I have a special treat for all you Boston Red Sox fans out there in the greatest nation in the world, Red Sox Nation. I was asked by the fine people at Holtzbrinck Publishers to take a look at and review David “Big Papi” Ortiz’s new book entitled, ‘Big Papi: My Story of Big Dreams and Big Hits’ which he wrote with Tony Massarotti. The book will be hitting bookstores in approximately 2 weeks on April 17th and can be bought at bookstores nationwide or preordered at Amazon.com. There is even a Spanish version as well.

Once I get my copy of the book, I will be reading and reviewing it here on the site. I also hope to be able to get a few extra copies to give away. I won’t know that until they ship my book out. If I do receive the books, I will be giving them away on our radio show, The Hits Keep Coming…, on a future episode. We would probably do some type of Big Papi trivia contest and the winner would receive a copy of the book. I will have more on this once I know if this will be possible.

So for the next three days, we will be taking a look at excerpts from the book. If you would like to read part 2, click the more button below. To see part 1, you can click here.

The team—I think we’re going to better this year, too. We had a lot of changes last year,
a lot of new players, and we had a lot of injuries, too. We had a lot of guys who were
playing in Boston for the very first time, and some of those guys had never played in the
American League before. It takes a little while to come over to a new league, like those
guys did, and to learn the pitchers, make adjustments, get used to everything. I know
because I’ve played my whole career in the American League and it still happens with
me. Every year, there are new guys in the league and new pitchers to learn, things like
that. But the longer you’re around, the more you know and the less you have to learn, and
the easier it all gets.

Look at someone like Mike Lowell, bro. He’s a smart dude who’s been around awhile,
but he never really played in the American League before 2006. He hit .280 with 20
home runs and 80 RBIs last season—which is a good year—and I bet you he’ll be even
better this year. I feel the same way about our young pitchers, guys like Jonathan
Papelbon and Josh Beckett. Papelbon is nasty, bro, and he’s been nasty since the day he
got to the big leagues. How much better can that kid get? I remember once when we were
in Toronto in 2005, the dude pitched three innings in relief and he didn’t give up a hit or a
run. It was a game we had to win. It was late in the year and we were trying to make the
playoffs, and we were having all kinds of problems with the bullpen. The kid came into
the game—he was a rookie, bro—and it was like he’d been pitching in the big leagues his
whole life. I remember the game because I hit a home run in the eleventh inning and we
won, 6–5—it was my second homer of the game—and Pap got his first major-league win.
I remember the reporters coming up to me after the game and asking me about him, and I
remember telling them that Pap reminded me of Roger Clemens. And he does, bro. As
long as that kid stays healthy, he’s going to do great things.

I only wish I had that kind of confidence when I was a rookie.

Beckett, too, dude. You just watch. He’s got great shit. He won sixteen games for us last
year and he’s only going to get better. He’s only six months older than Papelbon, I think.
He’s still learning. Beckett pitched his whole career in the National League before
coming to the Red Sox, so he didn’t know the hitters or know the league, and the whole
season was a learning experience for him. The American League is tough, bro. It’s a lot
different than the National League. You’ve got big dudes like me in the middle of the
lineup and you can’t make mistakes over here. It’s just different. A pitcher can get to the
end of the lineup in the National League and he can pitch around guys, save pitches, do
things like that because the other pitcher is coming to bat. But you can’t do that kind of
stuff in the American League, and it takes time to learn.

You have to have patience with people, bro.

Trust me.

I’m proof.

Even though we missed the playoffs last year, let me tell you: We didn’t have a terrible
year. We had a lot of injuries, especially late in the year, and we have a lot of talent. One
of the good things about playing in a place like Boston is we’re always going to have
talent, no matter what, and that’s a big difference from a place like Minnesota, where I
played the first four or five years of my career. In Boston, we have to compete against the
New York Yankees every year and we know the Yankees are going to be good, too. Our
owners and our general manager make changes every year—they’ve made some since the
end of last season—and they’re always trying to make us better. After the end of last
season, they went out and invested a lot of money to improve our team. They spent more
than $100 million just to get Daisuke Matsuzaka, a pitcher from Japan who should be a
big help to our staff for years to come. Our front-office people have hard jobs, bro, but
we have to have confidence in them, too.

Making the playoffs is something we want to do every year, but even when you miss the
postseason, October can still be valuable. You can make good use of the time off. The
baseball season is long and it can wear you down, and by the fall of 2006 we had been to
the playoffs three years in a row. In 2004, when we won the World Series, the off-season
was like one big party. Wherever we went, everybody wanted to talk about the Red Sox.
It seemed like there was always someplace to go, somewhere to celebrate, and I think we
all felt that way going into spring training and into the early part of 2005. It was like the
season never ended. And then we made the playoffs again in 2005, and even though we
got swept by the Chicago White Sox in the first round, it was like spring training came
fast. We had the World Baseball Classic and then the season started, and then all of a
sudden we were right back there in August and September again, trying to make the
playoffs.

Last winter, finally, I think we all got to catch our breath, get some rest, prepare for the
season like we really wanted to. And because the Yankees kicked our asses a little bit,
because they beat us by eleven games and we missed the playoffs and finished in third
place, maybe that was a good wake-up call for us. Nothing ever comes easy. You have to
work for everything you get because your competition is working, too. You have to work
hard just to keep up and you have to work harder to get better, or we all know what’s
going to happen.

You’re going to get beat.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to lose.

Copyright © 2007 by David Ortiz with Tony Massarotti. All rights reserved.