by David Ortiz
15
Paper Tigers
My agent had some calls to make on my behalf, during and after the 2010 Red Sox season. He was supposed to be exploring specifics: what would the Red Sox be willing to pay to keep me in Boston beyond 2011? Once he’d completed his homework, he hesitated to share what he had learned.
“I almost don’t want to tell you what their offer was,” he said.
The “they” he was talking about included general manager Theo Epstein and his staff. They had the choice of picking up a 2011 team option, worth $12.5 million, or signing me to a multiyear deal. I was a few weeks away from turning 35, and they wanted me to be with the team into my late thirties. So did I. It seemed that we were going in the same direction until I pressed my agent for details of the Red Sox proposal.
Instead of the option, he told me, their on-the-table suggestion was worth two years and $16 million. I asked him to repeat what he’d said, because it couldn’t have been what I had heard. That could not possibly be right. They basically wanted to buy an extra year for $3.5 million. It occurred to me that these were the types of behind-the-scenes things that fans would never know. In negotiating with an athlete, the team had all the power, at least when it came to perception. If the player didn’t accept the offer, no matter how imbalanced the terms, then he was greedy. Ungrateful. Selfish.
I was already sick of this routine. I knew it was going to be a big trading and free agency season for the Red Sox. They were going to be aggressive, for many reasons: we’d been swept from the playoffs in 2009 and missed them altogether in 2010; NESN’s ratings had dropped; there had been a sellout streak since 2003, but anyone could see there were more and more empty seats popping up at Fenway; and as a big-market team, the Red Sox had cash to spend.
I had heard rumors about who they wanted. Carl Crawford, a left fielder for Tampa, was a free agent. He was fast against other teams and the fastest man in the world against us. He’d always given us hell as a base stealer, so I was sure the Red Sox would call him. They also liked Adrián González. He was a high-average, power-hitting first baseman in San Diego, and Theo had been trying to pry him loose from the Padres for years. If either one of them was going to come to Boston, the team would have to spend a ton. And honestly, this was where I always ran into an issue with the financial thinking of the Red Sox.
Would I have liked to have Crawford and González on my side? Of course. I’m a winner. I liked to play with winners. There’s no way a team can be in position for a World Series title without a bunch of good, winning players around. My problem was that every time it was my turn to talk about contracts, I damn near had to wrestle every dollar and cent away from the team. And whenever a story would get out that I was looking to get paid, people were looking at me like, “Oh, here comes David Ortiz again . . .” It really pissed me off. Sometimes I just wanted to shout, “Yo! Wake the fuck up. I’m the best weapon you have, but I’m not the best-paid weapon you have. And I should be.”
It was an aspect of playing in Boston that I didn’t understand. Maybe the disconnect was in the way the Red Sox, and some of the public, viewed me as a player compared to the way I viewed myself. Their words and their actions told me that they thought I couldn’t carry a team anymore. The talk show hosts and callers thought it and said it; I heard them for the first two months of 2010. The columnists thought it. I read their articles about how I should accept being a part-time player, at best, or maybe think about walking away from the game. My manager, Tito Francona, thought it. He turned his back on me in April, before we knew anything about the season. Although we eventually talked and had a working relationship again, I never forgot that when Tito really felt he needed to win that game, he didn’t think I could do it for him. And with the sorry contract offer, Theo Epstein told me that he thought it as well. He was treating me like shit with that proposal.
I knew that I was still an elite hitter, even if they didn’t. My work habits never changed, and neither did my self-awareness. If I couldn’t get it done anymore, if I couldn’t catch up to a fastball, I would know that before anyone else. And I would admit it. I sure would know it before some sports columnist, who had no idea what it was like to dig in against the best pitchers in the world and try to hit a baseball traveling 98 miles per hour. With all respect, I’d know it before Tito and Theo too.
