Papi

by David Ortiz

  I never considered myself just a baseball player. I had chances to make kids happy, to make all people happy, so I always tried to do that.

  Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images

  I continually felt the love from Fenway fans. I tried to give it back to them, with everything I had.

  Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images

  Many special guests attended my last regular-season game, but none more important than my father, Enrique. He’s the hardest worker I know, and he saw a life for me in baseball long before I saw it for myself.

  Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images

  Pedro and Manny changed the way I thought about my job. More than that, their families and ours created a bond that continues to this day.

  Michael Ivins / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images

  Reporters asked me if I had given my retirement speech any thought before this game, my last one at Fenway. I told them no. I thought our last game would come much later than it did.

  Maddie Meyer / Getty Images

  The fans of New England gave me their passion, and I tried to give it right back to them. Every game and every at-bat. They helped shape me as a player and as a man.

  Maddie Meyer / Getty Images

  14

  Written Off

  The author of a Boston Globe article had the right idea, but it didn’t play out the way the story predicted. Or even the way I thought it would. The piece was written the day after the news broke about my name being on the 2003 list of performance-enhancing drug users in baseball. The reporter talked to multiple experts who said that advertisers would run away from me now, because who wanted to be connected to an accused cheater?

  The story said that my “reign as the face of the Red Sox has probably come to an end as companies seek to distance themselves from the scandal.”

  I was associated with several companies in the summer of 2009, including giants like JetBlue and Reebok. I honestly had no idea what they would do after hearing the bad news. They stayed with me in the first week of August, when I gave the press conference in New York City and explained that I was not a steroid user. They stood by eight weeks later in October, when we made the playoffs and, for the first time, were swept by the Angels. In December, many of my sponsors and friends were in the Dominican for the golf classic, which was bigger than ever, with more sponsors, more auction items, more celebrities.

  Ultimately, the sponsors didn’t run away, as the story suggested they would, and for that I was grateful. An easy counterargument, of course, is to say that they didn’t run away because I was helping their bottom line. It’s all about the money, right?

  Then how does that explain the doubts about me, and the disrespect toward me, in the New England media? As a member of the Red Sox, the successful and entertaining Red Sox, I was helping the media make money too. That didn’t stop them from talking trash and dismissing me. And even closer to home was my manager, Terry Francona. I think I helped put him on the map and put some money in his pocket. I was good for his business. But just a few weeks into the 2010 season, before our team had played 25 games and before I’d reached 100 at-bats, he wasn’t by my side anymore. Even he had lost faith in my baseball abilities.

  I was mad. Mad at my manager, mad at columnists who wanted me on the bench, mad at sports talk show hosts who wanted to run me out of town. Anyone who thought that I was just going to be pushed aside and told to go home because they thought it was time for it to happen, I had some words for. A lot of the words were in my head. They were the late-night motivation I needed for extra study. They were there with me in the car as I drove to work, in the weight room, in the batting cage. I’m always real, so I’ll tell you how serious it got: I began to look and listen for the outside criticism. I wanted it. I knew I could turn the hostility into my fuel, and it was going to help me get back to the player I knew I still was.

  Seven years had passed since I’d been underestimated in Boston. But that had happened in 2003 because the majority of people in New England hadn’t seen what I could do. In 2010, there was no excuse. I was 34 years old, and even though my 2009 hadn’t been great, it was still better production than you’d get from the average hitter in baseball.

  When it came to the media, I didn’t want them to kiss my ass. I just wanted them to use their heads. Just think about the order of things: in 2008, I’d injured the wrist on my top hand, and in 2009, for a few months, I couldn’t hit for shit. I never heard anyone say, “Hey, it might have to do with the injury that he had the year before.” Nope. It was just like, “He’s old. He stinks. He can’t hit no more. He can’t do this, he can’t do that . . .” Buried, buried, buried. Nobody talked about mechanics. Nobody talked about anything. Everything was based on, “He can’t do it no more.”

  I believe the Boston media is powerful when it comes to the fans and, in some ways, influential when it comes to the way the team is managed. When the media make a big deal about something, when they create a problem or issue, what are the fans supposed to think? They figure that these people are around the team 24/7, so they must know what they’re talking about. But they don’t. As I said, their negativity was going to help me, but that’s not the case for every player. Not every player wants a motherfucker in his face every single day, asking why he’s struggling. I can put up with the pressure and the doubt because that’s been my whole life, but some players don’t want the hassle of Boston when the game itself is hard enough.

  If all I’d had to do was prove the outsiders wrong, I would have had a smooth season. It wouldn’t have mattered how much reporters tried to pit me against my teammate Mike Lowell. Mikey was my boy, a great third baseman, and MVP of the World Series in 2007. He hurt his right hip in 2008 and had to have surgery in the off-season. In 2009, he hit 17 home runs. By 2010, according to the media, we were similar players—at the end of our careers. Mikey had handled left-handed pitching well the previous year, hitting .301. I’d struggled, with a .212 average. The solution that started to gain a lot of popularity in the media was to turn us into a designated hitter platoon. He’d play against the lefties, and I’d have the righties. The television network owned by the team, NESN, even ran a poll about what should happen next.

