Ortiz Illustrated

Tom Verducci's column in the June 19, 2006 issue of Sports Illustrated
(republished with SI's permission)

Who’s Your Papi?

What drives David Ortiz, the supersized Red Sox slugger, is his resentment of the ball club that did him wrong…and the fighting spirit of his late mother, Angela Rosa

Every ballpark seems smaller, every room brighter, every worry lighter when you’re in the company of David Americo Ortiz, the friendly galoot of a designated hitter for the eternally grateful Boston Red Sox. In girth and mirth Ortiz evokes Babe Ruth, Santa Claus and your favorite stuffed animal from childhood. The only son of Enrique and Angela Rosa ­Ortiz—“I’m my mom’s baby boy, you know?” he says ­proudly—grew up loved in Santo Domingo, D.R., and seems intent on loving the world back.

Runyon or Twain might have invented a character like Ortiz, if it were possible for even such expansive imaginations to conjure a 230-pound teddy bear who speaks like a California surfer with a thick Spanish accent; a Dominican who married a Wisconsin girl and has wintered part time in the state; a hip-hop, bling-­covered fashion plate who underneath his cool threads wears black boxer shorts with who’s your daddy? ­printed in all directions in Day-Glo colors; and—most amazing of all—one of the game’s great sluggers, who, at 27, was released by the Minnesota Twins after no other major league club wanted him in a trade.

Ortiz, now 30, ranked fourth in the American League in home runs (18) and first in RBIs (56) at week’s end, a pace that would leave him with 48 homers and 149 RBIs for the season and a three-year run in which he had no fewer than 41 homers and 139 RBIs. Only two players in history maintained such high production for three consecutive seasons: Ken Griffey Jr. (1996 through ’98) and Ruth, who did so for six straight years (1926 through ’31). A .300 hitter last season, Ortiz was batting .265, blaming the drop partly on the extreme defensive shifts employed against him (right).

In Ortiz there is a little bit of something for everyone to like, which helps explain why he received more All-Star votes from major league fans than any other player last year; why his Boston Red Sox teammates, in one of the more respectful acts in clubhouse culture, ceded him total control of the stereo; and why a terminally ill eight-year-old boy, given days to live, asked to visit Fenway Park to meet him in April. Ortiz’s popularity, like his gap-toothed, omnipresent smile, crosses cultures and generations.

“He appeals to every demographic,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein says. “People love watching athletes who you can tell enjoy what they’re doing. And to have a guy who comes to work every day with a smile—that’s especially huge in our clubhouse, where we had problems in the past.”

Says Puerto Rican–born teammate Alex Cora, “People love to be around David. The unique thing about him is that he communicates just as easily with the American players as with the Latin players. Most of the Latin stars don’t have that quality. He brings the team together.”

Ortiz thrives on such interaction, preferring to spend as much time as possible around friends and family. Yes, he is out­going by nature, but the company also keeps him from the dark thoughts that plague him sometimes when he is alone. Behind the smile there is pain. “I start thinking about life after death,” Ortiz says. “I’ve got to quit thinking about it because it’s very deep. Very deep. Sometimes you start thinking about it, and you don’t feel like you want to be alive, so I don’t like to get all quiet.

“Everybody goes through some tough times in their life, no matter what you do. Man, I’ve had my tough times.”

Eight minutes. Ortiz remembers it as exactly eight minutes. It is all the time needed for an elite runner to cover two miles, for an orchestra to play the second movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 or, as Ortiz found out, for your heart to break. On New Year’s Day 2002, it was eight minutes from that awful phone call from his sister’s ­boyfriend—Your mom has been in an ­accident—to the time Ortiz arrived at the roadside wreck near his home in Santo Domingo. A dump truck. His mom’s car. And Angela Rosa ... gone.

“I was there eight minutes after it happened, and she was dead already,” Ortiz says. “That’s why I don’t worry about baseball. I don’t feel like I put any pressure on myself when I’m playing baseball. Not after that.”

