Put David Ortiz in the Hall of Fame, and Then End the Pearl-Clutching About PEDs in Baseball

Big Papi's got more smoke wafting around his legacy than a lot of "disgraced" ex-MLB players. So what? The Hall of Fame is a popularity museum, not a church.

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It’s well-documented that I’m a morally repugnant Yankees fan, and thus shouldn’t be allowed to write about David Ortiz. 

And yet, I’ve written about Ortiz, the Boston Red Sox legend, the widely-beloved “Big Papi.”

In a notorious-in-New England 2016 column for The Week, I pointed out that despite the MLB and media-propagated myth of a selfless and humble cuddly teddy bear, Ortiz regularly exhibited on-field and in-clubhouse behavior that would be reviled in just about any other player. 

For example, I cited his violent temper, his routine whining about official scorers supposedly cheating him out of hits and runs batted in, and his tiresome martyr complex about both the media and his own contracts. 

Regarding the latter, Ortiz devoted a significant portion of his 2017 autobiography, “Papi,” to calling out ex-teammates *by name* who he thought were overpaid compared to him. He even disparaged ex-Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein for having the temerity to not hand him a blank check in free agency, and ex-Red Sox manager Terry Francona for briefly dropping him in the lineup after a two-month stretch where his batting average was below .160. 

This is the kind of stuff that usually isn’t great for a superstar’s reputation, but Ortiz has always gotten a pass. 

And there are some legit reasons for that! He’s very active in charity work, he’s popular with most players and reporters, and when he’s in a good mood he seems positively delightful. But when he goes bad, he goes real bad in a way that would earn him a far worse reputation were he not already sanctified as the lovable character, “Big Papi.”  

People are complicated, sure, but IMHO, Ortiz is both a generous, garrulous dude and a self-regarding crybaby. 

But those are other columns, already written. 

This column is about David Ortiz, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and whether or not Big Papi is worthy of induction. 

DRUM ROLL.

I believe Ortiz is worthy of Cooperstown. I would vote for him. Seriously. 

Misgivings about his public persona aside, Ortiz is unquestionably a transformative figure in the game’s history. And that’s why the Hall of Fame exists, after all.

The arguments for his candidacy have been well-documented, but I’ll document them again in the next section. 

The first of the two main arguments in opposition to Ortiz in the HOF is that he was essentially a career designated hitter. And while Edgar Martinez had to wait until his 10th and final year on the ballot to overcome anti-DH bias and earn his invitation to the Hall, Edgar played more than a quarter of his games at third base — the hot corner, the position occupied by the fewest Hall of Famers.  

Ortiz was never even a full-time first baseman—the position generally reserved for power-hitting leadfoots—he’s always been a DH. And thus, he’s the first career-long DH to be a legitimate candidate for the Hall of Fame. This is new.

The second argument against Ortiz pertains to the performance enhancing drug “suspicion” that’s clouded his career. A *lot* more on that in a subsequent section.

Each of the “anti” arguments is compelling. No North American professional sports league is more precious about its statistics, or more sanctimonious about its supposed “morals,” than Major League Baseball. 

But I’m a baseball fan first and foremost, and I also take a fairly “Big Hall” stance on the HOF. I wouldn’t have put a better-than-average-but-not-by-that-much DH like Harold Baines (jfc) into the Hall of Fame, but I also don’t think the HOF should be limited to just ten guys from 100 years ago. 

It’s a museum, a celebration of a game. Like fan fiction and wrap-up shows, it’s entertainment about entertainment.

Ortiz has a borderline case for the Hall just on his overall career numbers alone (and yes, Red Sox fans, it’s merely borderline). 

But if you count his peak seven-season period, his career postseason stats, his leadership role on three World Series champions, and his flair for the dramatic over nearly a decade and a half, it’s impossible to deny Ortiz’s impact on the game. 

That’s why I — Yankee fan scum — would vote for David Ortiz, were I lucky enough to be a voting member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. (Which I am not.) 

When the votes are finally made public, Big Papi is almost certainly getting in on his first ballot. I’m not going to lie and say I relish the inevitable sight of Ortiz donning one of those Hall of Fame jerseys.

But as a baseball fan I’ll hold onto the silly hope that the coronation of St. Papi will put a decisive end to three of the most tired, hypocritical, pearl-clutching tropes about the sanctity of Cooperstown.

