David Ortiz Begins His Last Slow Trot
By Ian Crouch
The Red Sox's David Ortiz tracking a home run against the Houston Astros, in Boston, on August 16, 2014. Ortiz announced on Wednesday that next season will be his last.
Photograph by Michael Dwyer / AP
Today, on his fortieth birthday, David Ortiz announced that next season, his twentieth in the majors, will be his last. His retirement tour could, with a little luck, stretch nearly a full calendar year—a nice, slow trot, with a few high-fives and one final two-handed salute to the heavens, like one of the famously ponderous trips around the bases that have followed each of his five hundred and three home runs. Ortiz began his career as a player who struggled to find a permanent spot with the Minnesota Twins, and he'll end it as one whom the Red Sox will never be able to replace.
Why now? Ortiz has shown few signs of slowing down. Last season, he played in a hundred and forty-six games, and his thirty-seven home runs were the most he'd hit in nearly a decade. He's near the end of his contract, but he's still worth the nearly sixteen million dollars that the Sox will pay him this year. "We run out of time at some point," Ortiz said, in a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHQA3N5OD0) released by the Players' Tribune Web site. "I wish I could play another forty years ... but it doesn't work that way."
Perhaps he is taking a lesson from his nominal boss at the Players' Tribune, Derek Jeter, whose own extended retirement party, like that of his former teammate, Mariano Rivera, the year before, was a rolling tribute that made even Sox fans tip their caps. Or maybe he has noticed the awkward uncertainty surrounding two high-profile oldsters in other sports, Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant, both of whom are muddling through injury-riddled seasons that may or may not—they won't say—be their last. The struggles of Manning and Bryant would be easier to watch if they were tinged with the good will of a last hurrah. Instead these players simply appear old, and adrift. It's tough to watch the great ones lose control of their stories in the last act. And Ortiz has always been the only one who could tell his.
It's a statistical exaggeration, but not a stylistic one, to say that Ortiz has been the twenty-first-century Babe Ruth. He's been a Latino hero for baseball's great Latino era, a Dominican king. He'll fall miles short of the Babe's career numbers—and he can't pitch—but he has matched him for flair. Like Ruth, he has a perfect nickname, Big Papi, reportedly given to him when he joined the Red Sox for spring training, in 2003, and, because he didn't know anyone's name, just called everyone "Papi." Soon he was the only Papi, the biggest Papi, with an easy swagger and a healthy gut stacked over his belt. Baseball uniforms were made for the few men on Earth who look like Ortiz, and he spiced his kit up with colorful batting gloves and sunglasses, and the sparkles from chunks of bling in his ears and around his neck. Ruth would have worn jewelry if he played today, and he'd have had the loudest at-bat music with the deepest bass. He probably would have been a D.H., too. Children, generally the best judges of baseball character, were drawn to Ortiz, as they were, years before, to Ruth, thanks to his grand gestures and gregarious smile. Kids are also drawn to something slightly malevolent, or at least mischievous, in their ballplayers. Both men occasionally made adults nervous.
Ortiz has been a complicated figure in the best way: big-hearted, occasionally maddening, and always dramatic. The same Ortiz who would, like an overgrown boy, lift the team's closer over his shoulder in a celebratory fireman's embrace could also set off unnecessary brawls with the opposing team, jaw excessively with umpires, or, in one unforgettable instance, smash a dugout telephone to bits. He could be prideful and self-involved, like the time he crashed his manager's press conference to curse about being denied an R.B.I. by the scorekeeper. But he was also a natural leader: for years, he was the Manny Ramirez whisperer, helping to steer the team's best hitter toward his best self, and he could rally the troops, as he did in a team huddle during Game 4 of the 2013 World Series. He was often surly with the press, and his foul-mouthed rants in both English and Spanish found novel uses for old dirty words. But more often he exuded the joy of the baseball life. He was a troublemaker and a prankster. He took one of the best selfies ever with President Obama. And it took all of Ortiz's various qualities to yield what was perhaps his finest moment, when, on a sunny day in April, before the first Red Sox game at Fenway following the Boston Marathon attack, he took the microphone and announced, in a moment of eloquent, vulgar catharsis, "This is our fucking city."
Ortiz isn't for everyone. His place in history is clouded by the fact that his name was leaked, in 2009, from a list of a hundred players who reportedly tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during the 2003 season. The specifics of that test have never been released, and Ortiz has strenuously proclaimed his innocence, and blamed any irregularities that year on supplements he was taking at the time. He hasn't failed a drug test since.
He would often gripe about money, but he had his reasons. He was never the highest-paid player on his team, and the Sox management never gave him a long contract, always sure that he was already a little too old to deserve one. Other players were signed to longer and more lucrative deals, only to be run out of town, traded long before their contracts were over. Ortiz outlasted everyone. He's the only player from Boston's unforgettable 2004 World Series championship who is still on the team. It should have been a long, slow decline—but that never happened.
Everything else about Ortiz has been slow: he plays the game in his own time, at his own pace. At the plate, he spits on his batting gloves and pats his big paws together, takes slow ambles outside the batter's box between pitches, jerks his head and slams his bat after he's fouled a meatball straight back. He flips his bat and admires his long flies. He's started many seasons slowly, too; there have been several times over the years when it seemed like he was finished. He'd be written off by sportswriters, and, let's admit it, the fans, only to rise again, another in a long line of I-told-you-so summers, and by the end of the season, he'd have thirty home runs and a hundred R.B.I. once again. The fans who would gripe that Ortiz didn't run out every ground ball or took a few extra seconds to watch a home run—well, these people simply can't be reasoned with. They can keep their grinders and scrappers and dirt dogs; I'll take Ortiz.
Ortiz is not the best player, or even the best hitter, in the storied history of the Red Sox. (By most statistical measurements, he perhaps ranks fourth or fifth among a murderer's row of great lefties—Speaker, Williams, Yaz, Boggs.) But he has been the leading man in nearly every good playoff moment the Red Sox have had for more than a decade. He almost single-handedly kept the Red Sox alive during the team's amazing comeback against the Yankees, in the 2004 American League Championship Series, which led to the team's first World Series title in eighty-six years. (It was fitting that Ortiz was the player to help finally break Ruth's supposed curse.) He batted an incredible .688 in the 2013 World Series, reaching base seventy-six per cent of the time. The best visual symbol of his many postseason triumphs came from Game 2 of the previous series, against the Detroit Tigers. Already down a game and trailing 5–1 in the eighth inning, the Sox were in trouble until Ortiz came to the plate with the bases loaded. He smacked a fastball into the right-field bullpen, sending a Tigers' outfielder sprawling over the wall, his legs making the shape of a V, which was matched be the outstretched arms of a security guard standing nearby. Two victory signs, one W. On the radio, the play-by-play man shouted, simply, "David Ortiz! David Ortiz! David Ortiz!" Without Ortiz, the Red Sox might still be rivalling their Midwestern blood brothers, the Cubs, for sad baseball futility. Instead, he has been perhaps the chief author of all of the Red Sox happiness.
Sometime next year—in November if the Red Sox are again fortunate, or September if they're not—David Ortiz will call it quits. And, sometime after that, his No. 34 should be retired, squeezed in along the roofline in right field, above the landing spot of so many of his greatest home runs. "I'm going to be done when I've decided that I'm done," he once said. Soon, but not yet.
Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker's editorial staff.
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