Papi

by David Ortiz

  Tito understood that part of it. He was a baseball player too. He understood how hard it is to get an RBI. One year I got 99 RBIs. It’s not 100. When you hit .299, it’s not .300. You’ve got to think the way management does. Ninety-nine doesn’t sound as lovely as 102 or 103.

  I’ll admit that I was thinking about my future during the 2011 season. And I was not alone. One day in August, out of nowhere, there was an ESPN report that Theo Epstein was interested in leaving the Red Sox to become president of the Chicago Cubs. I hadn’t thought about Theo leaving since he had done it six years earlier. One of the Red Sox owners, Tom Werner, denied the report. I wasn’t so sure. There was a lot of uncertainty in the franchise, top to bottom. Theo was looking to leave. Tito was in the final year of his contract, waiting to see if the team would pick up his option. I was going to be a free agent, and so was Papelbon.

  Some major decisions had to be made before the end of the year, and no one was paying attention to them until some minimal slides turned into an avalanche. One of the things that became symbolic of our collapsing season was, of all things, chicken and beer.

  That was not a controversial phrase on the last day of August. That night, in a game started by Beckett, we beat the Yankees at Fenway. Our record was 83–52, and we led our division by a game and a half. There wasn’t even a discussion of whether we’d make the playoffs with a month left in the season. We just knew we were going to make it. Our lead was too comfortable. We were too good.

  The next 24 hours seemed to change all of that, though.

  We began September with a loss, and then every day it seemed like another flaw was exposed. As a staff, we had pitched well all year. But one of our starters, John Lackey, had pitched most of the season with a torn rotator cuff. No one in the media knew it. His earned run average was well over six. When we were winning, the fans didn’t like his performance, but there were other good things about the team to think about. But when our disastrous first week of September included a Lackey start where he gave up six runs in five innings, he became a bigger target.

  Even after that bad week, with our record at 85–58, we were still seven games ahead of Tampa for the wild card with just 19 games left in the season. On September 9, we took our 85 wins to Tampa for a three-game series. When the series was over, we left Tampa with . . . 85 wins. Now we were just four games ahead of them with 16 to play, and we were a mess. Our starting pitching had caved. That dominant setup man from earlier in the season, Daniel Bard, suddenly lost it. He’d allowed four total runs in July and August. He gave up six runs in the first three innings he pitched in September.

  It was falling apart, from all directions. Even normal things that weren’t a big deal eventually were viewed as a big deal. Like chicken and beer.

  We’d always had chicken and beer in the clubhouse. Having chicken and beer in the clubhouse was like playing the National Anthem before games. It was there. It was always going to be there. Some of our starting pitchers were eating it in the clubhouse during the game. It wasn’t a big deal for the starters because they weren’t playing. If I ever got hungry during the game and I wasn’t playing, do you think I’d wait for the game to be over? No. I’d eat.

  But we were getting our asses beat at the end of the season, and it was going to have to be blamed on something. What was once a comfortable lead had shrunk all the way to a tie at the end of the year. All we had to do was beat the last-place team in our division, the Orioles, to have some type of postseason. Either we’d get in outright as the wild card or we’d have to play a one-game playoff with Tampa.

  But in one of the strangest seasons of my life, at any level, the collapse was complete. We went 7–20 in September, one of the worst meltdowns by a contender in baseball history. It was like we got smacked by the baseball gods. You think you have it figured out? Watch what we’re going to do to you. I’d been around for a while, and I’d never experienced anything like it.

  I’ve heard a lot of people give reasons for why it happened, from a lack of pitching, to my interruption of Tito’s press conference, to chicken and beer. I don’t think any of those things were the reason. I honestly don’t know why so many great players couldn’t come together and figure out how to get into the playoffs that year.

  I did know this, though: someone always pays for a year like that. Sometimes the scapegoat is a player, and sometimes it’s the manager. This time it was the manager. With a twist. The Red Sox decided not to pick up Tito’s option, which basically meant they fired him. I wasn’t surprised at all. I don’t root for anyone to lose their job, but I’m also realistic. With our team playing like that and Tito’s contract being up, it was easy to see what would happen. I thought Tito did a great job in his time with the Red Sox, and he was good to me, for the most part. We developed more of a business relationship after that night in Toronto, and so that’s how I looked at his firing. It was an inevitable business move. Soon after he left, Theo Epstein resigned and headed to Chicago for more money and a promotion.

  It felt like the entire organization was vulnerable. Four years earlier, in Denver, I had seen the Red Sox at our best. We won the Series that night, and I couldn’t have been happier professionally. Now, after the 2011 season, we couldn’t have been lower. After an accusatory Boston Globe article, I wasn’t even sure there was a “we” anymore. The article was full of rumors, finger-pointing, and backstabbing from anonymous sources. One of these sources talked about the chicken and beer in the clubhouse and suggested that our pitching staff didn’t work hard enough. Another source took some personal swipes at Tito and claimed, among other things, that he was too distracted by his personal life to be a good manager. Yet another claim was that our team was fractured and unwilling to put the work in to be great. It was a mess. Those types of stories never represent the entire accurate picture of a season. But with that said, somebody was talking to the media. Who was doing that? Whoever it was—or whoever they were—had no concept of teamwork. No matter how bad things are, you don’t sell out your family.

