12

Another Country

It was a warm summer morning at Columbia Point, and I’d arrived early for my appointment at the John F. Kennedy Library. The extra time, and the occasion, inspired me to look out at Dorchester Bay, pause, and reflect on some pivotal moments in my life.

As I prepared for a private lunch in my honor, I recalled the highs and lows of my childhood: my parents making dozens of sacrifices so we could have more food and perhaps one day move to a better house and attend better schools; my dad always fixing someone else’s car while often not having a car of his own to drive; my mom leaving the Dominican to buy clothes, dolls, and fabrics in places like Curaçao to bring back home and sell to tourists. My dad would take her to the airport on one of the vehicles we had, either his motorcycle or her moped. I could still remember them motoring away, two people and a suitcase. In those days, I didn’t see my father much outside of Sundays because he was always doing a job to get extra money.

This day, June 11, 2008, was right in front of me. This was the day I would officially become a United States citizen. The ceremony was supposed to be about the present, and that’s why I had a reserved seat in the front row, one of 226 people who would be granted American citizenship this day. It promised to be a great day, a day when some would say that they’d become U.S. citizens at the same time as Big Papi. But for me, the day wasn’t solely about the achievements of Papi. That was the pleasant part of the story, the part where the baseball star wins in the end with a clutch hit. That wasn’t the whole story, though. The past had also made this day significant, so I continued my slow memory walk through that part of the story. And I did it with gratitude.

I remembered moving to a new house in the Dominican after my parents had separated, though my dad was still a big part of my life. I’d come home from school with a friend, and my dad would look him up and down before giving a verdict. If he didn’t get a good feeling, if he didn’t like what he saw, he’d say, “David, you’re not going to be his friend anymore.” And that would be it. If my mother and father told me what I was supposed to do, I’d do it. No questions asked.

It was perfect that, all these years later, my father was at the JFK Library for the lunch and ceremony. He was the one who searched for any fear or indecision in my teenage voice when I called him after my first few weeks in the United States. He never told me that he and the family were counting on me, but I knew that they were. And I could hear that in his voice. He wanted to be assured that I’d stay the course and find a way to make a career out of pro baseball. I was driven by his hope and guided by the wisdom he’d given me through the years.

The adversity along the way had made me stronger. It made the adversity I’d experienced two weeks earlier, hurting my left wrist in a game against the Orioles, seem trivial. At least my father and my family didn’t have to work as hard as they had back then. At least my children, twelve, seven, and three years old, didn’t have to face any of the conditions in their neighborhood that I had in mine.

I was so proud to stand there and bring our family closer together. I never dreamed of this when I met Tiffany Brick from Kaukauna, Wisconsin, in 1996. I didn’t have my eye on citizenship then, but I always took the rules of the country seriously. Once, in the minors, there was a wild fight in a nightclub between my teammates and some of the Wisconsin locals. It was mayhem, and I was angry at the way my boys had been treated. I remember peeling teammates from the fray, trying to keep them out of trouble. Tiffany said to me later, “You were mad, and those guys were being real assholes to you and your teammates. I’m surprised you didn’t knock them out.” I told her, simply, “I’m a big guy and I can really hurt someone, and I don’t want to do that.” She would tell that story every now and then, and she’d add that she was impressed that someone at 20 years old could consistently think before acting. I gave credit to my parents then, and continue to give them credit now. They never let their circumstances define who they were. They demanded respect and high character.

Thank God that my youth, my ego, my testosterone never got the best of me. I’m fortunate that I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket in the United States. No arrests. No time in jail. The country has been incredible for me and my family, and I’ve always wanted to show that I respect the boundaries that are in place.

On June 11, I got emotional as I stood there with the others reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I thought of what is said in the Pledge, and even what isn’t said. That’s the part that got me. As a new citizen, I felt as though the country was saying, “We trust you.” I was so appreciative. I brought my family in for a hug and held on tight. I knew I’d be spending a lot of time with them that day, and that later they’d be there watching the game.

