Papi will always be 'Big O' to ex-Twins mates

MINNEAPOLIS -- When David Ortiz goes into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he'll go in with the block "B" of the Boston Red Sox etched on the cap on his plaque in Cooperstown, of course. The baseball world knows him as the larger-than-life figure of "Big Papi," titan to those in New England and the Dominican Republic, hero in the vanquishing of a century-old curse.

But before he ever transcended the bounds of the baseball diamond to become Big Papi, he was a Minnesota Twin. And to those who occupied the home clubhouse in the Metrodome alongside the future legend in those early years, when he was still just a young twenty-something searching for a foothold, he'll never be Big Papi.

Around these parts, he was, still is, and always will be "Big O" to many, and "Davey" to some -- willing recipient of the clubhouse joke, master of the cookout, easy target in a card game, and the friend whose generosity still ends in old Twins teammates finding boxes of bourbon or cartons of cigars at their doorsteps.

"I don't look at him [as Big Papi]," said former Twins reliever LaTroy Hawkins. "I know he's [an] incredible hitter going to the Hall of Fame, but to me, he's like my friend. He's my boy. ... We don't look at him in the way that everybody else looks at him, like larger than life."

It's been two full decades since Ortiz was released by the Minnesota Twins, cast aside by the front office before he exploded with the Red Sox. All these years later, he still has a group text with many of his old Twins teammates -- Hawkins, Eddie Guardado, Tori Hunter, Justin Morneau, Corey Koskie, Michael Cuddyer and clubhouse manager Rod "Hot Rod" McCormick.

Needless to say, Ortiz's relationship with his time in Minnesota has always been complicated. But for his old teammates, none of the love from those forgotten years of Ortiz's career has faded. Nor has the uproarious laughter.

Even as a fresh-faced youngster bouncing between the Minors and Majors at the start of his career, they all say he was the same ol' Papi. Or perhaps it's that the burly slugger going into the Hall of Fame is still the same ol' kid.

"All the fame that he came upon, he just didn't change," former Twins reliever Guardado said. "He's the same guy. That's what I love. Same guy, same smile, same laughter.

There was a big core of young, boisterous guys in that clubhouse who naturally banded together -- Koskie, Hunter, A.J. Pierzynski, Jacque Jones, Matt Lawton, Hawkins and Guardado. Ortiz was young, boisterous and unfiltered -- the perfect kind of personality to mesh into that group, with the clubhouse focused on ensuring guys felt comfortable to be themselves so they could play at their best.

And from the start, the big smile and personality that became emblematic of Ortiz's career were always there. He was never out of his element. So what if his English wasn't the best? He'd laugh at himself when teammates pointed out his mistakes, he'd laugh at his teammates' Spanish, and he so frequently found himself in the middle of whatever else was generating laughter in the clubhouse.

"When he'd walk in a room, [there was] the joy that he brought us just because he was a clown," Hawkins said. "Everything he did was funny. He was a connector. He helped keep everything light in our clubhouse because he was always doing something funny."

Even the mundane became funny. Big league ballplayers in all clubhouses often whittle away the idle hours with games of cards. But perhaps you'd walk into the Twins' clubhouse during a card game those days and find bits of pulverized fruit scattered across the carpet.

That's because Ortiz and Guardado would play games of "high card" where the prize was for the winner to pick up a slab of watermelon and slap the loser across the face with it, as hard as he could, sending flecks of pulp and juice flying across the room as cackling rang out.

Or if they were feeling more feisty, they'd up the ante by taking half of a broken bat to smack each other on their bare backs as the penalty for a loss.

There were lots of games of poker. They'd play every flight, and often, those games would spill into a hotel room in whatever city the Twins were staying in that night. Whenever Ortiz was involved, they'd need to keep an eye out for the antics.

"I remember one time, we were playing 'Follow the queen,'" Koskie said. "Every time Big O would deal, magically, the last card that would come up would be the queen. He said, 'Man, easy. Ladies love me, man.'

"And then, one time, we had a big pot and it carried over to our rooms. Big O went under the table and he took a card from the bottom [of the deck] and he put the queen on top. We're like, 'Big O! What are you doing?' He's like, 'What are you talking about? Nothing! Nothing, man!' I said, 'Dude, it's a glass table! We can see what you're doing!'"

And there were the pranks, of course. Ortiz was far more frequently on the receiving end of these shenanigans than on the giving end, partly because he was less creative than the others, Koskie thinks, and also because, well, swift retribution would assuredly follow.

"I don't remember him doing anything to me, because he knew I would get him back three times worse," Guardado said.

Koskie can remember "nothing original" about what Ortiz did to him. He recounts a time when Ortiz stole his clothes out of his locker, put them in a bucket of water, and shoved the contraption into the freezer to harden into a solid block of garb-filled ice.

"Literally, people have been doing that since prehistoric times," Koskie said with a scoff.

The real fun came when Ortiz found himself the butt of the joke. That most literally came to be in the widely publicized peanut butter incident, of course.

It was a game during the 2002 season, Ortiz's final year in Minnesota. Koskie snuck around the clubhouse to Ortiz's locker, jar of chunky Skippy peanut butter in hand. He spread it around the inside of Big O's underwear -- and in a sign of the depth of thought behind the ploy, Koskie also cut holes into the big toe areas of both of Ortiz's socks as a decoy.

The clubhouse watched as he first commented on the socks, then continued to get dressed -- with no visible response. He put on the rest of his white Nike velvet suit, picked up his stuff, and started walking out of the clubhouse.