Ortiz was 26 years old at the time and still trying to establish himself as an ­every-day player with the Twins, who had plucked him from the Seattle Mariners’ farm system in 1996, in one of those ­pennant-race deadline deals in which the anxious Mariners wanted veteran third baseman Dave Hollins. At the end of the ’97 season Ortiz was promoted to the big leagues, and the first person he called was, of course, Angela Rosa. She and Enrique, whom everyone calls Leo, were always there for him. There was the day Leo, who sold auto parts, left work to watch his boy play Little League for the first time. David smacked a home run, and as he rounded third, Leo bolted from the stands and interrupted his son’s trot to home by throwing a big hug around him. Though David still visits Leo regularly in Santo Domingo, things will never be the same without Angela Rose.

“She was one of the best mothers ever,” Ortiz says. “She was pretty much my everything. It’s tough, man. I come from a poor family, but I had a good education and a good home. That counts for everything. My mom, she ­wasn’t like a baseball mother who knew everything about the game. She just wanted me to be happy with what I was doing.”

Both his parents, Ortiz says, stressed the importance of education, but it was Leo, a former semi-pro ballplayer, who advised David to give up his other love, basketball, to concentrate on baseball. It was baseball that brought Ortiz to Wisconsin in 1996, where, while playing Class A ball at age 20, he met his wife, Tiffany, and started a family that includes two daughters, Jessica, 9, and Alexandra, 5, and a son, D’Angelo, 1 1/2.

The year that began with his mother’s death, 2002, would also be Ortiz’s last with the Twins. He hit .272 with 20 home runs and 75 RBIs platooning at first base for a young team that reached the AL Championship Series. Minnesota, though, was not high on Ortiz, who seemed injury-prone (he missed chunks of time with wrist and knee injuries), was not a polished fielder and ­couldn’t catch up with good fastballs on his hands. Minnesota G.M. Terry Ryan figured that Ortiz’s development had stalled and decided to trade him. “He just ­wasn’t getting it done here, for whatever reason,” Ryan says. Then he admits, “I made a bad baseball decision.”

He wasn’t alone. Ryan tried to trade Ortiz for two months. “Not one team made an offer,” Ryan says. “Nothing.”

Finally, in December 2002, the Twins released Ortiz. Finding a job at that point of the ­off-season looked so difficult to him that he told his agents, Fernando Cuza and Diego Benz, to check for openings in Japan and Mexico. “[The Twins] did me that bad,” Ortiz says. “I never had a problem with anybody in that organization. Ever, bro. I was a good teammate. I respect everybody. I never had no argument with no coach, nobody. I never did anything wrong, but they did me wrong. No respect, bro. I was lucky I got a job with the Red Sox. There were other teams, but they were offering me way less money.”

The Red Sox gave him $1.25 million and figured he was one of five guys—­along with Jeremy Giambi, Shea Hillenbrand, Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller—who would combine to fill three spots (first, third and DH). Six weeks into the season Ortiz showed so little power (two homers) that his teammates were calling him Juan Pierre (the light-hitting leadoff man who’s now with the Chicago Cubs). Ortiz wanted out of Boston. “I called my agents,” he recalls, “and said, ‘If you guys are not here tomorrow, you guys are fired.’”

After the next day’s game Ortiz and his agents met with Epstein in the players’ parking lot outside Fenway Park. “I told Theo, ‘I want you to trade me or release me,’” Ortiz says. “‘I can’t be sitting here watching this circus anymore, guys I know I can do better than. Me just watching from the bench? I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t clap for something that ­doesn’t deserve it.’”

“Give me a couple of days,” Epstein recalls saying. “I promise you we’ve got something in the works to free up a spot for you.”

“When things ­weren’t going good, she would always say, ‘Son, you’re always going to be my baby boy. Keep fighting. I love you.’ Now, even though I don’t have that voice, I feel that spirit to fight back when times are tough. My mom, she’s still always there for me. Always.”

▀ Sports Illustrated | June 19, 2006 -- Who's Your Papi? By Tom Verducci