Big Papi by David Ortiz

Author:David Ortiz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312366339
Publisher: St. Marti’s Press

SEÑOR OCTUBRE

For us, the Red Sox 2004 season began the day the 2003 season ended. After Grady got fired, our owners and our general manager went right to work to make us a better team. Theo Epstein hired Terry Francona as our manager, and the truth is that I didn’t know too much about him. But right around the same time that we hired Francona—everyone calls him Tito because that was his dad’s name—Theo traded for Curt Schilling and then signed Keith Foulke to be our closer. Foulke was the same guy I doubled off to win Game 4 of the Division Series against Oakland, but he was a good pitcher. So was Schilling. Two months after the season, two months before spring training 2004, we were already a better team.

We were ready to go, bro. We couldn’t wait to get started again. There were a lot of other things that almost happened that winter, and I’m glad they never did. Manny Ramirez liked parts of playing in Boston and didn’t like others, and the team was thinking about trading him. They even put him on waivers. Nomar Garciaparra had just one more year on his contract and the team hadn’t been able to re-sign him, and Pedro’s contract was going to be up at the end of 2004, too. It seemed like everybody’s contract was going to be up. Jason Varitek could be a free agent at the end of the year and so could Derek Lowe, and so Theo Epstein and John Henry, our owner, and Larry Lucchino, the team president, looked at a lot of ways to make us better. And by late January, less than a month before spring training, it looked like Manny and Nomar weren’t going to be back.

It looked like the Red Sox were going to trade both of them and that we were going to end up with a couple of new players.

One of them would have been Alex Rodriguez.

Before I go on, let me explain something: As a player, you don’t have much control sometimes. I learned that when I was with Minnesota. Before the Twins released me, I thought I was going to spend the rest of my career there. And as hard as it was for me when I learned that I was leaving, that the Twins didn’t want me back, it was hard on those guys, too. We all wanted to stay together, play together, win together. But the people upstairs, in the front office, they’re the ones who make the decisions. They pick who stays and who goes. And after you’ve been in the game awhile, after you get some experience, you learn something real fast.

There is nothing you can do about it.

That winter, before the 2004 season, I was on the other side of things. I got to understand what it felt like for Torii and Koskie and the rest of my boys when the Twins let me go. I started to understand how frustrating it was for them, too.

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