The 'Big Cheater' and Me
A sign. A Hall of Fame player. A reflection on an accusation.
This is the story about the newest member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and me. My part in the story of his career is less than an afterthought. I’m just a fan who took a sign to one out of the 2400 games he played. But, I want to take this occasion to reflect on what I did.
It was the first Sunday in August and the tickets were free. I was 17.
Four of them a dozen rows behind the Orioles dugout for a 1:35 first pitch. They were my friend’s family’s season tickets, but today they were ours if we wanted them. The call came on the house phone early that morning. We could scoop them off their kitchen counter. The door would be unlocked. We, of course, took ’em.
The O’s 40-59 record did not matter. We were a family of baseball fans who grew up craving the experience of being in the crowd. Always arriving before the first pitch and not leaving before the last out. A family of modest means who understood the value of taking in the full experience, because each game was a rarer opportunity than we wanted them to be. A family with the good sense and lack of shame to say yes to free tickets. And good seats? Icing on the cake.
I had the idea for the sign that morning. We were a family that would make noise without prompting, be engaged in the game. My father taught us as young kids the joy of keeping score. But we were not people who brought signs and sought attention. That day would be only my second: August 24, 1997, I recall having a small Cal Ripken birthday banner with me in the centerfield stands. I was 5.
I wrote out the words I wanted to be placed on the white poster board I found in the basement utility room. My mom had a steady hand and good handwriting. She wrote the letters’ outline in blue, I don’t remember who colored them in red. Boston’s colors.
My father, two brothers, and I were going to see Red Sox vs. Orioles at Camden Yards. It was Aug. 2, 2009. And I wanted to send a message to David Ortiz.
When Ortiz joined the Red Sox in 2003, he was a 28-year-old DH with an average bat who had just been cut loose by Minnesota. In Boston, he flourished and became “Big Papi.” That season the Red Sox would reach the ALCS, but lose Game 7 in New York.
It was the height of the World Series curse. The next season would be the height of the rivalry. The Yankees added Alex Rodriguez and reached a new height of universal disdain, which made the Red Sox universally liked.
The ALCS that season went to form: New York went ahead three games to none and Boston was facing a humiliating sweep. But in extra innings of Games 4 and 5, Ortiz notched the game-winning home run and game-winning hit. The Red Sox had life. Everyone wanted to see something nobody alive had ever seen before.
With two out in the top of the first in Game 7, Ortiz hit a two-run homer to open the scoring of an eventual blowout win. A week later they won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.
I was 12 when they clinched in St. Louis on the night of a lunar eclipse. For the length of the series, I wore a Babe Ruth t-shirt every hour of the day. I wanted to play a part in breaking the curse.
Less than six months later, Congress summoned Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Mark McGwire to talk about steroid use. Baseball became a game dominated by talk of cheating.
Three days before the game, The New York Times reported Ortiz was among the 104 major leaguers who tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance in 2003, the year baseball first started to anonymously test players to determine the extent of steroid use in the game. Manny Rameriez (who helped Boston win in 2004), Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, and Barry Bonds were the other notorious sluggers named.
Around that weekend, possibly the day before the game, I wrote an email to the longtime Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan. The email is lost, but I think I recall the sentiment: I was upset at Ortiz for cheating. He did something to gain an advantage that was, while possibly not necessarily outlawed by any rule at the time, against the spirit of the game. And I felt cheated, too.
Baseball is a game that loves history, loves its glorious past. Loves the mythical heroes of summer’s gone and the sacred numbers they put up. We commit them to memory. The home run chase in 1998, when 61* was topped by 70 and 66, had already been tainted by steroids.
I was able to see something so many did not. But this moment was also achieved through nefarious means? Shame on him.
Whether his decision to use a drug to artificially increase his prowess was driven by financial greed, hubris, ego, personal competitive verve, the desire to win, or something he did begrudgingly against his better judgment because everyone else was doing it, is irrelevant.
He did something he should not have done to gain an advantage, to recover from the grind of a 162 game season faster, to play better, to win games, to win pennants, to finally end a mythical curse named for a guy born on the second floor of the house at 216 Emory St. in Baltimore.
