The End Is Never Right, It Just Is: So Long, David Ortiz

The Natural—the movie, not the book—promotes a terrible lie. Baseball games mostly don't end with the big walk-off home run, hit by the player you'd most expect and most want to hit it. Even if that kind of special moment happened more often—and it would become less special with each repetition, not to mention do some damage to our conception of the closer—there is no freeze-framing that catharsis and rolling the credits. We don't get credits. Things just go on.

On Monday, the Red Sox were swept out of the American League Division Series by Cleveland, ending both their 2016 season and David Ortiz's career. It seems all too sudden, bringing to mind Pancho Villa's supposed last words, "Don't let it end like this—tell them I said something." Yet, this was the most honest ending Ortiz could have had, even if it's not the one we might have wanted. There is no easy or right way to stop, and there's no negotiating with the end when it's time.

Think of Babe Ruth in 1935: Fat, depressed, sick, struggling on a dead-end team. On May 25, he hit three home runs in Pittsburgh. Though he knew he should have walked into the sunset right then and there, he carried on for five more fruitless days, then picked a meaningless fight with ownership so he'd have an excuse to quit. "The termites have got me," he said to a former teammate during the last weeks of his life, shot through with cancer and regret. The big home run, or any home run, was so very far away.

Ortiz didn't get to circle the bases over rolling credits, either. He went 1-for-9 in the three games against Cleveland, and when it all ended, he was looking on helplessly from the dugout. Even if his spot had come up, he wasn't going to be able to contribute; he had already been replaced for a pinch-runner in the previous inning. Ortiz has 17 home runs in 84 postseason games, which is one homer every 18 at-bats; that's actually a little worse than his regular season average, but more than enough to imagine that he was probably good for one more big moment if the Red Sox could have stayed alive long enough. They couldn't, and regardless of rooting interest, if you appreciate history, sentimentality, or poetry, this was a painful way for a great career to close, especially when Ortiz had been so good this year.

Having accomplished his historic mission to be one of the agents who ended Boston's long championship drought, and now having decided he can no longer be a part of the story going forward, Ortiz now yields his place. October is now about Cleveland—which has been waiting since 1948, when they beat the Red Sox to advance to the World Series in a then-unusual one-game playoff—or it's about the Cubs, who have been standing by since before the Titanic's keel was laid. Or it's about something we don't know yet. There's always another story coming.

So Ortiz leaves the game after the best farewell season not by Shoeless Joe Jackson, another guy who had no control over the timing of his exit. He will remain the subject of what is already a raging Hall of Fame argument centered around the value of a career designated hitter—it's an official position that allowed Ortiz to have had more value than he would have had otherwise, and, yes, Edgar Martinez should go first, but the argument will go on anyway—and the question of a never-verified failed steroids test. We can only hope that the commissioner's recent statement on the questionability of those results, whatever they were, will put to rest questions about the veracity of a player who had his best years under the current testing protocol and never once failed.

Now Ortiz will recede. For most fans, baseball is about today, about this year's team. Ortiz will always be beloved in Boston, but as of today the focus will be on how the Red Sox will do next year. Ortiz will have nothing to do with that, as Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice will have nothing to do with it. At some point he'll likely be turned into a plaque in Cooperstown, and then he really will belong to the ages. Nothing makes a player seem like ancient history like putting them in the Hall of Fame. How it all ended, the fine points and little disappointments, will fade to bronze.

Soon enough, no one will care how the 2016 Red Sox' season ended. Here's what we'll remember, even Yankees fans: A guy the Minnesota Twins didn't want hitting 541 home runs. A player with enough personality to get his own affectionately rendered Saturday Night Live character. A man who, though not born in the United States, chose to become an American citizen, and on April 20, 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, rallied an entire city. You can never tell where the next great ballplayer will come from, or the next great citizen. It could be anywhere. Ortiz proves that.

Big body. Big smile. Big blasts. Big Papi. He may have played for Boston, but in time we'll see he was on everyone's side. Time is cruel to ballplayers trying to finish with a flourish, but it's generous to us that way.