  As bad as that article was, it was a preview of things to come in our organization. We were going to go from bad to worse.

  It was a chaotic time for me, in both my personal life and my baseball life. One of my best friends was to be married in January 2012, and he asked me to be a groomsman in his wedding. It was ironic because he was going to be at the beginning of his marriage as I appeared to be at the end of mine. And when I tried to escape that thought and just think about baseball, there was no peace there either. When the Red Sox hired Bobby Valentine as the new manager, I got phone call after phone call from players who had been around him. They all said the same thing:

  Good luck.

  16

  Breaks and Rebellions

  I had never met Bobby Valentine before 2011. I’d heard of him, seen him on TV, and remembered that he was the guy who’d put on a fake mustache to avoid being recognized and thrown out of a game. But I didn’t know the man, so that left me with an interesting decision at the end of the year: Should I listen to my friends, or pretend that I’d never heard a word they said?

  Everyone I knew was unimpressed with Valentine, the new manager of the Red Sox. He was hired in late November 2011, and the negative reaction from my baseball friends was instant. There were the sarcastic “good luck” messages. There were ominous warnings to get ready. Some even suggested that, at 36 years old, I probably wanted to retire rather than play for someone like him.

  Valentine hadn’t managed in the United States in a decade, although he had been a managerial star in Japan. He had spent a lot of time around the game as an ESPN analyst, and he was full of opinions on how the game should be played.

  I’m a person who has been able to get along with a range of personalities, pretty much everybody, so I tried to block out all the information I had. I tried not to think about the fact that the Red Sox never asked my opinion on players they were thinking about signing or managers they wanted to hire. They weren’t intere
sted in sharing, even though I felt I could have helped many times with things I knew as a veteran player on the team, things they seemed not to know. I found out on the news, just like everyone else, that Valentine was our new manager. I did some research and learned that there was basically one person in the organization, team president Larry Lucchino, who really wanted to hire Valentine. That was it. One person. Still, I’d been a peacemaker in many situations. And I had to perform regardless of who was managing. How bad could Bobby V really be?

  In early December, he decided to come to my golf tournament in the Dominican. I thought it was a nice gesture, and I spoke with him briefly. He was cool. I was a free agent, and Bobby told me that he was hopeful that I’d return to the Red Sox. Theo Epstein wasn’t negotiating the deals anymore, as he had moved on to Chicago, but the tone of the talks was the same. Ben Cherington was the new general manager, and it was frustrating to deal with someone else who acted like he didn’t know what I could do. How many times do you need me to give you 30 home runs and 100 runs batted in before you understand that’s who I am? I wanted to be paid what I was worth, on a long-term deal. The numbers the Red Sox were using weren’t even close to mine. We agreed to go to arbitration, and just before we got there we settled on a one-year contract for $14.5 million.

  At least Cherington was consistent with Epstein. Neither one of them made getting a deal done easy. But no matter how tough it was to talk money, it didn’t come close to what was in front of me, coming from all directions, in 2012.

  The drama began almost immediately in spring training. I couldn’t find the calm Bobby I’d seen in the Dominican. I remember fighting the thought, very early, We’re going to have an absolutely terrible year.

  It was all about him in the spring. It was as if he wanted to prove how smart he was by running us through all these drills he’d used while managing in Japan, drills we had never done before. Come on. This was major league baseball. In the United States of America. Everybody else playing baseball around the world wanted to be like us. Bobby was in his own bubble, and I just wanted to get him out of it and tell him, “Fuck you and the way you want to train and teach people how to play the game that you learned in Japan.”

  He asked for a lot of changes, including some that were completely unnecessary. One of the more ridiculous ones was having players hit grounders to each other. I thought that was funny, especially for me. The Red Sox weren’t paying me to hit grounders; I was there to hit balls to the moon. But that drill wasn’t the deal-breaker for me or the team. There was another drill that essentially caused him to lose his new team before we even left Florida. That’s not an exaggeration. He made it difficult for players to have his back, although I tried my hardest privately and every time I was asked about him publicly.

  The problem was not that his drills were new. The bigger issue was how he expected players who had been in the big leagues a long time to immediately do things his way without any missteps. I wasn’t sure, at that time, if that was truly his personality or if someone was telling him to act that way. There had been a lot of conversations about our team the year before, and how our lack of accountability led to our September collapse. Maybe Bobby was told to come in and boss around full-grown men. Maybe the Red Sox wanted to hire a daddy, not a manager.

  One day we were doing his drills and the shit hit the fan. We were hitting pop-ups, and Bobby had said that he didn’t want infielders to say, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it . . .” He thought that was an unreliable way of calling off a teammate because, in a noisy stadium, the player who’s being called off might not hear his teammate taking control. Well, all players have habits. Many of those habits lead big league players to the majors and keep them there. And in American baseball, most infielders taking the play say, “I got it.”