"I think he would have made it all the way to his car," Koskie said. "I had a visual of him sitting down in a hot car and just sitting all in that peanut butter."

It took Hunter calling out to Ortiz just before he got to the clubhouse door -- "Hey, Big O, how do you feel?" -- for Ortiz to realize that his teammates were staring at him. He paused. They could see the gears turning in his head as he processed the signals from the various nerve endings around his body.

Then, payoff.

"What the hell?" Ortiz roared as he dropped his pants.

Another time, Cristian Guzman got an idea while Ortiz was in a toilet stall. Unfortunately for Big O, he'd chosen a middle stall. Koskie and Guardado were quickly mobilized, with Koskie carrying a bucket of baby powder into one adjacent stall and Guardado sneaking a Gatorade cooler of water into the other.

You can guess what happened next.

"He comes out, and it looks like bread dough," Guardado said. "You know, how you mix flour and water together? Yeah, that's what it looked like all over."

Another incident Koskie highlighted happened after Ortiz went to the Red Sox. Koskie got a clubbie from the visitors' clubhouse to replace all of Ortiz's clothes with bright orange prison jumpsuits from the Lee County Sherriff's Department (that's the county in which both teams play their spring ball).

What Koskie remembers from that day is that when Ortiz rushed over to the Twins' clubhouse to confront them, he had first taken the time to put on one of the too-tight jumpsuits, the fabric straining against his considerable frame.

"That's what made it so fun with him, was because he would do that -- he put it on and you have fun with it, versus a guy who just get mad and would sit and pout," Koskie said. "He would play into the joke, and he just had a good sense of humor with that. That's kind of what made it fun with him -- he would follow through with it. And then you just have a blast with it."

For better or worse, Ortiz's time in Minnesota will always be remembered not for anything he did in a Twins uniform, but for how he was stripped of that uniform with his release following the 2002 season, likely one of the most significant franchise-altering decisions in Twins history.

Many of the Twins of that era and their families lived in a complex called Cedar Pointe in Minnetonka, a southwestern suburb of Minneapolis, and they wouldn't go their separate ways after Sunday home games. They'd all migrate from the Metrodome over to the garage at Big O's place, where they would put out chairs, play music and feast on the Dominican food that Ortiz -- a great cook -- would whip up.

The Twins and Red Sox both hold their Spring Training camps in Fort Myers, Fla., and come the spring after Ortiz signed with Boston, Guardado drove over to Ortiz's apartment, where Ortiz cooked some arroz con pollo (Dominican rice and chicken) for his friend, and they just ate and talked. Kind of like they used to -- but it was far more subdued, a reminder of what they'd lost.

"For me, I was sad, and I know for Torii and everybody else, they were sad to lose that piece, that person." Guardado remembers. I said, 'Hey, man, best of luck to you, man. You're always our boy.' You know? Things like that. I said, 'Go ahead and do your thing, man.' He went off. To watch what he did as a friend and a former teammate -- pretty special."

Big O took a chip on his shoulder to Boston. There, he built on those lessons to become Big Papi.

"It's just different stages of life that have happened to us," Koskie said. "You know, he's Big O. And then he moved on from us, and he grew up, and he became Big Papi."

The Twins won the AL Central again in '03 and '04, but they still haven't advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs since the run to the ALCS in '02. Johan Santana led that core to a victory in Game 1 of the '04 ALDS against the Yankees. They haven't won a playoff game since, an 18-game losing streak that stands as the longest ever in the men's "Big Four" professional sports.

Ortiz led a desperate Red Sox core and fanbase to a title in those same '04 playoffs. Then, again in '07 -- and once more in '13, for good measure.

"It would have been a great story if I would have kept him," said then-general manager Terry Ryan, who has repeatedly taken responsibility for the mistake over the years. "He was a good, good member of our organization for the amount of time he was here, and I just didn't follow through with the patience that I maybe showed some other players.

Here's the thing about revisionist history, though -- there are no "woulds" -- only "coulds." And that begs an important question.

"If he stayed here, would he be Big Papi?" Guardado wonders.

"He might have been," Ryan thinks. "The guy rose to the occasion in big at-bats, late in the game, with the crucial hit or the crucial home run. That's what he did over there. That's why he's going in the Hall of Fame. That might have happened in Minnesota. Eventually, players seem to rise to their ability level. If he did it in Boston, he probably would have done it in Minnesota."

Maybe he would have made a difference for the Twins in '03 or '04 or '06, thriving alongside the core of friends that defined his early years and that went on to define an era of Minnesota baseball. Maybe those big, career-defining postseason hits would have come for the team that first gave him a chance. Maybe he's still here, in Minneapolis, working as a special assistant in the Twins' front office or living in the Twin Cities like so many of those prominent figures.

Maybe not. Probably not, given how the Twins of that era operated. Minnesota wasn't Boston in the exposure or in the philosophy. They eventually let Hunter walk. They eventually traded Santana instead of extending him. It's safe to wonder if Ortiz would have had the chance to stick around, finish out his career and become the franchise-defining player he became in Boston.

But had it gone that way, the baseball world might never have come to know Big Papi.

Some within that world still haven't. To them, he'll always be Big O.

"We had a really good time," Hawkins said. "I wish we could have had more time together. It didn't work out that way, but happy for him, because he got an opportunity he probably wouldn't have gotten here. And we see how his career turned out.

"But he's the same damn David. He ain't changed."