These are:

1. “DHs aren’t real baseball players and shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame.”

2. “Players with plausible performance-enhancing drug (PED) ‘suspicion’ shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame.”

3. “The character clause is a very serious thing because it’s important to keep bad people out of the Hall of Fame.” 

They’re all ridiculous, archaic arguments, as I’ll demonstrate below. 

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

The case for Papi in Cooperstown

Let’s just keep this to bullet points, since it’s all fairly obvious.

- Ortiz was the de facto clubhouse leader and offensive force of three World Series championship-winning teams in a 10-season span.

- One of those teams was the Curse-breaking, history-making, 0-3 deficit overcoming, 2004 gang of “Idiots.” That they did “the impossible” against the hated Yankees was pure poetry, from a baseball fan perspective. No amount of personal Yankee-fan shame and rage can keep me from admitting such plain truths. However much I’d rather not relive that October, that was a historically historic Red Sox team, which gets Ortiz some extra Cooperstown credit. 

- in 85 career postseason games — roughly half of a full regular season — Ortiz had 17 home runs, 61 runs batted in, and a .404 on-base percentage. In three World Series, he batted .455 with an OBP of .576. That’s just insane. 

- “Clutch” is probably just a romantic mirage, but Ortiz undoubtedly had many “clutch” performances that are impossible to disentangle from the story of his career. 

- He’s arguably the most important Red Sox player since Ted Williams. And the Red Sox are one of MLB’s historic, seminal franchises. That, too, awards Ortiz a few more bonus points. 

-Yes, there are any number of criminally-overlooked players with overall career numbers and defensive contributions that far exceed Ortiz’s (I’m looking at you, Keith Hernandez and Willie Randolph). But it’s the Hall of FAME, and Ortiz is justifiably massively famous. 

So in my personal HOF value judgments, I’d vote for Ortiz, however filthy I’d feel doing so.

Designated hitter is a position, and DHs are real baseball players 

There are those who’d argue that a guy who played about 88% of his games as a designated hitter would need to have monstrous career numbers comparable to a HOF first baseman to be Cooperstown-worthy, and they’d have a point. 

And compared to the three HOFers best known as designated hitters, the knock on Ortiz as “just a hitter” gains more validity.

Edgar Martinez played about 70% of his games at DH, most of the rest were at 3B.

Frank Thomas played about 60% of his games at DH, the rest at 1B. 

Paul Molitor played a little less than 50% of his games at DH, and while he was mostly a 3B, at one point or another he played every other position on the field other than pitcher and catcher. 

Ortiz doesn’t blow any of these guys out of the water, statistically. 

Ok. So, he was never a position player. 

My feeling is: So what? Baseball is notoriously slow to accept evolution.

The one-inning reliever who pitches the 9th inning wasn’t a “position” in MLB until the late 1980s when Tony La Russa and Dennis Eckersley made it one. It worked out pretty well. Now they’re both in the Hall. 

Baseball purists have fully accepted the closer as a legitimate position, and several of them are already in the Hall of Fame. One of them, Mariano Rivera, is to date the *only* unanimously-voted Hall of Famer in history. 

So, like it or lump it: The DH is a real position. It shouldn’t be judged as an apples-to-apples equal to a position player, just as a reliever shouldn’t be judged as a starting pitcher. 

But if the DH is your obstacle to voting for Ortiz, I’d argue you should get over it.

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Performance-enhancing drug (PED) “suspicion” should no longer be a consideration for Hall of Fame voters. 

Here’s the tricky one. 

According to a New York Times report in 2009, David Ortiz was one of 104 names of failed drug tests on a list of the infamous 2003 PED survey.

By mutual agreement between the league and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), the results were supposed to remain 100% anonymous. The goal of the survey was to find out if more than 5% of MLB players were using banned substances. If that threshold was met on a test that the players *knew* was coming, real PED testing would be implemented in the league the following year.

Suffice to say, the threshold was met, and then some.

For years the survey test wasn’t much spoken of. 

But it came back in a big way when in February 2009, Alex Rodriguez’s inclusion on the 2003 list was leaked to a Sports Illustrated reporter. The source even shared which steroid he tested positive for. The always-unpopular A-Rod sheepishly admitted he cheated. He received no sympathy from the media or MLB over the fact that his failed test was made public through an illegal leaking of confidential drug test results. 