First, steroids killed baseball’s holy numbers. Then Ortiz (and Rameriez) tainted the curse-breakers, too.
At least, that’s how I felt in 2009.
Each time Ortiz stepped to the plate, as his name was announced, I stood up, and silently held up my sign, making sure I sat down before he stepped into the batter’s box to not block the game.
The Red Sox fans seated around us were displeased with me. The man directly behind me threatened to have me thrown out of Oriole Park. My father told him to shut up.
Ortiz came to the plate six times. We took no pictures of the occasion. After the game, I didn’t find any evidence my accusation was documented. That was the end of it.
Years later, I saw the image hold the screen for a few seconds in the final minutes of Ken Burns’ “Baseball: The Tenth Inning.” There I was, there was my dad, there were my brothers. But Ortiz was cropped out.
They could have ended baseball forever after the Red Sox won in 2004. Sure, the Cubs streak was longer and still ongoing, but they had never gotten as close so many times only to fail in an excruciating fashion. Boston winning was like seeing Sisyphus at the summit.
I didn’t realize it until now, but that World Series was the last great collective moment in baseball history.
The Curse of the Bambino was vanquished and the sport of the 20th century relinquished the spotlight. The final curtain call for America’s pastime.
In 2005, Major League Baseball banned steroids. Human growth hormone was banned in 2011. Manny Ramirez was suspended in 2009 for 50-games. And handed a 100-game ban in 2011 after a second positive test. Alex Rodriguez was banned for a season, missing 211 games from 2013-14.
Ortiz declared his innocence in 2009 and through his retirement in 2016. He was never suspended for use of any banned substance. And before the final regular-season game of his career, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred suggested it was possible Ortiz was innocent.
Manfred said those particular tests in 2003 were inconclusive because “it was hard to distinguish between certain substances that were legal, available over the counter, and not banned under our program.”
Steroid’s biggest impact was not on-field suspensions, but how we look at the recent past and who gets into the Hall of Fame. Baseball writers, the gatekeepers of Cooperstown, have punished almost anybody with any suspected link. Bonds, Sosa, and Roger Clemens were all kept out on their first ballot in 2013 despite their overwhelming on-field bona fides.
For Ortiz, Manfred said it would be wrong for voters to let “leaks, rumors, innuendo, not confirmed positive test results” keep him out of the Hall.
This year, was the final time Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa would appear on the writer’s ballots. They all fell short of the 75% threshold: Sosa (18.5%), Clemens (65.2%), and Bonds (66%). As did Ramirez (28.9%) and Rodriguez (34.3%).
Ortiz was elected in his first year of eligibility with 77.9%.
Yes, the steroid scandal crushed baseball’s post-1994 strike momentum built from Ripken’s streak and the home run chase. But the steroid fallout likely played a smaller role in the decline in the game’s popularity than many think.
Our tastes, the pace at which we live our lives, and the game’s pace of play have hurt the sport more than any scandal. Baseball, the sport of the radio age, survived the television era and weathered the storm of the start of the internet age. But it seems the social media age is a much tougher foe.
The Hall of Fame, the arguments, the outrage, and the anger have faded into the periphery of America’s sporting landscape, too.
In the end, for one game I made an accusation. And the evidence of that protest, the look of disapproval hung on my face, was recorded in the history of the game.
I was one of the cranks attempting to protect the sanctity of something that for its entire lifespan has been polluted by eras of impurity.
I feel a tinge of embarrassment seeing the picture now. I was a sanctimonious 17-year-old sitting in the expensive seats with a sign asking people to look at him.
I feel a tinge of shame in seeing the picture now, too. Did I wrongfully impugn the character of an innocent designated hitter?
Truthfully, I have no idea if Ortiz cheated. Or if he played in an era of the league that was on the level, either. We will, likely, never know the answer to either question.
The Red Sox beat the Orioles 18-10 that day in Aug. 2009. We stayed for the entire game. All 54 outs. Ortiz came up three times with the bases loaded and his best result was an RBI walk in the 4th inning, the plate appearance captured in the picture.
He finished the day 0-5.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives in New York.