by David Ortiz
“You’ve made it to Saturday Night Live . . . someone is doing you on Saturday Night Live. You’ve made it now, brother!”
I didn’t see what he was describing until later, and it made me smile. In this SNL skit, the actor Kenan Thompson was pretending to be Big Papi. What made it funny was that he exaggerated everything about me: the beard, the accent, the things I like to talk about. He spent a lot of time talking about popular Dominican foods like sancocho, pollo guisado, and what appeared to be his favorite thing to say, mofongo Dominicano. My opinion about things like that is they should make you happy. And a skit like that promotes your image when no one is saying anything bad about you.
The public that watches Saturday Night Live isn’t 100 percent the same as the one that watches baseball. Now you’re getting a new audience that may not know anything about baseball, Big Papi, or even the Dominican Republic. You never know what that might inspire people to do. Research the food that Kenan was talking about? Find out about the Dominican? Maybe even learn more about me and what I went through to get to the majors?
That’s why I never looked at the skit as a negative, even though I know some people did. They thought it reinforced Latin American stereotypes. I thought it was comical while being potentially educational, so I was flattered by it.
Winning the World Series didn’t just lead to material for comics in New York. It brought me and my teammates to the White House to meet with President Barack Obama. I already had a lot of respect for him for the way he’d handled the recovery from the bombing at the Marathon. He gave an incredibly inspiring speech in which he said that Boston would run again and win again. He’d even mentioned the sports teams having another parade down Boylston Street. He’d said that in April 2013. We’d won in October 2013. In April 2014, we were in Washington on the South Lawn, listening to him give a speech about our team.
I held an OBAMA Red Sox jersey, number 44, for the president. After he had spoken for about ten minutes, I handed him the jersey and then made a request. I brought out my cell phone and asked for a selfie. It was one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken, and people on social media agreed with me: within an hour or two, the image had been retweeted more than 40,000 times.
As someone who wasn’t born in the United States, it was an honor for me to stand there as an American citizen. I think Obama is the coolest president the United States will ever have. Total calm and cool. When he was walking toward me, I thought, As an American, you have to be proud to have a cool-ass president like this one.
When our World Series honeymoon and tributes wore off after a couple of months, it was easy to see our weaknesses. Our run production evaporated. We’d lost our leadoff hitter, Jacoby Ellsbury, to the Yankees. Our number-two hitter in 2013, Shane Victorino, was fighting injuries. The three and four hitters, Pedroia and I, had good numbers. They just weren’t numbers that put us on a pace similar to the championship season. Mike Napoli was the number-five hitter, but he’d also dipped from 2013. Xander Bogaerts was expected to make the leap from effective contributor to reliable starter, but his adjustment period was longer and rougher than predicted. We struggled in center with Ellsbury’s departure.
We were sliding. We were a back-and-forth team in April. We were slightly below average in May and early June. By the time we got to July and the All-Star break, we were just bad. We were in last place and Baltimore was in first. The Orioles had many good things going for them, and one of them was Nelson Cruz being selected to play in the All-Star Game.
In our previous disappointing season, 2012, we had made a big trade that signaled a new direction for the franchise. The same thing happened at the deadline in 2014. I couldn’t believe we’d changed so quickly. I felt like I could still hear the cheers on Boylston Street. I could still remember the faces, the smiles, the excitement of the fans waving at us as the Duck Boats passed by.
It seemed that it was being taken away, significant piece by significant piece. It was hard. Not only were these my boys, they were also good. I remember once teasing Chris Davis from Baltimore about Andrew Miller. Miller was our six-foot-seven left-handed reliever, and he used to make Davis look like shit. Davis is a friend of mine, so I got to first base and said, “My man, that guy is filthy, isn’t he?”
Davis gave the most honest and real answer: “I don’t know what to do against him. It’s like he knows what you’re thinking. He doesn’t give you shit to hit.” He was right. The next day Davis was facing Miller, and he threw a slider so nasty that it almost went into our dugout. I was laughing my ass off.
