Papi takes helm for spin
Ponders future as manager
WASHINGTON — David Ortiz was back in uniform yesterday, which means baseball was a little louder, a little edgier, and a lot more bad-ass.
The manager of the World Team in the AllStar Futures Game did a pregame media session in the third-base clubhouse at Nationals Park, waxing on such topics as the 2018 Red Sox (“Wooooh!! It’s like watching a movie you know how it’s going to end!”), infield shifts (“They took 500 hits away from me ... they’ve taken some of the fun of baseball away . . .”), Mookie Betts (“To me, to be honest, he’s gonna get better”) and Dustin Pedroia being out (“I can tell that it’s killing him”).
But the Full Big Papi Monty wasn’t in evidence until he ambled out to the field.
Nationals Park wasn’t even open yet, but there were kids on the field, lots of kids, some of them in wheelchairs, and Ortiz found time for every one of them.
He signed, he posed, he hugged. Rinse, repeat. He was clearly loving this, even as he played the oldman bit by telling one of the kids, “I’ve only been here for two hours and I’m already tired.”
But his presence in a baseball uniform raises some interesting questions: Could David Ortiz be a big league manager? Would David Ortiz be a big league manager? David Ortiz be a big league manager?
He was quizzed about this during the clubhouse media session. Two or three times, and in both English and Spanish. The problem was that Ortiz treated these questions as send-offs to a comedy routine.
“Not any time soon, brother,” he said, with the obligatory laugh, when asked about managing. “One and done,” he said. Asked about discussions he’s had with former teammate/rookie Red Sox manager Alex Cora, he said, “He just called me and said, ‘Hey, how does it feel being a manager?’ He gave me tons of advice but I was like, ‘It’s only for a day, buddy. Take it easy.’ ”
And then, playing off his own oversized personality, he said, “I swear to God, I’m so friendly with everybody that I don’t know how to get mad at anybody. (Managing) is not on my bucket list.”
But I waited until Ortiz was on the field and then asked him: “OK, no kidding, no jokes, would you ever consider being a manager?”
He offered something close to a yes — that is, if you hold the answer up to the light and then twist it a little.
“Being a manager is not an easy thing to do,” he said. “It’s not a piece of cake. Maybe in another 10 or 20 years. Who knows?”
Just to be clear, I doubt David Ortiz will ever manage. He has enough side gigs to keep him as busy as he chooses to be, and he probably has all the money he’ll ever need.
Fine. But since it’s always fashionable to compare David Ortiz with Ted Williams in the ongoing who’sthe-greatest-Red-Sox-player debate, let’s bring the Splendid Splinter into the discussion.
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When Williams retired from baseball after the 1960 season, nobody had him pegged to be a future bigleague manager. And do you know why? Because he had enough side gigs to keep him as busy as he chose to be, and he didn’t need the money. The Sears & Roebuck people were paying him somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 a year (a hefty sum in those days) to take part in corporate events, which included going fishing with various bigwigs. And when he wasn’t doing that he enjoyed nothing better than running off with his legit longtime fishing buddies.
So, no, Ted Williams was never going to be a manager.
In 1969, nine years after retiring, he agreed to become manager of the Washington Senators.
And here we were yesterday, in Washington, 49 years after Senators slugger Frank Howard graciously handed over his No. 9 to incoming skipper Ted Williams, asking another retired, iconic Red Sox slugger if he’ll ever manage.
It took Ted Williams nine years to get sufficiently bored as to consider managing.
David Ortiz is asking us to get back in touch with him in 10 or 20 years. Yeah, right.
No chance.
Just like Teddy Ballgame.