  So when our shortstop, Mike Aviles, got under a ball, he instinctively said, “I got it.” Bobby snapped. It was unlike anything I had ever seen in the majors. He went off on Aviles, cussing and verbally tearing him down in front of everyone. Listen, if it had been me, I would have gone up to him, right in front of the fans, and dropped a punch. Aviles was not his son or his grandson. He was a grown man, a major league baseball player who had worked hard to get there and who had fielding habits that had helped him do that. For him to all of a sudden have to change that, well, there should have been some patience.

  After that workout, I talked with Dustin Pedroia and Adrián González. We decided to meet with Bobby in his office and attempt to tell him how he was being perceived. It was a waste of time. We tried reasoning with him, and it was like communicating with a wall. All he did was roll his eyes and look everywhere but at us. It could not have been more obvious that he didn’t care what we had to say. We left his office shaking our heads.

  I was competitive enough to think that we could win a bunch of games despite Bobby’s ego. We still had Josh Beckett and Jon Lester at the top of our rotation. Even though Jonathan Papelbon had left for Philadelphia in free agency, I felt that we had an extremely talented closer to replace him, Mark Melancon, who was just 27 years old. If we used him properly, we’d be all right in the back of the bullpen. Our lineup had many of the same players from the year before, when we topped the majors in runs, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. One guy who was with us but wouldn’t be in the lineup was Carl Crawford. He had had wrist surgery, and he was going to miss at least half of the season.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize I’d been too optimistic. And when I say not long, I mean the first series of the season. We opened in Detroit and were swept by the Tigers. It was impossible to ignore the comments from my teammates about Bobby’s managing, how he made decisions that didn’t make sense, and how generally clueless and distant he was. The next stop on our trip was Toronto. On the flight there, I experienced a first in my career.

  Bobby’s seat was in the middle of the plane, and the players were in the back. That day I was near the front of our section. I remember looking up and seeing a line of my teammates walking toward me. They were pissed. I was like, “Whoa, whoa. What’s going on?” They said, “We want that motherfucker fired before the airplane lands.”

  I had never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what they might have done if they had gotten to him, but I felt it was way too early in the season for that kind of takeover. He was aggravating as hell, arrogant, and disrespectful, but I felt that we needed to try our best to support him.

  I knew all the big payroll guys—Lester, González, Beckett, Crawford—wanted him fired. That feeling hadn’t changed two weeks later when we were just 4–8. After batting practice, before a game at Fenway against the Yankees, I called a players-only meeting. I remember things got heated, and I almost got into a fistfight with my boy Beckett, who I love. My point during the meeting was that, yes, the manager was terrible, but we weren’t hitting or pitching very well either. It was hard to make a case against Bobby when we sucked ourselves. It got uncomfortable with Beckett because I called him out. He knew how much I respected him and believed in his talent. I told him I didn’t think he was as focused as he should have been, and not only was it affecting his own pitching, it was trickling down to Lester and Buchholz, who both looked up to him.

  I pushed his buttons on purpose. I wanted to light a fire under him and everyone he came across. I wanted to get everyone going, myself included. I admit that I was afraid of having a miserable season, and not just because I wanted to win so badly. If life with my second family, my baseball family, was out of order, then that meant there was no peace anywhere.

  My own family life was going through changes. Tiffany and I had been together for 16 years, but we had agreed that we couldn’t keep living the way we were. Things were falling apart for many reasons. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what it was, but we weren’t the same. Somewhere along the way, our normal lives had gotten lost in the celebrity life. That wasn’t us, although we didn’t have the perspective at the time to correct the problems. We decided to se
parate and start the divorce process.

  Tiffany is one of the best people I have ever met, an incredible wife, mother, and friend. The decision was painful but, we thought, for the best. We talked about living our lives together, for the kids, but we would physically live in different places. We’d bought a home in Weston and were part of a special neighborhood. The neighbors didn’t just wave and disappear into their houses. People cared and looked out for one another. Sometimes I’d look around and be amazed by the contrast between the life I’d had growing up and the comfortable life we’d been able to provide for our kids. I still loved Tiffany deeply. But we weren’t getting along well at all, and I moved out. I got a place in Chestnut Hill, on Boylston Street, and either the kids would come there or I’d go to the house in Weston to see them. They’d still come to games, and I made sure I was still a strong presence in their lives.

  Tiffany’s character shone through when the lawyers got involved. She was loving, even as we were separating. She had a lawyer who wanted to emphasize my celebrity status, so he went in hard, asking for everything he could. But Tiffany was composed, and she made it clear that she didn’t want anything extra. She wanted a peaceful transition and requested a straightforward split of assets. One of the brighter moments during this dark time was when she commented that she knew I’d continue to be a good father and provider.

  Without a doubt, it was the worst season of my career. Each day, nothing got better. Not my separation from Tiffany, and not the tense and irrational atmosphere that Bobby created in the clubhouse. As a team, we had some weeks when it would look like we were turning a corner. We won six games in a row shortly after our players-only meeting in April. In May we had another small streak, five in a row. I remember the final game in that streak was won by Beckett. He was great that night, shutting out Seattle on just a few hits and nine strikeouts. When he came out of the game, I was one of the first people congratulating him in the dugout. I knew we’d be all right, whether it was Josh and me or any of the players on our team.