Pedro Martinez is among those who wishes David Ortiz had stuck around for one more season.
Martinez admitted Friday on WEEI’s “Ordway, Merloni and Fauria” that he tried to convince Ortiz not to retire following a very productive 2016 campaign for the Boston Red Sox designated hitter. As far as Martinez is concerned, the organization would have benefited greatly from one more year of Big Papi.
“I’ve been trying so hard to get David back and help out these kids,” Martinez said, per WEEI.com. “I thought they needed one more year to kind of realize what they have to do. But you can’t blame David, either. You go through the struggles of baseball, the day-to-day — the stuff that you have to do — it gets to a point where you just get tired. You just get tired of the same routine, and all of that.”
The Red Sox’s roster is loaded with good young talent. Players like Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi, Xander Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley Jr. give Boston plenty of reason to believe the team will be competitive for the foreseeable future.
It’s still relatively early in those players’ careers, though. There inevitably are going to be some ups and downs, and the downs might be more pronounced this season than they otherwise would have been with Ortiz in the mix.
“Those guys are at a level where they’re good, they’re going to perform, but they need to realize why they perform,” Martinez said, per WEEI.com. “That’s what David was probably going to be able to relay in one more year. One more year of experience around those kids would be exactly leaving those kids graduated from college. They needed one more year to graduate.”
Now, it’s up to the Red Sox’s young stars to graduate on their own, though evidently not without a last-ditch effort by Martinez to coax Ortiz out of retirement.
Thumbnail photo via Bob DeChiara/USA TODAY Sports Images
