David Ortiz Doesn't Need Baseball Anymore

The best hitter in the American League is Mike Trout, who is 25 years old. The second-best hitter in the American League will turn 41 a few weeks after the World Series ends. He's a little bit rounder around the middle than he used to be, and as of last night he's finished with regular-season Major League Baseball. His name is David Ortiz, and he just doesn't need the game any more.

Not since 2007, when Barry Bonds and his .480 on-base percentage were pushed headfirst into baseball purgatory, has a superstar walked off the field with so much left to give. You probably have to go back to Ted Williams, and the .316/.451/.645 line he put up in 1960, to find one who did so willingly.

And before you read too much into the Bonds parallel, know this: every bit of available evidence suggests that Ortiz is going out on top—with a .315/.402/.620 line this year, not to mention 37 home runs—by playing the smartest baseball he's ever played, not by artificial means. "Watching him this year, it feels like he's reached a new level of mastery," said John Baker, a six-year big-league veteran. "Every at-bat that he takes is like a mini-game inside the game. He lives in rarefied air."

Much of that air these days is floating through the 2,500 or so cubic inches that make up the major-league strike zone. Ortiz has always been a patient hitter, especially since arriving in Boston from Minnesota, but this year he has taken his selective approach to a new level, refusing to swing at anything he doesn't feel he can crush.

"He knows exactly what he can drive and what he can't," a senior baseball ops executive for a rival club told VICE Sports last week. "He can recognize pitches on almost a personal level."

Pitch recognition is one of the hardest skills for hitters—even good, professional hitters—to master, and so there's probably something to the idea that Ortiz might still, in his 20th big-league season, be getting better at it. The only way to improve at differentiating between a big-league changeup and a big-league fastball is to see an awful lot of both, and get used to reacting to them.

Indeed, Ortiz's strikeout rate, which was just 13.5 percent this year, tells the story of a man who's achieved a sort of Zen-like self-awareness. He fully understands his strengths and weaknesses as a hitter, and his reaction times haven't yet slowed enough for his age to hold him back. "He's a hitter," said the same exec, "not just a slugger." Damn straight. More to the point, he's a hitter with the eyes of a 20-year-old, paired with experience hard-won from four busy decades on earth. It's a devastating combination.

Two statistics stand out. First, while his swing rate inside the zone is the same as it's ever been (choosy), Ortiz's contact rate inside the zone, at 91 percent, is the highest he has ever posted. Meanwhile, his hard-hit percentage (a measure of, uh, how often he hits the ball hard) is also at a career-high 46 percent. It's hard to fuck up all that much when you're smoking the ball half the time you connect, which is almost all the time. Taken together, these two numbers help explain why there's not much to the idea that any shady means are involved in Ortiz's success: where he's gotten better this year, you don't need steroids.

Part of the change springs from Ortiz's fearsome reputation at the plate. "From the moment that that music starts," Baker said, "when he kind of struts up to the plate, and you watch him get into the batter's box and tap the catcher's shin guard and say something to the umpire, he's kind of the game within the game itself."

Facing David Ortiz early in his career meant just facing some guy. Facing him now is facing David Ortiz.

And so pitchers have steadily thrown him less and less in the zone. Ortiz saw pitches in the zone at the lowest rate of his entire career this year, only 37 percent of the time. In order to survive, he had to evolve. And so he did.

So why walk away? It's difficult to say. Most big-league players are so wrapped up in the struggle and singular focus it takes to succeed at the game's highest level that they can't conceive of life outside of baseball. That's not a bad thing—that's just the way it is. They cling to the game until they can't play any more, and find themselves slowly fading away until, one cold spring, the phone finally falls silent.

"One of the things we try to teach players in instructional league is that there's a difference between 'I get to' and 'I have to' when it comes to baseball," said Baker, now an instructor and advisor with the Chicago Cubs. "When you play professional baseball, you get to play professional baseball. You don't have to do it. You get to do it. And if there comes a time where these guys who have been in the big leagues for a long time feel like it's something that they have to do, and they can recognize that feeling when it's happening and move away from it, well, more power to them."

Ortiz is playing free and easy now in his final season. After achieving basically everything anyone ever could want within the game—ten All-Star selections, four top-five MVP finishes, and three titles—he has nothing left to prove.

Part of the decision, too, has to do with Ortiz's children; he has two teenage daughters and a young son, and they're not getting any younger. "I'm a family guy," Ortiz told Sports Illustrated earlier this year. "I like to be with my family and do things with them, make sure everything is OK. My kids are growing. They pretty much are on their own right now. It's not the same as when they were three, four. You got to keep your eyes on them more closely now than when they were little kids. So I'm up to the challenge: Make sure that their life is straight too."

In some ways, the league's collective incredulity about Ortiz's decision to retire comes down to that fundamental conflict between what we expect will bring us happiness and what actually does. Most of us can't imagine walking away from the game, but Ortiz can imagine a life beyond baseball. In his outspokenness this season—on the role of Latin players in the game, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Donald Trump—he has shown an increasing willingness, even an eagerness, to move beyond the two-dimensional superstar status the world is so willing to offer him for the rest of his life and engage with the universe instead as a fully realized human being.

"[My character] matters to me more than any home runs I've hit. It may inspire some of the young players coming up to try to emulate the things I've done right," Ortiz told USA Today earlier this year, "If [my kids] ever get up here, I want people to say to them, 'I knew your dad, and he was a guy with huge power. But there was something better about him. He was a good person, a good guy.' That's what I care about the most."

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