It was no time for laughing when Miller was traded to the Orioles for a pitching prospect named Eduardo Rodríguez. I immediately thought of Davis laughing at me now. It was going to be my turn to deal with Miller as an opponent.
We also traded John Lackey, who pitched with a lot of toughness and attitude. He knew what he was doing on the mound. Even when he didn’t have his best stuff, he gave his team a chance to win. He was moved to the Cardinals for a hitter named Allen Craig and pitcher Joe Kelly.
The big move, though, was Lester. He was one of my brothers. I respected him and trusted him in big situations. No one could say anything about his resolve, in baseball or in life. He’d beaten cancer as a young pitcher and then returned to win the clinching game of the 2007 World Series. He’d been unhittable at times in 2013. He’d seen a lot of the same things in Boston that I had, experienced some of the same bullshit from the media and the team, yet he still wanted to be a part of the Red Sox. He was like me in that he had the city and the organization in his blood. At times, it seemed that when the Red Sox knew that about you, they’d try to take advantage with some “hometown discount” that didn’t measure up to what you deserved.
Lester and the Red Sox couldn’t figure out a deal, so they traded him to the A’s for an outfielder named Yoenis Céspedes. To make things worse, it wasn’t just Lester being traded to Oakland. Jonny Gomes, one of the best teammates I’ve ever had, was sent there with him.
The season was no longer about winning. It was about development. And that’s tough to hear in early August, especially when you’re 38 and trying to maximize your remaining years. I could understand the value of picking up prospects, but not at the expense of winning. I knew the Red Sox had money, and they were one of the teams that could keep veterans and go all out for young players. Our championship teams always had a blend of both.
Three weeks after trading Lester, the team opened up its checkbook and gave $72.5 million to a 27-year-old Cuban outfielder named Rusney Castillo. Now, I know they would just call it the price of doing business, but they never seemed to get how stupid these moves looked to veteran players. I had nothing against Rusney. The concern was that over $70 million could be given to someone who hadn’t spent a day in the majors and had not been actively playing baseball for a year. Meanwhile, they had just traded away one of the best big-game pitchers, a pitcher the Red Sox developed, all because they didn’t want to pay him what he deserved.
I couldn’t figure it out when the signing happened in August, and I didn’t have better answers when the season ended in October. We had lost 91 games, two fewer losses than we had had in 2012. Two last-place finishes surrounding a World Series title. It was weird. Maybe stranger than that was how we couldn’t score runs anymore. A team like Tampa, for example, always had to hunt for runs. They’d finished 2014 as the worst run-scoring team in the American League. We’d scored just 22 more runs than they had all season. Baltimore finished ahead of us by 25 games, and to this day I think that if we’d gotten Cruz instead of the Orioles, we would have made the playoffs.
Our year, on the field and philosophically, was bad.
Then, in free agency, things got even stranger. The Red Sox wanted to improve the lineup, understandably, so Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramírez were targets. Hanley always told me that he looked up to me, and I knew I could help make his transition to Boston a smooth one. Pablo, or Panda, was a good man who could bring a lot of
talent and personality to our team. There was also a free agent pitcher they wanted, and they were willing to pay well over $100 million to get him.
It was Jon Lester.
We probably could have had him, without negotiations from other teams, for $120 million in the spring. But after becoming a free agent in the fall, he was being chased by the Red Sox, Giants, and Cubs. All high-payroll teams. The number was going to be much higher than $120 million, especially since Theo Epstein was involved. He knew what Lester could bring to a team.
Let me tell you what a special human being Lester is. Even after all the tricks of negotiating, even after being traded by the Red Sox and shown more respect by other teams, he wanted to be here. He called me, crying, because he wanted to come back to the Red Sox. He was bawling, and it got me a little choked up too. I told him that he was a great pitcher and that he shouldn’t feel any guilt, because the Red Sox had had the opportunity to prevent free agency from happening.
“Look at your next move this way,” I told him. “It’s going to be for your family before it’s for you. That’s a big contract that can set people up for a long time. Go get it.”