It didn’t take me long to reject the offer, if you want to call it that, from the Red Sox. They picked up the option, so I was under contract for the 2011 season and then I’d be a free agent. It crossed my mind that the Red Sox were just trying to be good businessmen and not be on the hook for a long contract with me at my age. Fine. But if that was the way they were going, their negotiating style didn’t make sense.
When you consider everything, I was the most underpaid player the organization ever had. Why do I say that? Because of what I provided, happily, besides baseball. At this point, I was the face of the team, and everyone in every department knew it. They would ask me for something and the answer was usually yes. It wasn’t just about getting hits and winning championships. That whole organization was my second family, so I would wind up doing something for the guys in the parking lot, for the clubhouse crew, for marketing and promotions, I’d respond to TV requests, I’d talk to kids. Ask anyone there. They wouldn’t let me breathe. I did it all, and I was happy to do it. It’s just who I am. Some players have the mind-set that, hey, I’m just a baseball player and fuck off about everything else. Not me. I was involved in every aspect of the organization.
Then the contract situation would come up. They’d talk about me as a DH, when they and I both knew I was much more than that to them. It was predictable. I’d say publicly and privately, “If there’s one player in this organization who has earned every single dollar, I’m sorry, but it’s me.”
It was funny that my speaking up seemed to hurt some people’s feelings, after all I’d given to the Red Sox. Was I so insignificant that I couldn’t talk and think about myself for a minute?
I wasn’t surprised when the conversation about my contract didn’t last long. They picked up my option in November. By December, they were back to their free-spending selves. I’d seen it play out, time and again, without anyone seeming to keep track of what they’d done. They’d overpay players and then hope they could adjust to Boston. They’d underpay me, knowing that there was nothing about playing in Boston that I couldn’t handle.
As expected, they signed Crawford. What no one, including Crawford, expected was the size of the contract. They gave him $142 million guaranteed, or $20 million per year over seven years. Crawford told me straight up that all that money came out of nowhere. One day he said to me, “Damn, Papi. I was expecting $80 to $90 million, and they came to me with $142 million right out of the gate. I was driving and almost crashed when my agent told me. My agent was like, ‘The Red Sox have $142 million for yo’ ass.’ And I was like, ‘Who do I have to kill?’”
Once the Yankees had dinner with Crawford, the Red Sox panicked and overpaid him. That’s what I believed. They were desperate to get him. I was happy to have Crawford, but frustrated with Theo. Theo wasn’t done. He also traded four prospects, Anthony Rizzo and Casey Kelly the most highly regarded among them, to the Padres for González. I loved watching González hit. We had completely different styles, but I knew that he was the kind of person who would want to sit and exchange ideas about the game. He had hit 40 home runs two years earlier, and with a chance to play nearly 100 games between Fenway, Yankee Stadium, and Camden Yards, some people thought he’d match that with the Red Sox. Maybe he’d even pass it and top 50.
Like Crawford, one thing he wouldn’t have to worry about was his next contract. He was also given a long-term deal—seven years for $154 million. That came out to an average of $22 million per season. I wasn’t stupid. Even though these players were just being given the money that I had been fighting for, I knew what their presence meant. Our lineup was going to be loaded. There wasn’t one area where we
were lacking. We had two speedy outfielders in Crawford and Jacoby Ellsbury. González and I had the power covered. Dustin Pedroia was back from his foot injury, and he could do everything. One through nine, we had hitters who could wear out a staff.
As for our pitching, I felt it was the best top-to-bottom staff we’d had since I arrived in Boston. Our top starters were Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, John Lackey, and Clay Buchholz. Three of those four had started and won the deciding game of a World Series. Our bullpen was stacked. We had Jonathan Papelbon as our closer, and a kid with an incredible mix of pitches, Daniel Bard, setting him up. The only thing that was missing from our staff was the pitching coach from the previous four seasons. John Farrell, who commanded a lot of respect among the pitchers, had left for Toronto to manage the Blue Jays.
