by David Ortiz
I thought it was important to point out the significance of our jersey, because we were trying to represent and play for the city. This city and state were led by Menino and Patrick, who had empowered law enforcement to do their great work during that week. After that, I said something that I hadn’t planned to. It came from the pressure building up that entire week, finally being released. I looked at the sellout crowd, and to their surprise, and mine, I said, “This is our fucking city. And nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”
There was applause. Then there was music. It must have taken me a few seconds to realize, as I was walking off the field, that I’d said “fucking.” I began thinking, Oh shit. I think I screwed up. But when I got close to the police and the mayor, they high-fived me hard. They were excited about what I had just said. You know, when people give a speech like that in front of 30,000 or 40,000 people, they usually write things down ahead of time. They want to make sure they’re prepared for what they’re going to say. That had never crossed my mind. I’m not sure what I would have done with a written speech. Maybe I could have said it with feeling, without the obscenity, but I believed that true feeling had to be a part of it. I was hurting from the past week, and I know a lot of people must have felt just like me.
To my surprise, I didn’t get in trouble for what I said. It was the opposite. What I said became a rallying cry for some people. I had no idea that it would come out exactly like that, but I think it stuck with New Englanders because of what they’d experienced. Every emotion imaginable was felt between Monday and Friday. Finally, on Saturday, we were up and fighting again. That’s one of the reasons I fit so well in Boston. That’s my personality too. Try to knock me out and it’s not going to happen. I’ll always take on the fight.
Our team would never be able to take away the pain of the tragedy, but we could honor the city with our play and love for each other. That began in that Saturday game, which we won. It continued into early May. After a win against the Twins on the sixth, our record was 21–11. We were in first place and I was hitting .426.
I didn’t think anything of my hot start. It was early in the season, and I knew I wasn’t going to finish the year with an average over .400. I was more excited about our team and the characters we had in the clubhouse. I was a fan of everyone in the room and they all knew it, so sometimes I’d walk in and greet everyone with an exaggerated, “You guys are goooood!” Every day there was a different player doing something, big or small, to help us win a ball game. They truly were good players, and they were proof of just how far you can go even when you’re counted out.
I wasn’t counted out before our game on May 7. I was called a suspect and likely cheater. My hot start prompted a visit from Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy. He questioned me about my hitting, my bat speed, my injuries, my nationality, and said I “fit all the formulas” of a cheater.
“I was just drug-tested two days ago,” I told him. “I’ll send you the results if you want.”
I felt he was asking me certain things because of where I grew up, and he confirmed what I thought when he wrote about Dominicans and performance-enhancing drugs in his column. I thought it was disrespectful and racist. In the column, he wanted to pat himself on the back for asking me the questions in person. I might have been more impressed if he’d called me a cheater to my face instead of being so passive-aggressive.
This was part of playing in Boston that I’d learned to channel into something positive. Keep in mind that Shaughnessy was one of the people who wrote that I was done in 2009 and 2010. He and others believed the New York Times report, and they suggested that my success was due to steroids. I wasn’t done in 2009. I made the All-Star team in 2010, 2011, and 2012. I got off to a great start in 2013 and now the problem was not that I sucked, but that I was too good? How does that make any sense?
I can understand criticism for not having a good year. It’s okay. But you’re also going to be critical of a player when he’s doing well? That happens in Boston. I haven’t seen it happen in New York. Shaughnessy was crushing me, and that motherfucker still walks around like he owns the team. What’s the message that’s being sent to the rest of the players? Man, they’re crushing David Ortiz . . . crushing the man who runs the show in the clubhouse. In the long run, it’s going to catch up to the organization.
I tried to explain to reporters who asked that I got drug-tested more than anybody by those guys who’d been hired by the MLB owners and the players’ association. I was willing to bet that, if they kept records for tests, I held the record. Even the guys who had tested positive for something known didn’t get tested as much as I did. It’s as if they kept testing me because they were thinking, We can’t believe you’re still bangin’ after all these years. They said the tests were random. That’s what they said. But I was in there all the time, so either their random machine loved me, or they were lying.
Once, I got a funny story out of a drug test. It was just before the golf classic in the Dominican, and there was a tester who tracked me down there. Well, he almost tracked me down. He called me from the airport and said he was lost. The guy came to test me for PEDs, and he didn’t even know where he was going. Crazy. Now, if I had been up to something sinister, I would have told the confused tester to keep driving in circles until he was off the island. Instead, I said, “Where you at? I’ll come get you.”
In the spring and summer of 2013, I had more serious things to think about than cynics and skeptics. I was 37 years old and thinking about what I was doing with my life. I missed my wife. I missed my kids. I missed being who I was. The kids still came to the games, and I was still involved in their lives, but I missed being a daily presence. We still loved each other, and the time away made me appreciate how powerful our family, at its best, could be. And I was thinking in terms of “our.” I’d always felt that way, and it became clearer when my father-in-law, Terry Brick, died that summer. Tiffany was grieving, and so was I. It was becoming a mission season for me: help the city, help the team, help put my family back together again.