  I could have dealt with it all if that had been the extent of it. It wasn’t. And I had no warning, not even a hint, of what was going to happen next.

  Some events are so meaningful that every detail sticks. The sounds. The looks on individual faces in the crowd. The location of the cameras. Your teammates and their voices, voices that sound like a shouted echo when they’re trying to get your attention. The awareness that everybody is looking in your direction, waiting to see how you’ll react to the situation. The isolation. The anger. The disloyalty.

  That was my night on April 27, 2010.

  After a rough start to the season, we were looking more like the team we were expected to be. Our record, going into a Tuesday night game in Toronto, was 9–11. Twenty games into the season doesn’t tell you much of anything. Lots of teams and players have hot starts, but so what? There’s still 90 percent of the season to play, so the skill is in being able to maintain what you’ve started. The same is true for slow starts. If you have talent, you’re going to work your way into a rhythm and get your timing down. That’s the way I had always approached it, and I felt that it worked for me.

  We were locked in a tight game with the Blue Jays, tied at 1 in the top of the eighth inning. I had made my name in moments like this. This was the part of the game—being presented with drama and an opportunity to win it—where I had the most fun. I was batting sixth in the lineup that night, one spot behind J. D. Drew. J.D. was good at recognizing pitches, so I knew there was a chance he’d get on base with two outs, which would load the bases for me.

  I started thinking about who was in the Toronto bullpen and what kind of stuff they had. There was no question in my mind that I was going to be able to do something to help us get a win. I was in d
eep concentration on what was going to happen next when J.D. drew the walk. The Blue Jays prepared for me by going to the ’pen and bringing in a right-hander named Kevin Gregg.

  The problem for me was that their manager, Cito Gaston, might have thought that Gregg was coming in to face me, but my manager didn’t agree.

  “David! David! David!”

  I could hear a commotion behind me, a bunch of screaming voices. I was at home plate, digging in already. My first thought was, Oh shit, what happened? Nothing had happened. Something was happening. Tito was pinch-hitting for me. In April. With the bases loaded. That was bad enough, and I didn’t agree with it. What made it worse was the way he did it. I’m standing up there getting ready to hit, and he makes the last-second decision to bring in Mikey to replace me. It was embarrassing. Man, was it ever embarrassing.

  There weren’t many fans in the park that night, somewhere around 15,000. I wouldn’t think that they were all watching me, but it felt that way. The NESN cameras were there, seemingly zooming in from every possible angle. I felt like I had a camera guy in my pocket. You know how that angle is from ESPN when you hit a home run? When the camera is in your face? That’s exactly how I felt.

  I knew what they wanted, and I wasn’t going to give it to them. Everybody watching in Toronto and at home in New England was expecting me to go fucking crazy, and I did. But I did it behind the scenes. I was angry. I was also trying to be smart. If I went off on TV, I knew how that would play with the public. The clip would be shown 50 times by midnight, and it would be an invitation for even more people to talk shit about me. No thanks.

  As I walked through the dugout and to the tunnel, it started to sink in what Tito had just done. It was disrespectful. I always thought he understood who I was as a player and as a man, but it was clear to me that he didn’t understand as much as I thought he did.

  Our relationship, which had been really good for five years, lost its core of trust that night. I knew we’d never be the same going forward. His move was an announcement to the baseball world. He didn’t think I was the same player anymore. If he’d thought my April struggles were due to a slow start, he would have left me in there. He took me out because he didn’t think I could do the job.

  Once in that tunnel, with no cameras in sight, I went off. I threw my bat, my helmet, my gloves, my elbow pad. Anything that could be thrown, I threw it. No one came near me, and no one wanted to talk. Especially not Tito. And I didn’t want to talk to him in that moment either. He could have said something before it all happened, but he chose not to.

  I finally made it to the clubhouse and took a shower. I dressed quickly and waited for the very last out of the game, which we won. As soon as it was over, I hustled out of there without talking to the media. It was another smart decision. If I had said even half of what I was thinking and feeling that night, I would have given the critics their stories for the rest of the year, if not the rest of my career. I’m not joking. There are some long memories among fans and media. If I had said something crazy after the game, the comment would have been replayed continuously, living on forever.

  Still, I wasn’t all that sweet the next day. One of the radio reporters, Jonny Miller, came up to me and said, “Why did you leave before the end of the game?” He was throwing out a false story to me, and I was already pissed about the night before. Bad timing on his part. I told Jonny to fuck off. I told him that he should have known that I’m not stupid, I wouldn’t leave a game before it ended, and maybe he should have checked with his sources before peddling that garbage. If I had left before the game, a bad situation would have gotten worse.

  And yes, as far as I was concerned, this was bad. There had been no warning, no heads-up, nothing. The minute I struggle, you’re going to turn your back on me? Where’s the loyalty? Where’s the fairness?

