His place in baseball lore was cemented in 2004, when he powered the Red Sox from an unprecedented 3-0 deficit against the New York Yankees to claim the American League Championship Series and eventually the World Series title, Boston’s first since 1918. Ortiz stuck around long enough to win three championships with the Red Sox, earning World Series MVP honors in 2013 when he banged 11 hits in 16 at-bats, including two home runs, and accrued a .760 on-base percentage in a six-game conquest of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Perhaps most notably, the vast majority of Ortiz’s best work came after Major League Baseball and the MLB Players’ Assn. agreed to drug testing with penalties, beginning with the 2005 season. Ortiz never failed an MLB-administered test; while the 2013 Biogenesis scandal revealed more than a dozen players received PEDs that evaded detection from tests, Ortiz’s publicly clean record seemed to buttress his case leading into his 2016 retirement – a season in which he led the majors with a 1.021 OPS.
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