That summer, there was another leak of a few names on the 2003 list — this time it included Red Sox heroes Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz.

Manny was a Dodger at this point, and he had already gotten popped for failing a PED test earlier that year. The bloom was fully off the “Manny Being Manny” myth before this story dropped. 

But, Big Papi…no one wanted to believe this. And Ortiz took advantage of that sympathy: he stonewalled. 

In a press conference seated beside then-MLBPA president Michael Weiner (RIP), Ortiz mumbled about being “careless” in earlier days with his “supplements,” but denied taking steroids, and promised he’d get to the bottom of it. Then he basically did nothing, and the story went away. 

Meanwhile, Ortiz continued doing his thing, mashing balls and racking up the numbers. His 2013 World Series performance is the stuff of video games — batting .688 with two HR, six RBI, and eight walks over six games.

As he hinted that his career was winding down, Ortiz was still putting up dominating numbers that were once unthinkable for a player pushing the age of 40 (Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens being notable exceptions to that rule). 

Bizarrely, that’s right around the same time Ortiz started going off publicly about how wronged he had been by the media for reporting on his name’s inclusion on the 2003 PED list. (He didn’t give the media credit for essentially ignoring the story in the years since 2009.)

Ortiz in 2016 received a year-long MLB-wide tribute during what would be his final season. But he was only getting started on correcting the record. 

He claimed in a Players Tribune article that “nobody in MLB history has been tested for PEDs more than me” — and cited a number of tests that is either wildly exaggerated or an accidental admission that he was part of a MLB testing program for past offenders. 

Later, he’d declare in both his book and in interviews that he was the victim of a vast conspiracy that included the New York Yankees, The New York Times, and MLB itself. This was too much even for some Red Sox beat writers, who rarely can avoid being obsequious homers. 

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred came to Ortiz’s defense late in the 2016 season, saying there were “10 or 15 [names on the 2003 list] where there was probably, or possibly, a very legitimate explanation that did not involve the use of a banned substance.” 

That’s an incredibly lawyerly way for Manfred, a lawyer, to say Ortiz has about a 10-15% chance of being falsely impugned. Regardless, the commissioner said he hoped HOF voters wouldn’t hold the cloud of suspicion caused by the leaking of a few names on the 2003 list against Ortiz whenever his name came on the ballot. 

“What I do feel is unfair that in situations where it is leaks, rumors, innuendo, not confirmed positive-tests results, that is unfair to the players. I think that would be wrong,” Manfred said in 2016.

Notably, Manfred has never offered this defense for Sammy Sosa, who hit more than 600 HRs and was also implicated by the 2003 list, but who otherwise never tested positive for PEDs in his career. 

The difference between Manfred’s treatment of Ortiz and Sosa can be boiled down to one simple thing: popularity. Ortiz is beloved, Sosa’s an embarrassment. 

It’s cynical but, from MLB’s point of view, it’s a practical calculation. 

Sosa, along with the similarly PED-tainted Mark McGwire, mesmerized baseball fans with his home run heroics in the late 90s, when MLB was clawing its way out of the post-1994 strike malaise. But then Sosa’s popularity plummeted after he was caught using a corked bat in 2003, and his ignominious exit from the Chicago Cubs lost him the only true fanbase he ever had. 

Sosa also took a public beating after he refused to answer questions in English in a 2005 congressional hearing on steroids in baseball. (Is it really so outrageous for a non-native English speaker to use an interpreter when testifying under oath before Congress?) And then there’s the whole Michael Jackson cowboy look he’s adopted, which kinda creeped everybody out. 

But the only “hard” PED evidence against Sosa is the same evidence Manfred said should be totally disregarded when it comes to Ortiz. And yet, Manfred has never once said a word in Sosa’s defense, despite career numbers that are undoubtedly Hall of Fame-worthy.

So it’s all about popularity, not moral or intellectual consistency. 

But once again, who cares? 

Of course the Hall of Fame is a popularity contest. What it is not is an august, moral institution. It’s a theme park for crusty old baseball romantics. 

Nearly every athlete caught red-handed or implicated by PED connections says they accidentally took something. 

And it is entirely possible that Ortiz is THE ONLY INNOCENT MAN. The first and, thus far, only major athlete implicated in a PED scandal for whom the smoke does not indicate fire. 

