by David Ortiz
That wasn’t my concern at the beginning of the 2009 season. My left wrist was. Still. I had gotten into some bad habits from the previous year’s injury, and they carried over into the season. My swing was wrecked, and I was connecting under the ball all the time, under, under, under . . . I couldn’t get on top of it. Nobody worried in April. We had an 11-game winning streak, and the fact that I didn’t have a home run in the month could be explained as a slow start.
It got more serious in May. I was struggling, badly, and I was in the middle of two extremes. On one side were the media and fans, many of whom decided I was done. Washed up at 33 years old. The other side was my team. You wouldn’t think there’s a downside to always being reliable, game after game, year after year. There is. Sometimes your organization looks at you like you’re Superman. I was such a good hitter that people couldn’t understand why I was going through such a nasty slump. Even when people tried to say something to me, they didn’t know what to tell me.
Thirty games into the season, I still hadn’t homered. I had a .220 batting average. I was in the same city I’d been since 2003, parking in the same Fenway lot, walking through the same clubhouse. But now, for the first time, I personally experienced the cynical New England that I’d heard about. All the superstar Red Sox players had dealt with it, for one reason or another, over the years. No exceptions. Now it was my turn. I don’t know if they thought they were going to wear me down, or get me to snap, but they had no chance. I thought of that warning from Manny. Don’t ever change the menu in Boston . . .
But suddenly it was controversial to bring up Manny in Boston. On May 8, the news broke that he had tested positive for a banned substance that masks PED use. He was suspended for 50 games. For some, it brought into question all that he—and by association, we—had accomplished. The trend for players with Hall of Fame talent and PED suspensions was that they had no chance of being voted into the Hall. The writers with votes weren’t just guardians, they were embarrassed guardians. The steroid era had been going on for years without anyone writing and talking about it. When it was clear that several voters were late to the conversation, many of them became zealots on PEDs. It was as if they were determined to never miss a story like that again.
For me, two things can be simultaneously true without contradiction: Manny used a drug to mask a PED, and he was still one of the best hitters I’d ever seen.
The niceties were gone now with the Manny news. The innuendo was part of the new story. He’s Dominican and so am I. We were teammates. I described him as an idol of mine. If he did it, then it was assumed I did too. Or so the logic went. I knew I didn’t have to answer for anything. My career had exploded because I learned how to work hard, study, and claim my place as a middle-of-the-order hitter.
I knew how to listen too.
A friend of mine from the Dominican had called me after I’d hit my first home run, on May 20, our team’s 40th game of the year. He’s known me since we were kids, and we’d played together on traveling teams.
“Papi,” he said. “You’re too loopy!”
I asked him what he was talking about.
“Your bottom hand is taking over every swing,” he said. “That’s why you’re missing so many pitches. It’s why you’re popping up so many pitches.”
He made so much sense. My body naturally wanted to protect the left wrist. I hadn’t been using my body the way I normally would.
“Go and have fun, man,” my friend said. “What’s the worst thing that can happen? Oh-for-four? Who cares? Enjoy yourself.”
I started doing hand-strengthening exercises. The fact that it felt so uncomfortable told me that I hadn’t been using my top hand. I did them for about a week, and then I started feeling it.
I took my friend’s advice, as awkward as the wrist felt, and forced myself to focus on the range of motion in my left hand. Whereas I had one home run in the first two months of the season, I piled up 12 in the next two months.
That’s where I stood on a Thursday morning at the end of July, a morning that I’ll never forget. It was July 30. I was standing in our ancient clubhouse, the same one that Babe Ruth and Ted Williams used in an earlier era. I felt like I had seen them, or some type of ghost, after a reporter I didn’t know approached. He told me something I thought was a joke, a truly unfunny one.
“Any minute, you’re going to see your name flash on ESPN,” he said. “You tested positive for a banned substance in 2003, and your name is on The List.”
The reporter was youngish and had thick dark hair. He was Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, and he was one of the star reporters on the PED beat. Someone had told him that my name, and Manny’s, appeared on a supposedly anonymous list of 104 players from the survey test of 2003. The list had been seized by the federal government, and now had become a bit of a political weapon. No one knew who was doing the leaking and whom or what they were fighting against.
The real story was complicated and needed to be walked through slowly. That list didn’t mean what everyone thought it did. Some people on it were steroid users, some were supplement users, some were amphetamine users, and some used something over-the-counter that activated a positive test. They were all lumped in there. But the topic was sexy enough that I knew it wasn’t going to head in the direction of reasoned analysis. It was a PEDs story, and it followed an admission from Alex and a fall by Manny. I was having a below-average season that had caused people to ask whether I had been doing something previously and perhaps stopped doing it in 2009.
It all added up to cheating and nothing else for a lot of people.