I believed in our team as much as anybody, but even I was surprised at times by our collective desire to learn. That stood out for me in late June, when we traveled to Detroit for a four-game series. We felt that we matched up well against the Tigers, despite their roster of stars. We didn’t make our case in the series, losing three of four. But our response to a key at-bat let me know that we’d be okay against anyone, especially when the games became more important.
In the final game of the series, a reliever named Joaquín Benoit faced us in the top of the ninth inning. We trailed 7–4, but the heart of the lineup was due. Benoit gave up a single to Pedroia, and I was up next. I knew it was going to be a battle, but I didn’t know that he’d perfected a changeup. It was a gem. He threw me that pitch on a 2–2 count and struck me out swinging. We got a run off him in the ninth, but we still lost the game.
Later, the whole team went to the video room and watched that at-bat. I was sitting at the computer and could hear all the voices behind me as Benoit’s out pitch was released. “Damn, that was nasty.” It was a pitch that started in the strike zone, and once it got to the contact point it dropped. Benoit had a 95-mile-per-hour fastball, but that changeup was like 85, 86. I told my teammates, “The next time I face him, I’m going to look for that pitch the entire at-bat.”
We won nine of the next ten games after leaving Detroit, and we led the division by five and a half games. Our lead at the All-Star break was two and a half. I made my fourth consecutive All-Star team and had 19 home runs in mid-July. No matter when the temperature of our team was checked, whether it was Memorial Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July, or Labor Day, we were the same. Steady. Tough. Resilient.
My favorite statistic about our team was that we made it through the entire regular season without losing three games in a row. The numbers don’t always tell the story of what a team is, but that stat does. It’s proof that shutting our team do
wn over a long period was almost impossible. Players figured out the flaws on other teams and shared whatever they learned with everyone else. I’m not just talking about starting players; everyone would do that.
One of the players who blew me away was Jonny Gomes. He would prepare for games like a football player. He was always talking about baseball, analyzing what pitchers wanted to do, and thinking about the best ways to attack a weakness. Jonny is one of those players you have to play with to understand his value. I remember thinking that if I were the general manager of the Red Sox, I’d sign Jonny to a five-year contract. The agreement would be that if he couldn’t play through that contract, he’d be a part of the organization as a coach or something else. With all the money in the game, it’s important to have players like Jonny, players who remind you that what drives everything is a pure love for baseball.
I’d like to think people will say that about our 2013 team. We finished the regular season with 97 wins and the division title. We had gone from last place to first, and we won back many fans who had questioned our commitment to winning in 2011 and 2012. I was excited to be playing again in October rather than looking back and explaining what had gone wrong. We’d been out of the playoffs for four years, and I was more serious about the postseason than at any point in my career. I was a month away from my 38th birthday, and I didn’t know how many more playoff opportunities I’d have in my baseball life. I felt fine, but I was realistic. Thirty-eight is not 28. I wasn’t going to play much longer.
Our opponent in the first round of the playoffs was Tampa. I respected them, especially their pitching, but I didn’t think they had enough offense to beat us in the five-game division series. We had had some tense moments with the Rays over the years. They were one of the lowest-payroll teams in baseball, yet they always seemed to maximize each dollar with smart, low-risk signings. They played with an attitude and edge, and I liked it.
We took care of them in our first game, at Fenway, 12–2. It was a strange game. Our ace, Jon Lester, started for us. He gave up two runs early, and we were being shut down by their starter, Matt Moore. And then the game changed when I came to bat in the fourth, although I didn’t do anything unusual. I hit a fly ball to right field that I thought was going to be caught by their right fielder, Wil Myers. He was under the ball, and then he lost it. It bounced into the bullpen for a gift double. That led to a five-run fourth for us, and then we added three more in the fifth to turn a close game into a runaway.
Game 2 went from strange to personal. Their starter was David Price, who our team was introduced to in 2008. He was a rookie reliever then, and he’d closed us out in the American League Championship Series. He was only 28 now, but he’d grown up a lot since then, and had won the Cy Young Award in 2012. He was a tough pitcher for anyone to hit, but devastating on left-handers. He’d given up just two home runs the entire season to those of us on the left side, allowing a .189 batting average. My career numbers against Price were not good: a .216 batting average with no home runs.
I was fortunate against him on that Saturday evening. I connected with a fastball and turned it into a home run, deep into our bullpen, in the first inning. Price was still on the mound in the eighth, even though we led 6–4. I was first up in the inning, and I pulled another fastball deep to right field. It seemed to hug the Pesky Pole for a while, and I stood at the plate watching the ball and the umpire for the fair-or-foul signal. Price didn’t like it, and everyone watching on TV could see that. I wouldn’t be surprised if a dozen thoughts were flashing through his mind, including the important ones: as the Rays’ ace, he hadn’t picked them up, and being down to us 0–2 most likely meant their season would be over soon. Complaining about me and my approach to home runs masked the deeper issues.
Long after we won the game, I got a phone call while I was on our team bus. It was Price. I had had small talk with him before and he had always been laid-back and cool. Not this time. He was pissed.
“Man, why’d you embarrass me like that?” he asked.
