Relive Big Papi's 2010 HR Derby win
Ian Browne
@IanMBrowneBOSTON -- David Ortiz spent an entire career swinging for the fences, whether it was batting practice or the actual game.
One of the most impressive power displays Big Papi ever put on was on July 12, 2010, when he won the Home Run Derby in Anaheim.
Believe it or not, it was the only Derby that Ortiz ever won.
The left-handed-hitting slugger smashed eight homers in the first round, 13 in the second and 11 more in the finals. The runner-up was his good friend Hanley Ramirez, with whom Ortiz would become teammates five years later.
“He loves to have fun," Ramirez said that night. "He's unbelievable. He's one of the best people I've ever met in my life. I know he's going to come back and do what he gets paid to do -- hit bombs. The most important thing tonight is that we were all rooting for each other. Nobody was rooting for himself. We had fun."
Though it’s hard to remember all these years later, the 2010 All-Star festivities represented a chance for Ortiz to bring his resurgence to a national level.
In 2009, Ortiz had what wound up as the worst of his 14 seasons with the Red Sox, hitting .238 with a .794 OPS and ordinary -- for him -- counting stats (28 homers, 99 RBIs).
And things weren’t any better when the 2010 season started, as Ortiz hit .143 with a homer and four RBIs in April and started platooning with Mike Lowell at DH while even getting pinch-hit for twice.
While some started to wonder at the time if Ortiz was about to go on a sharp decline, he regained his groove that May and never seemed to lose it for the rest of his career, which ended after the 2016 season.
The conquest at the Derby was a telling sign that Ortiz had regained his place among the best in the game.
“Not everything is roses and flowers," Ortiz said after the Derby. "You've got to deal with the downs so you can get up. You know, I've been a guy that I've been a force as long as I've been playing here with the Red Sox, and I've had a lot of ups, a lot more than downs, and as soon as I have a down, it seems like everybody is pointing at me like a Nintendo game or something that is supposed to be that easy. We have to work hard to get prepared to play the game and we have to do a lot of things to maintain ourselves -- myself -- at that level."