Theo knew what he was getting in Lester: a good teammate, a good pitcher, a guy who was all about business. I have never seen anyone work harder than that kid. Good players who not only perform at the highest level but can do it in Boston are worth keeping. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care who’s in charge of the Red Sox. If they ask me the key to holding on to talent, I will tell them to find the players who can perform in Boston and keep them.
Going into the 2015 season, I’d been a part of the Red Sox for a dozen years. I’d seen players panic. I’d seen players get scared. I’d seen players wanting to go home. I’d seen players fake injuries. I’d seen all kinds of shit, but none of it ever came from the guys who understood Boston and had figured out how to lock in and perform as a member of the Red Sox.
I’d been fortunate to be a part of a city with a makeup so much like my own. It’s funny how things work out. When I was in Minnesota, I had no idea that Boston was where I should have been all along. You get released and it’s embarrassing. It makes you unsure of what’s coming next, which can be an uncomfortable feeling. Yet, as I looked ahead at 2015, a huge milestone was before me. Five hundred home runs. And I had a chance to do that as a member of the Red Sox.
I was 39 when the season started. I knew I was still a good player, but I wasn’t the same as I’d been my first four or five years with the Red Sox. Anybody who really knew baseball and hitting could see the difference. Back in the day, when I hit the ball, it was going in the stands. Now, the balls that used to go in the stands still went there sometimes but many of them scraped the wall or wound up as doubles to the gap. I felt that my knowledge of pitchers was better at 39 than it had been at 29, but strength is strength. You’re not going to out-think Father Time.
My love for the game was still there in 2015, despite our team not being much better than the year before. We were better at the plate and worse as a pitching staff. I didn’t know who made the call to move on from Lester, and to a degree Lackey, but I thought many times that our season reflected that decision.
The American League East is no joke—it has some of the most elite hitters in baseball. I was always nervous for pitchers who came from another division, like the National League Central, and thought they could get away with the same pitches here. It doesn’t work. Also, in this division, you need an ace. There’s no way around it. You’ve got to get him and you’ve got to pay him.
We had traded Yoenis Céspedes to Detroit for pitcher Rick Porcello, who was 26. I liked Porcello. He had good control and kept the ball on the ground. I thought we needed more pitching, and the stats agreed. On July 1, our team earned run average was at the bottom of the league.
I felt fine physically, although my batting average was just .228. I did have 13 home runs, 21 away from 500 in my career. I’ve never taken my achievements for granted, but I never played for them either. I’d be lying if I told you that I spent a lot of time thinking about 500 home runs and whether it was going to happen in 2015. I wanted to help us win, but the year was harder than I’d thought it would be.
At times, honestly, I felt old. It took me longer to get ready for games. I required more treatment. I still lifted as much as my teammates, if not more. It just took longer to recover. People at the park would ask how I was doing and I’d tell them one of two things: Papi is old . . . Papi is tired.
The good part of not being a 2015 All-Star was that I could rest. I needed it. I was a different hitter after the break and had 21 home runs going into August, 13 short of 500. That was a milestone that only 26 other players in history had reached. Our organization was changing as well. When you spend a lot of money on a team and it doesn’t perform to expectations, there’s no patience for that in big markets. Ben Cherington, who had built a championship team two years earlier, was essentially demoted, without losing his job, when the Red Sox hired Dave Dombrowski as president of baseball operations. Dombrowski had worked for John Henry in Florida, and he had recently been the top baseball executive in Detroit. I knew people who’d worked for him, and I’d heard that he was a very involved boss. You were always aware of him. Maybe Ben heard that as well, because he decided to resign rather than stay on board and be the number two to Dombrowski.
It was difficult to think about the pursuit of 500 home runs when much more important things were happening with our team. I liked our manager, John Farrell, a great deal. I felt that his ability to communicate was his strongest asset, and that’s important when dealing with a bunch of proud athletes who all want to play. John was strong and proud himself, so he tried to put the team’s needs above his own when he managed in pain and didn’t tell many people.