Where Ortiz stands alone (other than say, Lance Armstrong) is that most of the accused don’t claim to be the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy, or accuse the fucking New York Times of attempting to frame one of the most popular athletes of a generation.

But for the sake of reasonable doubt, let’s throw the whole 2003 PED list out. Poof! Never happened. None of it. Not the “10 to 15%” chance of an oops result, not the illegal leak, not even the aftermath of stonewalling, contradictory storytelling, and insane counter-accusations.

That’s all stricken from the record. We still need to talk about his trainer.

Ortiz regularly worked out in the Dominican Republic with Angel Presinal, a trainer popular with MLB players, who also happens to have been banned from all MLB clubhouses since 2001 after getting caught at an airport ferrying steroids for an MLB player. 

Presinal’s clients have included numerous MLB stars who subsequently tested positive for PEDs or been otherwise implicated: including Alex Rodriguez, Bartolo Colon, Juan Gonzalez, and Robinson Cano.

Big Papi not only trained with the banned Presinal, he publicly defended him many years after the trainer was exiled by MLB. 

This alone is enough of a “connection” to steroids to keep most players off HOF voters’ ballots. Just ask Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza, who each waited a few years to be voted into the Hall based on little more than “innuendo” about alleged PED use.

If “PED suspicion” is an impediment on your Hall of Fame ballot, but you’d vote for Ortiz, you’d need to discount 1) His name appearing on the 2003 list of failed PED tests; 2) His long-time association with a reputed steroid trafficker; 3) His unhinged and nonsensical conspiracy theories positing that he was framed.

If you’re the type of fan (or Hall of Fame voter) for whom “suspicion” is enough to indict, then you really should not vote for Ortiz. But if you would vote for Ortiz, then really, you shouldn’t hold “PED suspicion” against anyone. 

Kenesaw Mountain Landis (Photo credit: Sporting News via Getty Images)

The character clause is a joke. Ignore it. 

Ultimately, who cares if Ortiz took steroids, or any banned substance? 

And for that matter, who cares if Curt Schilling is a racist, transphobic bigot when it comes to the Hall of Fame? The other problematic Red Sox hero on the ballot has all kinds of Cooperstown-worthy credentials, but his disgusting politics and repulsive personality will likely keep him out on his last year on the ballot.  

Schilling might be a garbage personality, but he’s a sad, bankrupt MAGA podcaster. He has no power within the game, or anywhere else really. He may not deserve celebration because he sucks as a person, but should his overall shittiness keep him out of the Hall of Fame if he’s otherwise worthy as a player?

On the other hand, figures including (but hardly limited to) former Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey and baseball’s first commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis conspired for years to keep Blacks and people of color out of baseball. These were men with power, who used that power to do bad things in baseball. They hurt people, they cheated fans, and they were bad for the game. And they’re Hall of Famers. 

If men like Yawkey and Landis are enshrined in Cooperstown, the character clause is meaningless. 

And let’s not forget Bud Selig, who in the 1980s as one of the worst owners in baseball illegally colluded with other owners against the players in a scheme to keep salaries artificially low. As commissioner, Selig willfully turned a blind eye to PED use for more than a decade. While presiding over the steroid-era’s massive power numbers, Selig made himself and his fellow owners even richer. 

Selig was the steroid-era’s architect and overseer, and he’s in Cooperstown because of the money that steroid-enhanced players made for the league. 

Meanwhile, the best players of their generation — Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens — remain exiled because of their reputed PED use. (Though the circumstantial evidence is strong against both of them, neither ever tested positive for PEDs). 

If steroids are so evil and wrong and disqualifying, then Selig shouldn’t be anywhere near the Hall. 

But if Selig’s in the Hall, Bonds and Clemens should be, as well. So, for that matter, should Ortiz. 

I’m a baseball fan, which means I appreciate the guys who play the game with skill, passion, and personality. And baseball being the most sentimental and myth-making of all the major North American team sports, I love a good narrative.

But let’s be real about this — if Ortiz gets elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, there’s no good reason to include “PED suspicion” among Hall of Fame voting considerations ever again.

So, put Big Papi in Cooperstown. And while you’re at it, ditch the anti-DH bias, the pearl-clutching over steroids, and the ridiculous notion that “character” counts in baseball.

Baseball is just entertainment, show business. Enjoy the show, and leave the moral posturing for the pulpit.