I was excited about our team, and so were fans and reporters. At the end of March, just before our first road trip of the season, the Boston Herald had a headline that summed up what a lot of people were thinking: “Best Team Ever.” I didn’t know about that, but I thought we’d blow the division away. Physically, I felt great. And from what I could see, so did a lot of my teammates.
I’d hit just .222 against left-handed pitching in 2010. I’d hit 32 home runs, but just two came off lefties. I needed help going into the season, so one day at the batting cage I approached my new teammate, González. I’m more of a pull hitter than González, and I thought I was trying to pull the ball too much against lefties. Watching González gave me some ideas. I asked him what his plan was when a lefty was bearing down on him.
“I give them the inside of the plate,” he explained. “And I focus on all pitches on the outer third.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“That makes a lot of sense,” I replied. “They don’t pitch me inside, and I’m pulling everything. But everything I’m pulling is outside. What I need to do is just stay on the pitch and go with it.”
It was simple, yet it sparked something in me. I knew then that I’d be better against lefties than I’d been in a while.
When the 2011 season started, we weren’t prepared for it. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because a lot of players were trying to do too much. Maybe it was the pressure of being named one of the best teams of all time before we’d even played a game. I don’t know. We just weren’t ready.
We went to Texas and got swept, and followed that by getting swept in Cleveland. We came home for our opener against the Yankees and won two out of three, but then we faced the Rays at home and we got swept again. Four series played, three sweeps. We were a lot of things, but we were not the Best Team Ever. Far from it.
At 2–10, it was hard to say that any one big thing was the reason for the terrible start. We didn’t know it at the time, but our clubhouse reflected the entire organization: many agendas, many directions. The level of dysfunction would be apparent much later in the season, and I wasn’t above contributing to some of it myself. But that was for the summer. In the spring, the issues were the definition of roles and the comfort level in Boston. Theo had grown up about a mile from Fenway and understood the psyche of Red Sox fans. He was one of them, and so he knew how the demanding baseball culture could eat up and spit out certain personality types. That’s why I was surprised over the years by his interest in some players who clearly had a problem with Boston’s intensity.
Crawford, for example, was not comfortable. The pressure he put on himself to perform to the enormous contract was part of it, and for a while he didn’t know where he should fit in the lineup. Leadoff? Number two? Number six? Put the ball on the ground and use your legs? Or use the relative power that resulted in a career-high 19 home runs in 2010? He never settled in, and he didn’t look like the same player he had been in Tampa.
González, meanwhile, was a great hitter. He always had a plan at the plate, and he made hitting to all fields look effortless. He was a West Coast guy, though, and getting used to the urgency and brashness of the East Coast—whether it was driving, talking, or reporting—was an adjustment for him. Both he and Crawford were All-Star players, so the hope was that talent would overshadow everything else.
That’s what started to happen in June and July, when we put together a couple of impressive runs. We had a 14–2 stretch in June. Just before the All-Star break, we went 10–1. We still had some fight in us. I mean that literally.
On a Friday night in Baltimore, we got off to a dream start against the Orioles. It was an eight-run first inning, so their manager, Buck Showalter, went to his bullpen early. I’d personally never had a problem with Showalter, although earlier in the year he’d been critical of the Red Sox and our high payroll. At one point, he called for reliever Kevin Gregg, a pitcher who had never pitched me inside before. My only significant history with Gregg had come the year before, in Toronto. He was the pitcher I didn’t have the opportunity to face because Tito pinch-hit for me. In Baltimore in 2011, I knew something was up when Gregg kept trying to throw in to me, including one pitch that came close to my face. That’s when he pissed me off. Any baseball player will tell you not to mess around with pitches around his head. I dug in and thought, It’s on, baby. If you hit me, I know it’s on purpose. And I’m coming for that ass. He was trying to hit me and didn’t succeed. He threw a pitch that I popped up for an easy out, and as I was running down the line I heard him say, “Run, motherfucker, run!”