I didn’t know what to expect that Friday afternoon at Fenway when he gathered us all together for a team meeting. I tried to guess what it was about. We were in last place, which was disappointing, but it wasn’t news. We’d struggled all year. But then I looked at John’s face, and I could see that something serious had happened. He’s a big man, about six-foot-four, with a strong baritone. But he almost seemed to whisper when he told us what was going on. He’d learned, during a procedure to correct a hernia, that he had cancer. Stage 1 lymphoma. He said he was going to take the rest of the season off to focus on his health.
It was silent in the room, and no one had the perfect words. We hugged him and told him that we were going to support him and pray for him. There aren’t a lot of people who could have handled things like John did. He’d managed a game, in Miami, knowing that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
The news about John changed my outlook for the rest of the season. Of course, I wanted to have fun and win games. I also forced myself to pause the first two weeks of September as I approached my 500th home run. It wasn’t just about the stats. It was a life lesson, a bunch of them. I can’t say there was a lesson for each home run, but it was hard for me to put the journey into a neat sentence or two. I thought about so many things. Like sharing. I didn’t know when my time in the game would be up, but I knew I wanted to share everything I knew with as many players as possible. My experience with the negativity of some people in baseball inspired me to reach out to players—whether on my team or another team—when I sensed that they were struggling.
I could feel a lot of my bitterness over how I was treated in 2010 turning into something more positive. My experiences had produced an upbeat story for me to tell. On the day I was pinch-hit for in Toronto, my career home run total stood at 318. How many people that day thought that I’d even reach 350? And those who thought I’d get that far probably guessed it would be with another team. It was a lesson to never count myself out. It was a lesson to not count anyone else out either.
There were some unlikely stories in the 500–home run club, but many of those players were anointed as stars when they were teenagers. Mickey Mantle and Ken Griffey Jr., Reggie Jackson a
nd Barry Bonds. Ted Williams and Alex Rodriguez. The scouts saw them coming and cleared the path. My road had been unusual and unexpected. Discovered in the Dominican, released in Minnesota, rescued in Boston, disrespected in Canada, revived again in New England.
I knew that number 500 was going to be special, and not just because it would remind me of crisscrossing the baseball map. I always pointed to heaven after home runs, sharing those moments with my mother. She had loved being the mother of a professional athlete. I loved the thought of her smiling above as her son became a member of even more exclusive company. It finally happened on September 12.
We were in Tampa, where the Rays, like us, were winding down a disappointing season. There were about 20,000 fans in the stands, and many of them made it clear why they were there. Every time I stepped to the plate there would be a commotion and several thousand cell phones flashing. I didn’t take the moment for granted, but I wanted it to be over. In the fifth inning, with us already ahead 7–0, I got my kind of pitch from starter Matt Moore. It was low and inside, and I did what I had done 499 other times in my career. I hit it and sent it flying, deep into the stands. I tried not to smile as I circled the bases, but it was hard. I could see both teams standing and clapping outside of their dugouts, and there were even people in the stands who wrote later that they’d come all the way from Haina to see number 500.
My teammates were great. They were as happy for me as they would have been for themselves. I got so many kind words from them, and from other players too. In fact, my cell phone nearly gave out from all the congratulatory texts I received. By the time the game was over, I had at least 75 texts.
I’m not usually in the moment like that, but this was a time to think about life and special occasions. Life changes quickly. John was a perfect example of that. He told me that he was feeling no pain at all before his diagnosis, and then one day he had cancer.
I wanted to be in the mind-set of appreciating everything I had, whether it was my health or the ability to hit 500 home runs in a career. I’d heard about so many great players in baseball history, so many bad boys I’d grown up admiring. When I hit that home run in Tampa off Matt Moore, I thought about what it meant as I ran the bases. One day I was going to be one of those players the scouts talked about. They had said that I was going to be the next Fred McGriff, and now they’d look at the swing of some 15- or 16-year-old kid and say he’s going to be the next David Ortiz.