The wrist injury hadn’t gotten any better. What had happened Memorial Day weekend was that the sheath covering the tendons in my left wrist had been dislodged on a hard swing. My pain threshold is high, but this wasn’t just about pain, it was also about the mechanics of my wrist. It just didn’t feel right. After reaching a full count, the damaged wrist felt so awkward that I had to come out of the game.

I had no guesses on what it was. I knew it was bad, though. My wrist felt terrible. Things got even more frustrating when I talked with the doctors and was told about the healing and treatment plan for the wrist. There would be no surgery or resetting. I was just going to have to wear a cast and be patient. “Is that it?” I’d asked. “Nothing else?”

That was it, and it was nerve-racking.

I’d begun the season slowly, hitting just .184 in April. I was starting to get hot in May. I hit eight home runs and eight doubles, drew 18 walks, and drove in 22 runs. Not a bad month at all. We were playing good baseball, but there was a twist to the season that we weren’t used to. We had company. It wasn’t just the Red Sox and Yankees anymore. The team that had spent nearly a decade at the bottom of the division, the Tampa Bay Rays, was challenging for the East title. We needed all the slugging I could give us, and I was starting to do that. But at the precise moment when my team needed me, I could only observe.

That seemed like the story of what the season would be for the Red Sox. Some things were damaged far beyond repair, and we could only watch them play out. I knew at least a month before everyone else that Manny had reached a breaking point with the Red Sox. There was no way the relationship could last any longer. It was hard for me to watch because of who Manny was to me and how I felt about winning games.

I just couldn’t crush Manny like some people did. He was only four years older than me, but I looked up to him as a hitter. He was a genius at the plate. All you have to do is ask the pitchers. They’ll tell you that he could be fooled, like all of us, but he couldn’t be fooled for long. He studied a pitcher’s strengths and then worked until that strength wasn’t as reliable for the pitcher as it had been in the past. I loved that about him.

The other stuff was tough. I wanted to win every night, and when he was there, winning was more likely. Now flip that around: when he wasn’t there, it made it a lot harder for us to be successful. Manny would change his mind like day changing to night. He had spent the beginning of spring training saying that he wanted the Red Sox to pick up the option years on his contract and he wanted to finish his career in Boston. He joked and smiled a lot. Then, right before I got hurt, he started to change. It was clear to me that he was sick of New England, more fed up than he’d ever been, and wanted to get out. Over the years, Tito had called meetings with a few veterans to talk about Manny, and he’d tell us that he could easily take Manny out of the lineup. But he warned us that we would have to be okay with how that would look on the field. Most of the time, we agreed to put some humor on his actions and keep it moving.

But I knew Manny, and this was different. He wasn’t giving anyone a choice.

On opening night of the NBA Finals between the Celtics and Lakers, the Red Sox moved first pitch of our game with Tampa up an hour so we wouldn’t have a conflict with the Celtics. Instead, it turned out that we had a conflict with ourselves. Everyone was aware of how intense Kevin Youkilis, our first baseman, could be when he played. He was known for throwing anything in sight when things didn’t go his way during an at-bat. Even before there was any trouble with Youkilis, Manny would tell me, “If he ever hits me with a helmet or anything, I’m going to have to hit him back.”

Youkilis didn’t hit Manny with a stray bat, helmet, or anything else in the fifth inning that night against Tampa. But Manny slapped at him anyway, and they had to be separated in the dugout. Nothing like that had ever happened with Manny before, but it faded quickly over the next couple of weeks. The city was entertained and distracted by other things. The Celtics won the Finals and had a parade, just eight months after we had celebrated winning the World Series over the Rockies. And we were back in first place, even without me in the middle of the lineup.

The end, unofficially, came on a Friday night in Houston. I don’t think Manny did it on purpose, but once it happened he understood that there was no coming back from it. He’d asked Jack McCormick, our traveling secretary, who had been with the Red Sox for a dozen years, to find 16 tickets for that night’s game. Jack didn’t think he’d be able to find that many, and an argument broke out. Then Jack was on the floor, put there by a Manny push. It didn’t go any further than that, but that was far enough.

