David Ortiz Feels Pain Just From Walking, Happy With Decision To Retire After 2016
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- At age 40, in what's been announced as the final season of his career, David Ortiz has been one of the best hitters in baseball through nearly two months of the 2016 season. It's led to many folks questioning why he's so eager to walk away from a game which he still dominates.
When pressed for an answer, Ortiz explained that it's the actual act of walking that's playing the biggest role.
Ortiz spoke with Yahoo's Jeff Passan about where he's at in his career, and according to Passan, "it hurts Ortiz just to walk."
Passan also added, "His feet feel like giant stones with cracks fissuring through them. The rest of his body works well enough, responds to treatment. His feet, though. They're why he's retiring. They're what vex him."
Passan's an excellent writer, but he tends to lean on the hyperbolic at times. (Lord, he does.) So, leaving the fissured stones aside, here's what Ortiz said on the record about his feet.
"Your body, man. Your body tells you. My body, man. My body's pretty beat up," Ortiz told Passan. "Remember, if you look at guys my size, they don't last. I noticed that seven or eight years ago. That's why I needed to start doing things right. I lost 25 pounds. I started eating better, do things better. But let me tell you: It's not easy, man."
Ortiz said the grind of the travel schedule as well as the need to work out every day weigh on him the most, and that ultimately, "I'm good with the decision that I'm making because I've been thinking about it for a while."
Yet, at the end of the piece, Ortiz seemed to be letting the world (well, really just the Red Sox front office) what it might cost to entice him to spend 2017 going through the grind one more time.
"Hopefully, nobody comes to me and offers $25 million," Ortiz, who's making $16 million this season, told Passan. "I'm good with the decision that I made right now, but would you leave $25 million on the table? I don't want nobody to offer me that."
It kind of sounds like he does, foot pain be damned.
Check out the full story on Yahoo, if for no other reason than to learn that David Ortiz reads Internet comments.