Report: David Ortiz To Join Fox Studio Team For Baseball Playoffs
BOSTON (CBS) -- Red Sox fans will have to watch their first postseason in over a decade without David Ortiz in uniform. But fortunately, Big Papi is still going to grace TV screens - as a broadcaster.
Ortiz will join former major-league All-Star Keith Hernandez as Fox's newest analysts for their studio coverage during the baseball postseason, Newsday's Neil Best reported on Sunday. Ortiz and Hernandez are added to a crew that includes host Kevin Burkhardt and fellow former major-leaguers Alex Rodriguez and Frank Thomas.
The new role is the biggest for Hernandez in his career as an analyst, as the former Met has worked for SportsNet New York since 2006. But it is totally uncharted territory for Ortiz, who just retired at the end of 2016 after putting together arguably the best season of his career.
Ortiz may be wholly inexperienced as a TV analyst, but his personality and charm are beyond reproach. Red Sox fans and media are also used to Big Papi's brutal honesty when assessing himself and the Red Sox during his playing career, so perhaps that will translate well to the studio.
It will be a heck of an opportunity for Ortiz, who has the advantage of intimately knowing most of the players on the current Red Sox. If he can be as engaging as an analyst as he was as a player speaking to reporters, he may well have found the proverbial "second career".