We won that night’s game in Houston, and then dropped five in a row. Three of those losses were to Tampa, which regained control of first place and went ahead by three and a half games. We were sliding. We were five games back after a one-run loss at Yankee Stadium on July 6. Manny pinch-hit that day in the ninth inning against Mariano Rivera. I knew, because he’d gotten me many times, how masterful Mariano could be. When he faced Manny with the score tied at 4 in the ninth, he needed three pitches to get him out. Three called strikes. Manny never moved his bat. We lost the game in the bottom of the 10th.

A lot of reporters and fans wondered if that strikeout was intentional. Did Manny really stand there to send a message to ownership and the front office? No one really knew. The fact that the question had to be asked was a sign that we were slipping, and it had nothing to do with the standings. We were too talented a team to miss the playoffs. But there was tension in the clubhouse. I wanted to get back in the lineup as fast as I could, and that would help some. Manny being granted his wish would also be healthy for everyone.

The trading deadline was approaching, and my wrist was healed. But it just didn’t feel like it belonged to me. The first time I started taking swings, I remember thinking, I have no chance. I’m telling you, it was bad. I was getting a lot of massages and doing various wrist exercises. It was going to be a while before I felt like myself.

It must have been an eye-opening time for Red Sox ownership and management. It was nearly August, the stretch run, and for different reasons they weren’t seeing the real David Ortiz and the real Manny Ramírez. Manny seemed to be making a deadline push to get what he wanted. He talked on his phone, during a game, by the Green Monster. Another time he said he was hurt. In yet another incident, he made himself available to reporters, in English and Spanish, and told them that he was sick of the Red Sox. He even said that “the Red Sox don’t deserve a player like me.”

All of this happened in a three-week span, and then he was gone. On July 31, the Red Sox, Pirates, and Dodgers pulled off a three-team deal. We got Jason Bay. The Dodgers got Manny Ramírez. It was the best thing for everyone, even if it didn’t seem that way on the surface. Bay was a good player and teammate. Manny was a Hall of Famer. But he was a Hall of Famer who wanted to leave, and so it was clear that no one would see his true talent until he got what he wanted.

I didn’t know what to think, short- and long-term. We needed to make the playoffs, and after I’d missed all of June and nearly all of July, I didn’t think my bat could carry us. And Manny was gone. That was the bad news. The good news was that Youkilis and Pedroia were having MVP-type seasons. Pedroia, in just his second year, was one of the respected leaders in the clubhouse. If I’d had an MVP vote, he would have been my choice.

I tried not to think about how good we’d have been if we, not the Dodgers, could have had the focused Manny. Manny went to L.A. and destroyed National League pitching. His numbers were ridiculous. They were so ridiculous that it didn’t take long for him to be mentioned as a MVP candidate in the NL.

This was my sixth year in Boston, and our team had been serious contenders for all six of those seasons. There were so many accomplished players I’d been able to call a teammate. Nomar. Pedro. Johnny. Manny. Some of the best players the game had ever seen, and then they were gone. It was never pleasant on the way out. Contract breakdowns. Cheap shots from the media. Hard feelings between players and the organization.

Why was that? And was it going to happen to me?

It was hard for me to envision that at the end of the 2008 season. I’d always wanted my contracts to have more money in them, and the Red Sox always wanted it to be less. That was the nature of business. It wasn’t personal. As for the media, I understood what their job was. Most of the time the media had been fair and respectful to me, so I didn’t have any problems there. Our team, even without Manny, didn’t give people much reason to complain.

We lost the division to Tampa, but we still made the playoffs for the fifth time in the previous six seasons. In what was becoming an annual October series, we played the Angels in the first round. For the third time in five years, we eliminated them. Winning that round earned us a spot in the league championship series against Tampa.