I was now a name in this war. It was endless. Say you didn’t do it enough and you sound guilty. Say nothing and your silence proves your guilt. Your spoken truth can’t get you out of it because the assumption is that you’re lying if you say you didn’t do it. Everybody lies about it, right? Even your advocates can’t get you out of it. They mean well, but their position is often built on guilt. It wasn’t illegal at the time, they say. Or, I don’t care what they do; it’s entertainment.
But that wasn’t how I saw it. I didn’t do it. I did care. In fact, I gave a damn. It was my career, my name, my reputation. Who was going to believe that I hated the thought of chemicals in my body and I had never used steroids? As a professional athlete, I’d trained hard and used vitamins and supplements like anyone else. I was careful about what I put in my body in 2003. I became even more conscientious in 2004, when Major League Baseball issued specific guidelines about what could and could not be used. I’d never failed a drug test in the five years the policy had been in place, and never worried about failing because I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Who was going to trust what I’d had to say after that relaxed session in spring training, even though every word of it had been true?
I said before that it was a nightmare. It was worse than that. It was a horror movie.
It took me a while to calm down, because I had so much shit going through my head. Did this guy know what he was talking about? I needed to call my agent. The union. My wife. And we had a game to play that afternoon, followed by trips to Baltimore, Tampa, and New York.
I hit a home run on the 30th, and we beat the A’s. I remember a lot of my homers, but not that one. There was plenty to learn, and I needed to understand and retain it all by the time we got to New York. That’s where I wanted to handle all the questions. I’d planned to go to Yankee Stadium, in the largest media center in the country, and show everyone that I wasn’t hiding. I was going to speak for myself, in English, without notes, and the people would see my honesty and consistency.
At the time, I just didn’t know better. I was too optimistic. I thought if I shared everything I knew with the public, maybe all fans, not just Red Sox fans, would be able to see my point of view. In an unusual move, Major League Baseball released a statement, putting its support behind me. Michael Weiner, the head of the Players’ Association, was a frequent visitor to my suite in the Marriott Marquis in New
York. I wanted to be sure I knew everything that he did, so that when I talked I’d be informed.
In some cities—even in Boston—it was too late. The opinions had already been firmly set.
“Big Papi was on the juice,” Bob Ryan wrote in the Boston Globe, “and only the terminally naive could be shocked.”
“David Ortiz lied to you,” the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy added. “It seems safe to say that his entire Red Sox career is a lie.”
Believe it or not, even the cowriter of my first book, Tony Massarotti, called me a myth.
Inside our clubhouse, guys supported me, even if they didn’t know what to say. Or what to think.
I couldn’t blame a soul in the organization. They honestly didn’t know what to do, and I understood that because I didn’t either. I was confused, angry, and alone. I was being accused in 2009 for something that happened in 2003 and no one could tell me what I did. I thought it was bullshit. It had been the early stages of testing, and part of the experiment was to record names, but with an assurance they’d be kept confidential. I had a feeling back then that this type of privacy breach would happen to somebody. Just not me.
What I couldn’t accept was the combination of snap judgments and lack of information being brought to my own case.
“Hey, Papi, you tested positive for something.”
“Oh yeah? What was it?”
“We don’t know. We just know it’s positive.”
How does that make sense? To me, it didn’t and doesn’t. Because of “The List,” the Red Sox couldn’t say they were all the way riding with me, because they didn’t know what I’d done. Theo Epstein didn’t know. Terry Francona didn’t know. My teammates and the Players’ Association didn’t know.
I knew it would stay that way until I was proven right or someone proved that I was wrong.
Think about it: the first test for PEDs was in 2003, and PED use started to be punished in 2004. I had done my best work in the testing era, not the steroid era.
I don’t know how many players looked forward to being questioned by the national media, inside Yankee Stadium, but I did. It had been a week and a half since the Times story was published, and it was all I’d thought about during that time. I was in a hurry to learn what had happened to me, and in a hurry to share it with the public.
My press conference was scheduled on a Saturday, although our four-game series with the Yankees began on a Thursday. If I wanted a preview of how the typical fan was going to receive my explanation, it was there in the series opener. I stepped to the plate for my first at-bat, and instead of the usual murmur, a mixture of respect and envy, there was something different coming from the crowd of nearly 50,000. Boos. Loud, pointed, disappointed boos. It wasn’t the whole crowd, but their displeasure was the most pronounced sound of the night.
This was going to be my reality until I spoke about why I was on that list. I also acknowledged that it might be my reality even after I spoke.
My moment came that Saturday afternoon, inside a packed room at the stadium. There were dozens of reporters there from New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago. I kept telling myself that I had no reason to be nervous because I was just telling my story. Weiner sat next to me so he could answer the questions that dealt with legalities and technicalities. That wasn’t my area. I was there to answer the big questions: What happened? What did you do? I patiently told the media what I thought went wrong.
