Ortiz’s love story endures
When David Ortiz was in surgery late Sunday and into Monday morning, another victim of a hideous act of gun violence, the baseball world paused for a moment and braced for the worst. Shootings are a wellspring of chaos, and the sketchy details emerging from the Dominican Republic — an amusement center, a bar, a man on a motorcycle, shot in the leg, shot through the back — eventually stabilized.
As did Ortiz. Thank goodness.
The thought of losing baseball’s greatest multinational ambassador, a bilingual beacon and source of joy, was untenable. Now, it looks like “Big Papi” will be around not just for his family and his three children, but for the baseball community in his native Dominican Republic and the USA, of which he became a citizen in 2008.
Ortiz is just 43, hopefully with us for decades. Somehow, it feels foolish to wait that long to let him know how we feel.
With that, an appreciation — or, for the very young, an introduction — for why no ballplayer might be as loved as Big Papi.
Rags to riches
Is there anything more relatable than getting fired?
Before he was Big Papi, writ large, Ortiz was a parttime DH looking for a job when the Twins released him in 2002. Convinced he
couldn’t stay healthy on the Metrodome turf, the Twins first tried to give him away and found no takers.
So they dumped him, rather than give him a modest raise via arbitration, a move that generated few headlines. That wouldn’t happen today: Ortiz was a better than league-average hitter, far easily defined by his .809 OPS at the time than his .266 batting average.
It would be easy to call young Theo Epstein a visionary for taking a flyer on Ortiz, but then again, Ortiz sat on the market for six weeks before the Red Sox’s second-year general manager called.
Ortiz rewarded his boss immediately in 2003, with the first of five consecutive top-five MVP finishes and a kickstart to the greatest run in franchise history.
Contagious joy
From his American League Division Series-ending shot over the Green Monster against the Angels, to a walk-off homer in Game 4 and a walk-off single in Game 5 of the epic AL Championship Series against the Yankees, Ortiz was the defining character as the Red Sox broke their 86-year championship drought in 2004.
His charisma was so overwhelming, it couldn’t help but spill into the National League Championship Series, too.
After Ortiz drove a Paul Quantrill pitch over the right-field fence to end Game 4 and spark Boston’s historic comeback from a 3-0 ALCS deficit, he joyfully tossed his helmet aside and entered a mosh pit of celebrating teammates, far from an atypical reaction for Ortiz or that band of Red Sox branded the “Idiots.”
A more striking event occurred a couple of nights later, during an Astros-Cardinals NLCS that was an excellent undercard to Yankees-Red Sox. When Jeff Kent broke up a scoreless Game 5 with a walk-off, three-run homer in Houston, he circled the bases and approached home.
Kent typically played the game with the joy and elan of a state highway patrolman — mustache and all — yet something remarkable happened on this night. Steps from home, Kent grinned, removed his helmet, tossed it aside and was enveloped by teammates. Just like Big Papi.
If you like bat flips and pimped home runs, swagger and exuberance and a brand of baseball far different from the tight-lipped, head-down variety that ruled for more than a century, well, Ortiz was a crucial bridge from dour to dazzling.
A beacon
The hardest game in the world is only more difficult when you’re thousands of miles and a world away from home.
There’s no data suggesting how much impact Ortiz had on foreign-born major leaguers, a group that typically comprised 25-30% of the player population during his career.
Make no mistake, however: This was where Ortiz earned his Big Papi moniker.
Robinson Cano called him “my big brother.” Hanley Ramirez credited him for getting through a particularly grim patch of his career in 2010. Jose Bautista said Ortiz foretold a long struggle that would eventually lead to stardom.
It’s not just the bold-face names, however. From hosting unheralded Kennys Vargas — similar in stature to Ortiz, if not production — for spring training dinners to showing recent call-ups how to act like major leaguers, it’s fair to say Ortiz probably saved a lot of careers before they really got started.
“That matters to me more than any home runs I’ve hit. It may inspire some of the young players coming up to try to emulate the things I’ve done right,” Ortiz told our Jorge L. Ortiz in 2016. “If (my children) ever get up here, I want people to say to them, ‘I knew your dad, and he was a guy with huge power. But there was something better about him. He was a good person, a good guy.’ That’s what I care about the most.”
‘This is our (expletive) city’
The concept of “sports as healing” can span a spectrum ranging from trite to deeply meaningful. In words and actions, on the diamond and in the community, the 2013 Red Sox transcended this concept.
Ortiz’s speech one week after the Boston Marathon bombing lasted barely a minute, but his unplanned f-bomb — “This is our (expletive) city, and nobody gonna dictate our freedom” — was pitch-perfect.
The months and years to come only reinforced this ethos. The survivors were not forgotten, from the moment of Ortiz’s speech to the instant Jonny Gomes brought the 2013 World Series trophy to the marathon finish line.
This was perhaps Ortiz’s greatest feat: reality matching narrative. The Red Sox, one year after losing 93 games, really did go out and win the World Series for their city.
Ortiz really did back up his words: The 2013 World Series was his masterpiece within a gallery of postseason greatness. His numbers look downright incorrect: a .688 average, .760 on-base percentage and 1.948 OPS in the sixgame conquest of the Cardinals. All of this backing up a season when he finished 10th in MVP voting and made his ninth All-Star appearance.
Sometimes, heroes really do come through.
The imperfections
Ortiz made it through two decades in the big leagues, most of it in Boston, a period of great production and occasional tumult.
In 2009, it was reported that Ortiz failed a drug test during 2003 survey testing for performance-enhancing drugs. He ultimately blamed it on a tainted supplement. Upon Ortiz’s retirement in 2016, commissioner Rob Manfred took the unprecedented step of suggesting Ortiz’s test could have been tainted and that it should not impact his chances for the Hall of Fame.
The greater case can be made on the field: Ortiz played 12 seasons during baseball’s era of drug testing with penalties and never tested positive, while maintaining a relatively consistent arc of production.
Ortiz had his clashes with the Boston media, which makes him not at all unique, and sparred with management over contractual issues.
He emerged from it all well-compensated — $160 million in gross salary isn’t bad for a designated hitter — and respected, a megawatt star in two countries.
More significantly, he is a crucial link in the game’s modern history and a figure who will remain fascinating to watch as he grows older, in his deeds and ever-colorful words.
For that, we should all be grateful.