I had a lot of respect for that team. Their lineup never scared you, but their pitching was unbelievable. Their manager, Joe Maddon, was one of the first managers to use a defensive shift against me. He used to come up with some crazy shit. At times, honestly, his alignments would frustrate me and get me out of my game plan. One time he put on a shift and I got a mistake pitch. I hit it out and thought, You’re gonna have to put a shift in the stands to get that one. He was a great manager, and his team really played hard for him.

I was playing hard in the postseason, but my swing was off. I had more walks than hits, and my slugging percentage was in the .300s. The Rays played a solid, and unpredictable, series. We beat them in Game 1, but they won the next three in a row. After outscoring us 31–13, they did it to us again in Game 5 at Fenway and were winning 7–0 after seven innings. TBS was televising the series, and friends of mine told me that the network was doing a Rays-Phillies World Series preview during the game. I know I looked bad, and so did the team.

But we were a veteran team with a lot of talent and pride. We made it a game in the bottom of the seventh. It was 7–1 when I came to the plate, with two guys on. One thing that amazes visiting teams about Fenway is that the fans never, ever think that we’re out of a game. The comeback in 2004 has a lot to do with that, but I remember that hopefulness from 2003 too. As I walked up, I could hear the sellout crowd chanting my name. Papi, Papi, Papi. I was facing a hard-throwing reliever named Grant Balfour, who usually had nasty stuff. He was scuffling a bit in Game 5, and although he was still throwing in the upper 90s, his pitches weren’t moving all that much.

As I look back at that swing now, I can see what I couldn’t then: the swing had a big loop in it. At least it’s big to my eye. I was compensating for the awkwardness in my wrist, and it was going to take a while for me to figure that out. It didn’t matter when Balfour threw a 97-mile-per-hour fastball right where I like it, low and inside. I pulled it to right field, and the three-run shot put us right back in the game and the series.

We won Games 5 and 6, which put us in Tampa for Game 7. Their starter was Matt Garza, who pitched well against us. Ours was Jon Lester. A year after his cancer treatment, Lester was much bigger and stronger than he had been the previous October in Denver. His mentality reminded me of my own. He was the kind of athlete who wanted to wipe out everybody in front of him. He was always ready for competition, never scared.

Lester threw hard and had great control all night. We didn’t give him much to work with, though, coming up with just three hits. Not only did the Rays win the pennant with a 3–1 win, they gave a glimpse of their future in the eighth and ninth innings. They brought out a left-hander named David Price to finish the game. He’d been the number-one overall pick in the draft the year before, and he was already in the majors. He was 23, and the bullpen assignment was temporary. He was going to be a star, and we’d have to deal with him at the top of their rotation for many years.

 

If Tampa’s future looked good, so did ours. I liked the youth we had, and unlike Tampa, we had the ability to spend to fill some of our holes. I had obviously been happier, as a baseball player, in October 2007 than I was in October 2008. My life, though, was never supposed to be about baseball and nothing else.

After taking a year off to better plan the Children’s Fund, I removed a couple of training wheels and we became a 501(c)(3) in 2008. We got a board of directors. We also put on our first celebrity golf classic in the Dominican. My friend and teammate Sean Casey was our emcee. It was attended by some of the biggest names in sports, past and present: Bobby Orr, John Havlicek, Mariano Rivera, Luis Tiant, Jimmy Rollins, Torii Hunter, Jim Rice.

I was humbled and optimistic. These great athletes had taken the time to come to Punta Cana to support something that was so important to me. I enjoyed the beautiful Dominican weather with them, the golf, the food, and their conversations and smiles. We’d done all that while raising money to help those who truly needed it. It was hard to grasp that this was happening to me. Just over 100 miles down the road from Punta Cana, not that long ago, I had been one of those poor kids, never thinking that Hall of Famers would be coming to the Dominican for me.

It was a fulfilling time in my life, and as a positive thinker, I had no reason to believe that it would soon become a nightmare. I absolutely did not think like that. But the nightmare happened anyway.