  Tito did what he did and felt what he felt, but there was another factor in his decision in Toronto. You’ve got everyone, from the media to the front office, in your ear saying, “He’s done, he’s done.” Hearing that every day, probably 90 percent of managers would have done the same thing that Tito did. The other 10 percent of managers who will take it in the ass for you, they’re rare. And many of them are making decisions in small markets where there’s no daily media agenda to contend with.

  In a lot of ways, it’s the media in New England who run the ball club. Once they start hounding you, in print, on the radio, on TV, it’s constant. You can’t be on the fence. Either you’re against the media or you give in to what they want. Looking at it that way, as the season progressed, I stopped blaming Tito alone for that night in Toronto. He’d felt that pressure to do what he was always being asked about.

  A few weeks after Toronto, the commentary began to change about me and our team. Earlier in the year, people were saying I couldn’t catch up to a fastball, which I found funny. I wish pitchers had felt the same way and challenged me with them inside. They didn’t because they understood how much I loved that pitch. My wife used to watch me study video in the off-season, studying at times when she thought we should have been shopping or something. She would ask why I was looking so carefully at the video and I’d give her a simple answer: I’m hunting for mistakes—anytime they throw ’em, I hit ’em.

  By early July, I had hit my share of mistakes. I was a regular in the lineup again. At that point, I had hit 17 home runs and driven in 54, and had a slugging percentage of .566. I was selected to my sixth All-Star team and asked to compete in my fourth Home Run Derby. I didn’t hear anyone calling sports talk radio anymore, saying that I should be released. Our team was 49–32 on July 3, after a win over Baltimore. It was the halfway point of our season, and we were just a half-game out of first place in the division.

  Those were all good things. The issues were with our injuries. Dustin Pedroia had been having a great season, but he broke a bone in his left foot and had to go on the disabled list. Jacoby Ellsbury was already on the DL with broken ribs. Víctor Martínez had a fractured thumb. Clay Buchholz had a hyperextended knee. We were a high-payroll team with a lot of depth, but that was too much missing talent to ignore.

  Our slide actually began after that Baltimore win, the week before the All-Star Game in Anaheim. It was a bad week. We lost five out of seven, all to divisional opponents, and went from a half-game behind to five out at the break. We got swept by first-place Tampa, with their win in the final game coming from 24-year-old David Price. As I’d expected, he had become an All-Star and Cy Young Award candidate. With Price leading a rotation stocked with pitchers under 30, and with all our injuries, it was going to be challenging for us to catch the Rays.

  I knew I’d have a lot of time to think about the near and distant future during the second half of the season. But at the All-Star break, all I could do was smile and think of the people who’d had to eat their words. And my manager, who had to change his lineup to include me every day. Three months earlier, fans and media in Boston had wanted my ass to be released. Now here I was in California on an All-Star team. Not only that, I’d advanced to the final round of the Home Run Derby, where I was facing off against Hanley Ramírez, the former Red Sox minor leaguer. I beat Hanley head to head. He was a good kid. He told me that I was like a father to him in baseball, and that he was happy that I’d won a contest that, although symbolic, said what I still was. A hitter. A home run hitter. After all the doubts.

  It’s too bad our team didn’t have a similar turnaround story. We were good, but with Tampa and the Yankees in our division, it took more than that. We won 89 games. The Rays and Yankees made the playoffs, though, with 96 and 95 wins.

  It had been an educational year for me, in every way. Instead of business running away from me, I continued to get more opportunities. I’d opened a suburban restaurant, Big Papi’s Grille, and now I was in talks for another restaurant partnership downtown.

  My view of baseball politics had sharpened in 2009 and 2010 as well. I had gone through hell the previous July and August, but t
he positive in that experience was that it woke me up to the flaws in the system. The New York Times report was an example of how twisted things could be behind the scenes. There was nothing fair about my name being on that list. Every other player whose name had been up in a PED allegation before knew what they tested positive for. Every single player but me. What did that tell me? That someone felt there had been too much focus on PEDs and the Yankees and it was time for the Red Sox to be mentioned too. Or that someone was just aiming to hurt my image.

  I was confident then and I’m confident now: no one can prove that I tested positive for something, because it didn’t happen.

  As for the business of playing baseball, the year reinforced a few lessons for me, ones I’ve not only learned myself but that I tell young players who ask for advice. I tell them, and remind myself, that you have to be confident and savvy when playing this game. Don’t let anyone define who you are and what you’re capable of. If I’d listened to everyone in the spring of 2010, I would have just put my head down and gone home. Instead, I finished with 32 home runs, 36 doubles, and 102 runs batted in. Back to bangin’.

  Look, the reason we play this game is not just because we love it. It’s also an opportunity to give ourselves and our families a better situation. We’re looking to the future, so we have to be smart. We have to make good decisions, and sometimes we have to swallow our pride and play along with what the organization wants.

  Sometimes.

  My contract was up at the end of the 2010 season, and I didn’t see myself the way the Red Sox did. I thought my value was higher than they did. So while sometimes you have to play along, at other times you just have to stand up and fight on principle. Theo Epstein showed me that when he left the Red Sox in 2005. Five years later, I was ready to fight him on what I believed was rightfully mine.