I didn’t agree with the way he was putting it. I told him that I’d never try to embarrass him unless he gave me a reason to. Eventually I said, “Listen, you’re a great player. Stop showing people that this stuff bothers you. It makes you look soft.”
All the guys on the bus with me were interested in the conversation, especially Jonny, who played with Price in Tampa. Jonny said that Price was one of the best teammates he’d ever had, but his mentality was that no one should be able to get him for two homers in a game like I had.
“He’s got to realize that he’s dealing with someone of his caliber,” Jonny said. “He’s not just talking about any hitter. So where is this going?”
To Price’s credit, he called back after our initial conversation and apologized. I thought it was over, but learned much later that there was still some resentment. The series was essentially over, though: Tampa won Game 3, but we wrapped it up with a shutdown win in Game 4. We were on our way to the American League Championship Series, prepared to face the talented Tigers.
We had lost our season series to Detroit, and all you had to do was look at the Tigers’ rotation to know why. All of their starters were good, from the obvious leaders, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, to the more understated Game 1 starter, Aníbal Sánchez. We’d played the Tigers seven times in the regular season and missed Sánchez each time.
Seeing him for the first time in Game 1 made me realize how lucky we had been not to have to face him all season. He had finished as the ERA champion in 2013, giving up only a couple of runs per outing. The way he pitched in Game 1 made me wonder how anyone ever scored against him at all. He seemed to be throwing invisible balls to the plate. We drew six walks off him, but I still think he pitched the game of his life. He didn’t give up any hits in six innings and struck out 12. He turned the game over to the bullpen, and they got five more strikeouts against a single hit. That was it. And that hit came in the ninth inning. We were that close to being no-hit to begin a playoff series. Lester had been amazing against them too, allowing a run in six innings. But the talk of the night was their pitching in a 1–0 win.
The next game, through five innings, was more of the same. Scherzer was on the mound, and we didn’t have a hit. A normal Scherzer was a dominant pitcher, but this Game 2 version exceeded the standard. He was spotting his fastball better than ever. His velocity was up to 98 at times, and he was throwing the ball where he liked, not where the hitter wanted it. With mastery like that, it’s tough to hit a slider and a changeup, and we didn’t. We were being no-hit again through five.
People around the game talk, and sometimes you’re not sure if what you hear is true or not. I’d heard that Scherzer had said he was going to pitch no more than seven innings or 100 pitches. I wanted that to be true.
We managed to get our first hit earlier than in Game 1. It came in the sixth with a soft liner by Shane Victorino. We pushed across a run as well. I couldn’t help us add to it, though, because Scherzer got me to strike out on a slider low in the zone. We had struck out 28 times in the first 15 innings of the series and been outscored 6–1.
One of the quirks about Fenway, and about Boston, is that it doesn’t take much there to give people hope. We had appeared to be overmatched in the series, and Fenway was quiet. But when Pedroia doubled off the Monster to drive in our first run, the old park came alive. I’d seen it dozens of times, and it always gave me goosebumps. It was that feeling that a big moment was coming, and I didn’t want to be left out. Something was in the New England atmosphere all day. Earlier in the afternoon, the New England Patriots won their game late, with a Tom Brady touchdown pass in the final five seconds. There was something in the air.
I liked our chances to do something because of who wasn’t there to begin the eighth. Indeed, Scherzer was out, after striking out 13 and allowing two hits. No one else who came into the game was going to hurt us like Scherzer had. The new pitcher, José Veras, gave up a double to Will Middlebrooks.
The crowd sprang to life again, and Tigers manager Jim Leyland wanted no part of it. He quickly got Veras out of the game and brought in a lefty, Drew Smyly, to pitch to the left-handed Ellsbury. But after Ellsbury walked, putting runners on first and second, Leyland was in action again. Out: Smyly. In: Al Alburquerque. The move seemed to be a good one when Victorino struck out. Then Pedroia singled, my boy Torii Hunter quickly retrieved the ball to hold Middlebrooks at third, and it was time for Leyland to make an important decision.
The bases were loaded with one out in the eighth. I was coming to the plate. Leyland looked to the bullpen and brought in a man I’d been waiting to see for three and a half months: Joaquín Benoit. Swear to God, my first thought when I saw him running in from the bullpen was, Here comes my changeup.
I didn’t know if he was going to throw it the first pitch, third, or fifth, but I knew I would see it. I tried to think with him. He knew I was a good fastball hitter, so he had to be careful throwing it with the bases loaded. That changeup was too good to ignore, and he had gotten me out with it in June. I’d studied it many times, seeing how it dropped magically at the point of contact. If you weren’t expecting it, that changeup was an out pitch for sure. But I was determined to sit on it. Sure enough, he threw it on the first pitch. I put a nice swing on it and sent it flying toward right field.
I saw Torii running hard, looking up, and quickly calculating the mechanics of a dynamic catch. I’d seen him do it dozens of times, in the big leagues as well as the minors. He’d won nine Gold Gloves and earned them all. I wouldn’t know until much later that he’d had a decent shot at making the catch. The ball just missed his glove and all three of them, Torii, his glove, and the ball, landed in the Red Sox bullpen.