I said, “I definitely was a little bit careless back in those days when I was buying supplements and vitamins over the counter. Legal supplements, legal vitamins, over-the-counter. But I never bought steroids or used steroids.”
It was the truth. And after I said it, I felt some of the tension leave my body. All I could share was the truth. It was up to them, and the fans, whether they wanted to believe it. There were many questions from the crowd, regarding what I took and why it had triggered the positive test. One person asked if I wanted to see the anonymous list released so all the names would be known to the public. The idea being that I wouldn’t be the only player fighting for his reputation. But I’ve always been a positive person, so why would I root for making someone else miserable just because I was going through some shit? That’s incredibly selfish. This is how I answered the reporter:
“I don’t think that I would really like to see another player going through what I’ve been through this past week.”
After I spoke in New York, I could see where my season and my story were headed. It wasn’t to the depths, as many might have imagined. We were playing in Texas about a week after I’d spoken from the heart in New York, and Tiffany and the kids came along. I was on the field, so I didn’t hear about an incident that happened until the game was over. There was a guy yelling “Cheater” at me during each of my at-bats. D’Angelo was five years old, and he was hurt by what he heard.
I sat down with my son, who was a month away from going to kindergarten. I tried to tell him what the name-calling and jeers from the crowd meant. It needed to be explained, and I wanted to be the one who did it. But it killed me. I could see that he was confused, and he didn’t understand what I was trying to tell him. At the end of our chat, I told him that you can’t make everyone happy. I told him that on the playground there might be a kid who gets the attention because he screams louder than everyone else. On my playground, there are those who use microphones and I don’t. They get the last word when it comes to telling the story and influencing the fans that way.
But that was just talking.
In 2009, my average didn’t rise much, and I finished at .238. I did have 28 home runs and 99 runs batted in, which prompted one of my new teammates, Víctor Martínez, to joke, “They say this is a bad season for you? Close to thirty and a hundred? I wanna have bad seasons like this.”
I’d learned a lot from my struggles at the plate, from the accusations made against me, and from being exposed to the dark side of the Boston media. It all required a fight, and I was ready. I’m a fighter and a winner. I learned to do both, to fight and to win, as a kid. You can knock me down, but I’m gonna get back up, brother. I’m gonna get back up.
One of the proudest moments of my life. As a United States citizen, I felt as if the country was telling me, “We trust you.”
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox
In 1996, I introduced myself to Tiffany Brick with an unforgettable line. Today she is my wife, best friend, and number one supporter. We’re enjoying ourselves here at an event for the David Ortiz Children’s Fund.
Paul Marotta / Getty Images
I never took the talk seriously, but Alex Rodriguez really was close to being traded for Manny and being my teammate in 2004. Instead, Manny stayed in Boston and four years later A-Rod was on our side—in the All-Star Game—at old Yankee Stadium.
Bloomberg / Getty Images
Here I’m side by side with Tito, which was usually the case, literally and figuratively. But he lost confidence in me one night in Toronto, and our relationship was never the same afterward.
Icon Sports Wire / Getty Images
Baseball gave me the opportunity to do so many things that I love: laugh, win, celebrate.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
Less than a week after the bombings on Marathon Monday, I was speaking from my heart at Fenway Park. What I eventually said surprised a lot of people, and I even surprised myself.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox
There was no question that our collective baseball joy was restored in 2013.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
We knew that we could never fill the void that the tragedy had created in so many lives. The best thing we could do was honor the survivors, and the city, by embodying Boston Strong with our play.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
Every time I had a chance to honor my late mother, Angela, I did it.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
Our cl
ubhouse desperately needed stability in 2013. John Farrell provided it in abundance the entire season.
Michael Ivins/Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
I hit .688 in the World Series, but my wife said I was even better off the field as I put our family back together. That’s why sharing this moment with my son, D’Angelo, was bigger than baseball.
Al Tielemans / Getty Images
For the first time in ninety-five years, the Red Sox clinched a World Series at Fenway. It was the most appropriate way to end a season that had begun so tragically.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox
I’d come such a long way. Initially, I was embarrassed by my Twins release. But times like these, collecting a necklace of championship rings, made me grateful for everything that had happened to me.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
I remember what I was thinking when I first met Barack Obama: “As an American, you have to be proud to have a cool-ass president like this one.”
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox
When I left the house for my final home opener, Tiffany said she didn’t think the Red Sox had anything special planned. I should have known something was up. My daughter Alex brought me to tears with her beautiful singing of the National Anthem.
Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images
I’m always humbled to stand next to heroes such as Jeff Bauman, Marathon bombing survivor. His cooperation helped bring the perpetrators to justice.
Adam Glanzman / Getty Images