EARLY YEARS

BIG PAPI // THE LEGEND AND LEGACY OF DAVID ORTIZ

DOMINICAN DRIVE AND

A

MINNESOTA MISSTEP

BY JOHN POWERS

He originally wanted to be Michael Jordan.

David Ortiz was an imposing manchild who could make plenty of space for himself beneath a basketball rim. But if you lived in the Dominican Republic, your role models were Juan Marichal and Felipe Alou and the rest of the island's storied ballplayers. Once Ortiz vaulted the fence that separated the court from the diamond and swatted a home run in his first at-bat, he was hooked on horsehide.

Enrique Ortiz had been a promising pitcher but his burly son grew up swinging at bottle caps, doll heads, stuffed socks – anything that could pass for a baseball. By 16, David had been discovered by a local scout and passed on to the Florida Marlins, then an expansion franchise that was building a system from scratch.

"Dah-veed, you are going to play in the big leagues someday," his father assured him when he was cut loose, sore-elbowed, from the club's local prospects program after a few months. "Maybe it won't be with the Marlins, but that is their mistake. There are other teams to play for."

Ortiz ended up signing for $7,500 with the Seattle Mariners, who seasoned him for a couple of summers in the Arizona sun, then sent him to their affiliate in Wisconsin, where he was the Midwest League's best defensive first baseman (not a misprint) and hit .322 as the Timber Rattlers reached the 1996 championship round.

That made Ortiz an attractive trading piece and when the Mariners needed a third baseman for the stretch run, he suddenly found himself a Twin as the player to be named later in the Dave Hollins deal. "This was one of the best young hitters I've ever been around," observed Wisconsin manager Mike Goff, who said he "lost it" when he was told that Ortiz had been swapped.

Ortiz responded with a breakout year, zooming from A-ball to the majors in five months, hitting .317 with 31 homers and 124 runs batted in along the way. "He just stormed through our minor-league system," observed general manager Terry Ryan.

Minnesota, a losing club that needed offensive punch, plugged in Ortiz as its everyday first baseman in 1998. He was hitting .306 when he fractured the hamate bone in his right wrist, the slugger's occupational hazard, had surgery, and missed two months.

That was the beginning of an up-and-down ride in the Twin Cities that lasted for five years and was marked by injuries, confusion, and frustration. The mutual disenchantment between Ortiz and the club began in spring training in 1999 when the Twins sent their 23-year-old strongman, who was hitting .137 with a dozen strikeouts in 51 at-bats, down to the Salt Lake Buzz for development.

After crushing Triple A pitching, Ortiz was back by September and in 2000 he was their main but miscast designated hitter, a basher for a club that wanted him to be a singles hitter. "Whenever I took a big swing, they'd say to me, 'Hey, hey, what are you doing?'" he recalled. "So I said, 'You want me to hit like a little (girl), then I will.'"

Ortiz never was quite sure what the club wanted from him and it didn't help that he and manager Tom Kelly weren't on the same page. "I don't think he really liked me," Ortiz mused later. "I don't know why. That was his style, not just with me. He was hard on young players. He was the kind of manager who likes veteran players. He never liked me."

When Ortiz broke his right wrist sliding into home against the Royals (yet stayed in the game and hit a homer in his next at-bat) and missed nearly three months of the 2001 season, it was the beginning of his annus horribilis. His mother Angela was killed at 46 in an automobile accident on the first day of 2002. "She used to love just watching me hitting the ball," said Ortiz, who had her face tattooed on his right arm. "All she worried about was how I hit the ball."

Then, after having knee surgery in the spring to remove bone chips, Ortiz missed several weeks and went 43 games without a homer. His turnaround came after the All-Star break when he heated up with a 19game hitting streak while the Twins ran away with the AL Central and made the playoffs for the first time in more than a decade, knocking off the Athletics in the divisional series.

"I felt like things were really starting to come together," Ortiz said in his 2007 autobiography "Big Papi: My Story of Big Dreams and Big Hits." "I had the best year of my career, a season I dedicated to my mother ... I was starting to make good money playing in the big leagues and I was starting to build my confidence, and I was playing for a team that went to the American League Championship Series. I really thought that things were looking up."

But his days in Minnesota were finished. The club had a Gold Glove first baseman in Doug Mientkiewicz. Ortiz, who was making $950,000, was up for salary arbitration and the Twins, a small-market operation with a limited budget, didn't want to pay him what could have been twice as much. So they let him go in December in what Ryan later conceded was "a bad baseball decision."

"I thought I might get traded or something but I never thought about getting released," said Ortiz. "It just didn't seem like the kind of thing that could happen. I was coming off a pretty good year and I was young and I thought there would be some team out there that would want to trade for a big dude like me."

Ortiz was a man with a point to prove in search of a wall to clear. The opportunity came in the Fens, where the Sox were revamping and, among other things, looking to replace Brian Daubach, whom they'd set free. Ortiz was four years younger, had similar stats, could split time at both first base and DH, and would play for less than half as much money. He also came highly recommended. Pedro Martinez called the Boston front office from Santo Domingo as soon as he heard that Ortiz was on the market and urged that he be signed; fellow countryman Manny Ramirez concurred.

After Ortiz pummeled the ball in the Dominican winter league and showed defensive deftness, club scouts urged general manager Theo Epstein to acquire him. There was little risk or expense and significant upside. "You're looking at a player with the potential to be a middle-of-the-lineup bat in the big leagues," reckoned Epstein, who inked Ortiz to a one-year deal for $1.25 million.

Ortiz became much more: the greatest clutch hitter in Sox history, who helped put three rings on his teammates' fingers; the supersized face of the franchise; and a civic icon.

BY ANY OTHER NAME, ALWAYS ORTIZ

BY NICK CAFARDO

David Ortiz, known in 1996 as David Arias, was the top defensive first baseman in the Midwest League for the Seattle Mariners' farm team. And when Minnesota Twins general manager Terry Ryan acquired Ortiz from the Mariners for veteran third baseman Dave Hollins later that year, he felt he had stolen a top hitting prospect.

Ortiz proceeded to skyrocket through the Twins' minor league system in 1997, hitting .317 with 31 homers and 124 RBIs.

Five years later, after the 2002 season, Ryan released Ortiz. Ryan has beaten himself up...