That was it. I wasn’t going to be talked to like that by anybody. I charged the mound and threw a huge left at Gregg, and he threw a wild right at me. We both missed, fortunately. We’re both big men—he’s six-six and about 250 pounds—and we could have caused some damage.
The benches cleared, and things calmed down quickly. I knew it was Gregg who threw the pitches, but I was certain that the directions came from Showalter. I never said anything to him afterward, and he didn’t say anything to me. Most players on both teams moved on from the incident. But every time we played Baltimore, there was something about Showalter that made me feel that he never did. That wouldn’t be confirmed until several years later, when his true character would be revealed in an embarrassing way.
We were red-hot in July, so no one talked about our early season slump anymore. Some of the core issues that we had as an organization still lingered, though. They were just concealed by all the wins.
I was grateful for many things. We were in first place, I was selected to my seventh All-Star Game, and I was back to crushing left-handed pitching. I had 19 home runs at the break, along with 55 runs batted in, and an overall .304 batting average. González’s tip had really paid off for me. I was hitting for a higher average and slugging percentage against lefties than righties. I was one of six Red Sox All-Stars, along with González, Beckett, Lester, Ellsbury, and Youkilis.
We continued to play well after the break, well into early August, although there were some minor eruptions. One of them was mine.
We played the Indians at Fenway and won 4–3 on an Ellsbury walk-off home run. In the first inning of the game, I thought I drove in two runs with a line drive to left field. I hit that ball so hard that the left fielder couldn’t field it but could only block it. González was on third and scored easily. Youkilis was running on contact and would have scored no matter what happened. The official scorer that night disagreed. He said the second run scored due to an error. The next day one of my teammates said to me, “Can you believe they scored that an error last night?” I was hot then, and started asking people where Tito was. I was told that he was in a room on the mezzanine level of Fenway, next to our weight room. I walked in hot, pointing and cussing. There was a problem, though: he was in the middle of a press conference.
The entire Red Sox media corps, representing all of New England, saw my anger and heard my complaint. Tito said he would talk with me later, and I walked away. Now, you might be wondering, why get that upset over one silly RBI? I’ll explain it this way: I come from nothing. And fucking with somebody’s job is not my thing. I respect everyone that respects
me. If you don’t respect me, I’m not going to respect you. That’s the way I am. But if you respect me, I will always respect you. Simple.
But I truly believed that the scorekeepers at Fenway made a lot of mistakes. I didn’t know if the scorekeepers were always the same people, but what I did know was that we were screwed by them dozens of times. I was just fed up with it that day. It was as if I remembered all the slights at the same time and it pushed me over the edge. I remembered a game against the Orioles when I hit a ball in the hole. Rafael Palmeiro was playing first base at the time. He dove for the ball and grabbed it, but couldn’t throw me out because the pitcher didn’t cover the base. I was safe at first. The scorekeeper called that an error. What, you score a mental mistake as an error? Everything was always against the hitter, and that was my livelihood. That was my pride.
In retrospect, there were a lot of things on my mind besides the loss of the RBI. But that was the one incident too many, the one that had me saying to myself, I can’t do this shit no more. Eventually, I’d be able to step back and assess all the things, some life-changing and some career-altering, that were on my heart and mind then. I wasn’t thinking in a big-picture way that day.
They eventually changed the error and gave me that RBI. If I hadn’t gotten mad . . . if I hadn’t expressed my anger . . . if I hadn’t fought, what would have happened? I was in my contract year, and I knew how the Red Sox viewed things. I knew my numbers could be thrown at me come negotiation time. All I did was hit, man. If I didn’t hit, well, in their eyes I hadn’t done shit. Listen, when I was hitting .230, everybody was talking trash about me. When I wasn’t hitting well, it was, “Oh, Big Papi is done. Big Papi is this, Big Papi is that.” So when I worked hard to get a hit and they gave it an error, in my book, that was a minus.