Two people David Ortiz could kill, they made him so mad with their invasive, relentless suspicion of his PED usage: a Boston Globe columnist and the guy who showed up at the Red Sox star’s home in the Dominican Republic this winter, at 7:30 a.m., with a briefcase full of blood-drawing needles and piss cups.
Those two moments of rage are contained within a first-person essay Ortiz wrote this week for The Players’ Tribune, the website founded by Derek Jeter for athletes to self-publish and deliver their own spin to the masses.
Ortiz’s subject is the steroid chatter that has followed him since his breakout in Boston and only amplified after his name leaked in 2009 as one of the roughly 100 to test positive in a survey drug screening conducted by MLB in 2003.
Ortiz insists he is clean and always has been — “The only thing you’re going to find in my blood is rice and beans,” he joked to the early-morning tester — and blames a poorly classified supplement for getting popped the first time.
“To this day, nobody has any answers for me. Nobody can tell me what I supposedly tested positive for. They say they legally can’t, because the tests were never supposed to be public,” Ortiz said.
“I’m no bulls—ter. I never knowingly took any steroids. If I tested positive for anything, it was for something in pills I bought at the damn mall.”
The demonstrative DH claims the all-time MLB record for clean urine samples, more than 80 since 2004, and attributes his spike in success (released by the Twins in 2002, ALCS MVP in 2004, 54 homers in 2006) to simple maturation.
Ortiz only suppresses the rage by thinking back to his youth. The 39-year-old multimillionaire writes he grew up in “the gutter,” in a home where his father abused his mother.
“I learned to play the game with my head and my heart and my balls,” he said.
That wasn’t enough for the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy, who is not named but instead referred to as “the reporter with the red jheri curl.” One day in 2013 the well-known columnist pushed Ortiz’s buttons with a series of PED generalizations: “You’re from the Dominican. You’re older. You fit the profile of a steroid user. Don’t you think you’re a prime suspect?”
“I wanted to kill this guy,” Ortiz said.
Instead he asked for Shaughnessy’s address.
“I just got tested two days ago,” he retorted. “I’ll mail you the f—ing results.”