As a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, one book I couldn’t resist buying in recent years is Papi: My Story by David Ortiz with Michael Holley. Few Red Sox players have been as beloved as Ortiz, who is right there with Larry Bird as the best athletes in the clutch in Boston history, and he’s also beloved for his larger than life personality. While this book has a lot of inside baseball (pun intended) from his playing days, there is much more for the reader to appreciate.
The 30,000-foot view of Ortiz’s career has been well-chronicled. Despite some promise, the Minnesota Twins released him after the 2002 season and the Red Sox took a chance on him, and the rest, as they say, is history. He became a great slugger to a degree seemingly no one saw coming. How did that happen?
Well, the real story isn’t that simple, and there have been plenty of doubters as to how it happened as well.
The book starts with Ortiz telling the story of his upbringing in a rough part of the Dominican Republic. Not many people in his position make it out, but as we know, he did. He speaks of how important his parents are throughout the book, including the tragedy of his mother being killed in a car accident one night on New Year’s day and his premonition about that night before it happened.
Naturally, there is a lot of great insight into Ortiz’s career in the book. He talks about how he and Tom Kelly never got along in Minnesota and what led up to his release from the Twins, as well as the challenges they faced as a small market team not necessarily built to contend every single year or reload when stars retire or leave town. They had been a playoff team, but had to decide where they would spend their money, yet of all things, they released Ortiz, an emerging slugger at the time. He loved many of his teammates and was devastated at the thought of not playing with them, especially the ones he came up with in the minors.
In Boston, he talks about how different the culture was and how it shaped him into the player he became. It was a night-and-day difference in so many ways. He gets into how Manny Ramirez was a big part of that, teaching him a great deal about hitting, and his insights into Manny and his quirks is the kind of thing you read many a book like this for. He mentions how Manny seemed to enjoy being perceived as an airhead even though he wasn’t that at all, and doesn’t hold back about how the Red Sox and Manny didn’t often have the best relationship with both parties seeking to move on at different times. He also was not immune to Manny’s quirks, but he learned to deal with it.
Pedro Martinez had no small role in getting Ortiz to Boston, but he also had a role in helping Ortiz adjust on and off the field. Ortiz spent a lot of time with Pedro and his family, and also talked about much of a coach Pedro was. You can see this in Pedro watching him on TV, but I also remember once when Derek Lowe was struggling in a start and Pedro could see why it was and told Lowe in between innings. From there, Lowe dominated the rest of the game, applying what Pedro told him.
An interesting aspect he gets into is his pay and contracts both with the Twins and the Red Sox. Of note, he gets into how the Red Sox threw crazy money at some players who had never played in Boston (think: J.D. Drew, Carl Crawford) but seemed to be cheap with their own players, including him even though he didn’t come up through their farm system. This is something that the Red Sox seem to have changed with slightly, perhaps among other things being bit by how Jon Lester departed after being low-balled, which Ortiz talks about. It’s also clear in the book that he thinks the world of Lester personally with all he overcame, while he had a great insight into how Drew’s laid-back nature masked how talented he was but also explained why he was a good but hardly great player.
Reading about that was interesting because at times I thought he was a little too hung up with his contract. As I read it, I thought about how the media can put out an incomplete story that gives one an impression that has no basis in the reality of the situation. Ortiz wasn’t chasing dollars, although he wanted to be paid market value, but you get the sense his real issue is the aforementioned one of the Red Sox throwing so much money at players who never played in the city instead of the homegrown talent. It’s something that is common all over the corporate world, where raises tend not to be great but someone can leave one company for another and get a significant raise, sometimes a double-digit percentage.
Speaking of the media, the book’s recounting of Ortiz’s relationship with David Price is noteworthy. It’s well-publicized that they were fine when they were about to be teammates, but in fact, they were not exactly best enemies to begin with. Of course, Price also got a bit of a raw deal from the media while in Boston, yet a great column in The Athletic after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2018 blew up so much of the narrative around him. In fact, Price is in many ways the ultimate teammate.
Another interesting aspect of his story is when he was accused of using steroids. Ortiz was among over 100 players on a famous list of MLB players who supposedly tested positive for PEDs in 2003, with many names being leaked out over time. He talked about how he responded when informed that his name being on the list was coming out, doing extensive prep and wanting to address this in the big media market of New York. Later, he talked about his extensive testing for the remainder of his career at length, noting that he was always ready for the random tests he often got and never failed one of them.
While the Red Sox won a lot and Ortiz became an elite player during his years in Boston, it wasn’t great all the time. Ortiz talked about the time things changed between him and Terry Francona, as well as the team falling apart in 2011. I knew all along I wouldn’t care to watch the team in 2012, and I didn’t miss much, but it was a year to forget as expected. Here, Ortiz talks about how Bobby Valentine was no small part of that and showed a lot of arrogance along the way during his one season managing the team. Of course, things turned around a year later, though 2014 was another year to forget before things got better again.
Ortiz finished up reflecting on his final season and the treatment he got at opposing ballparks, noting how the Yankees outdid pretty much everyone else. Then, once retired, like a lot of ballplayers he at first didn’t know what to do with himself, although he kept an active life in the early day when the book was written. Now we wonder if he will be elected to the Hall of Fame, with much debate surrounding his being a DH for most of his career, something that didn’t seem to doom the candidacies of Harold Baines or Edgar Martinez.
If you’re a Red Sox fan, this book is well worth your time. It’s a well-done look inside the life and career of one of Boston’s most beloved athletes, with a lot of great inside baseball on the team’s run that included three World Series titles during his time with them. Ortiz’s story – from being released by the Twins to a Hall of Fame candidate – is well-chronicled at a high level, and this book chronicles it in more detail, the kind of detail you hope for when you pick up a book like this.