in a row. After outscoring us 31–13, they did it to us again in Game 5 at Fenway and were winning 7–0 after seven innings. TBS was televising the series, and friends of mine told me that the network was doing a Rays-Phillies World Series preview during the game. I know I looked bad, and so did the team.

  But we were a veteran team with a lot of talent and pride. We made it a game in the bottom of the seventh. It was 7–1 when I came to the plate, with two guys on. One thing that amazes visiting teams about Fenway is that the fans never, ever think that we’re out of a game. The comeback in 2004 has a lot to do with that, but I remember that hopefulness from 2003 too. As I walked up, I could hear the sellout crowd chanting my name. Papi, Papi, Papi. I was facing a hard-throwing reliever named Grant Balfour, who usually had nasty stuff. He was scuffling a bit in Game 5, and although he was still throwing in the upper 90s, his pitches weren’t moving all that much.

  As I look back at that swing now, I can see what I couldn’t then: the swing had a big loop in it. At least it’s big to my eye. I was compensating for the awkwardness in my wrist, and it was going to take a while for me to figure that out. It didn’t matter when Balfour threw a 97-mile-per-hour fastball right where I like it, low and inside. I pulled it to right field, and the three-run shot put us right back in the game and the series.

  We won Games 5 and 6, which put us in Tampa for Game 7. Their starter was Matt Garza, who pitched well against us. Ours was Jon Lester. A year after his cancer treatment, Lester was much bigger and stronger than he had been the previous October in Denver. His mentality reminded me of my own. He was the kind of athlete who wanted to wipe out everybody in front of him. He was always ready for competition, never scared.

  Lester threw hard and had great control all night. We didn’t give him much to work with, though, coming up with just three hits. Not only did the Rays win the pennant with a 3–1 win, they gave a glimpse of their future in the eighth and ninth innings. They brought out a left-hander named David Price to finish the game. He’d been the number-one overall pick in the draft the year before, and he was already in the majors. He was 23, and the bullpen assignment was temporary. He was going to be a star, and we’d have to deal with him at the top of their rotation for many years.

  If Tampa’s future looked good, so did ours. I liked the youth we had, and unlike Tampa, we had the ability to spend to fill some of our holes. I had obviously been happier, as a baseball player, in October 2007 than I was in October 2008. My life, though, was never supposed to be about baseball and nothing else.

  After taking a year off to better plan the Children’s Fund, I removed a couple of training wheels and we became a 501(c)(3) in 2008. We got a board of directors. We also put on our first celebrity golf classic in the Dominican. My friend and teammate Sean Casey was our emcee. It was attended by some of the biggest names in sports, past and present: Bobby Orr, John Havlicek, Mariano Rivera, Luis Tiant, Jimmy Rollins, Torii Hunter, Jim Rice.

  I was humbled and optimistic. These great athletes had taken the time to come to Punta Cana to support something that was so important to me. I enjoyed the beautiful Dominican weather with them, the golf, the food, and their conversations and smiles. We’d done all that while raising money to help those who truly needed it. It was hard to grasp that this was happening to me. Just over 100 miles down the road from Punta Cana, not that long ago, I had been one of those poor kids, never thinking that Hall of Famers would be coming to the Dominican for me.

  It was a fulfilling time in my life, and as a positive thinker, I had no reason to believe that it would soon become a nightmare. I absolutely did not think like that. But the nightmare happened anyway.

  13

  Accused

  As I sat at ease in Fort Myers before a crowd of reporters, it never occurred to me that this session would one day be used as proof of my hypocrisy.

  Why would it? It was February 16, 2009, my first interview of spring training. I’d done this for years. This was part of the routine. The men and women who cover and comment on the Red Sox would ask me questions about numerous topics, and I’d give them answers. Simple, for them and for me.

  The sun was usually brilliant, the mood mostly light, and the questions the friendliest they’d be all year. How was the off-season? What did you work on? What do you think of the team this year? When it was over, there’d still be time for golf, sailing, or the beach.

  I never think that someone is trying to be an asshole, and I didn’t think that way that day when I was asked about steroid use in baseball. I understood the timing of the question. A week earlier, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees had admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) for parts of two years, from 2001 until 2003. He said he did it while he played in Texas, it was stupid to do, and he hadn’t done any of that during his five seasons in New York.

  It was a hot topic, and it had gone beyond baseball. Even President Obama chimed in with his opinion, when asked. It was national news.

  I was asked what I would do, in today’s game, if someone tested positive for PEDs. I was happy to answer the question. I hated how some people talked about baseball, especially when a player was doing something special. There was always that suggestion of steroids, and I thought it was unfair to the player and the game. I told the reporters that I would never use PEDs because it would be disrespectful to a lot of people, including my family and the fans. I said there should be testing three or four times a year, for everyone, and that if someone failed a drug test, they should be banned for an entire season.

  I wasn’t trying to embarrass anyone, even if most Red Sox fans wouldn’t have minded a takedown of Alex. I wasn’t afraid to say that I liked Alex and considered him a friend. Some of the people hanging around him wanted something from him, whether it was money or fame, but all I ask of anyone is to be themselves. I think that’s why I get along with so many different personality types. I’m not asking you to be who I want you to be. Just be yourself, and that’s good enough.

&nbs
p; That’s how I viewed that February exchange with the reporters. I was being myself, speaking out about a subject on which I had some passionate opinions. I didn’t like how Latin players were routinely accused of using PEDs. Although no one went there with me, they’d tiptoe up to that line and not cross it. They’d ask, essentially, why are you so good now and you weren’t in Minnesota? I’d usually give a polite answer, although I wasn’t the one who should have been answering. It was obvious that the difference in my performance there was more of a Twins problem than my problem. I was a part-time player my last year in Minnesota, and I had a .500 slugging percentage. I had 32 doubles and 20 home runs. As a part-timer. How many more would I have hit as a full-time player? How many more would I have hit as a full-time player who didn’t have a manager fucking with his head year after year? Ten? Fifteen? And that was based purely on the talent of a 27-year-old hitter, not the proven ability of the studying, thinking slugger I’d become in Boston.

  After making my statements in Florida, I didn’t give any more thought to the state of major league baseball’s drug policies. In 2003, players had been given a survey drug test, the results of which would remain anonymous. If at least 5 percent of players showed positive results, we would have mandatory testing, with penalties, in 2004.

  We got the testing in 2004. I was fine with it. I’ve always been a big man, with raw, natural strength. I was that way even when I was just 15 or 16. When I became a pro, I used training supplements and vitamins, just like anyone else in baseball, to prepare for the season. Once the policy was put in place, teams were very specific about what would and would not trigger a positive test, and anyone who cared about his livelihood listened carefully.