The Ode to Dustin Pedroia
“Couple of years ago, I had 60 at-bats, and I was hitting .170. Everyone was ready to kill me, too. What happened? Laser show. So, relax.”
And you say, just be here now
Forget about the past, your mask is wearing thin
Just let me throw one more dice
I know that I can win
I’m waiting for my real life to begin
This is the piece I never wanted to write, but the one I knew was imminent.
I could write about how angry I am with Manny Machado for orchestrating the spike slide into Dustin Pedroia’s knee that effectively ended his career. I could write about how frustrated I am that it seems like the majority of Red Sox Nation is now cheering the fact that Dustin Pedroia won’t occupy a roster spot anymore. I could write about how sad I feel that the Athlete of My Childhood and the man who will forever be my favorite baseball player is now retired from the game in the same year that Tom Brady stepped away from the Patriots, forcing me to reconcile with the fact that my childhood experience with sports has officially concluded, leaving the realm to the next generation and deploying tears throughout my eyes. But none of these would be doing the proper service to the career and the influence that Dustin Pedroia had and will always have. None of them properly celebrated all that he brought to the game of baseball, to the city of Boston, and to my life.
When I was nine years old, the Red Sox were largely directionless — and so was I. Coming off a 2006 season that saw Boston miss the playoffs despite being two years removed from the incredible, all-time 2004 postseason run and championship, the strategy for the team largely revolved around inking foreign phenom Daisuke Matsuzaka to a mega-contract. On the diamond, though, there was a hole in the infield.
Who could possibly take over the second baseman job from Mark Loretta? Who could ever end a platoon system at the position with Alex Cora? The answer was a five-foot-eight (when he stretched) motor mouth from California. His name was Dustin Pedroia and, at first, he hardly seemed like the type who’d be destined one day for the Red Sox Hall of Fame.
Following thirty-one games in a late season call-up in 2006 in which Pedroia slashed .191/.258/.303, the slump continued as Pedroia’s official rookie campaign sent fans clamoring for full-time reinstatement of Cora at the position. There didn’t really seem to be a plan for the Red Sox at second base aside from the simple, “Wait it out.” In a largely consistent 2007 season, the same was true of Terry Francona’s objective as manager of the club.
And the same was true of me. I mean, I was just nine years old. I didn’t need to have my life figured out, but there was still a tickle in the back of my mind that produced enough anxiety within me to make me doubt that. My career plans at the time? Play in the NBA for twenty seasons, spend my middle years at Walt Disney World, and retire to become a Santa Claus at the mall. I’m not entirely sure if I knew this career plan was impossible at the time, but there must have been some semblance of doubt. After all, I had little hope of growing past Pedroia’s self-proclaimed height. Professional basketball doesn’t favor the small.
I do remember the occasional resentment I felt towards being physically unable to play basketball, even though my heart wasn’t lacking. It felt unfair that other people got to be tall and were then allowed to go professional in the sport they loved, while I was doomed to have it as a hobby and nothing more.
I mean, the skill was beside the point. Sure, I could only dribble with one hand and I frequently forgot to follow through on my jumpshot. But I had heart, man. Why couldn’t that matter as much as field goal percentage and general awareness of the surroundings on a basketball court?
The answer is because heart alone doesn’t win basketball games. Heart alone doesn’t win any sort of sports match. There has to be some sort of skill involved. So even if I hadn’t consciously accepted that the NBA was not in my future when I was nine years old, I still knew — on some level — that I’d have to figure out some other career path. Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of time to do it.
With this knowledge in mind, I set about limiting my summer anxieties to just one impending problem: whichever day the first day of school was slated for. Instead of worry about what life would be like when I was double my age, I did my best canine impression and tried to live in the moment of each summer, especially that special 2007 season.
That summer was marked by plenty of cookouts at the homes of multiple family members, including one family in particular that loved to play sports whenever we came over to celebrate the latest patriotic holiday. Burgers and hot dogs were savored to the tune of Joe Castiglione calling the Red Sox game on the nearby radio, perched carefully on a plastic, white table that was meant for the outdoors.
After we ate, a few of us would shuttle over the driveway for pick-up games of basketball and over to the rest of the yard for position-less games of wiffleball. While listening to Castiglione call the pitches from Josh Beckett and the swings from David Ortiz, I’d pretend I was just like them, gripping a wiffleball as if it had seems and emulating the ferocious, intimidating stance that Big Papi embodied whenever he strode to the plate.
In one particular at-bat in wiffleball, the score long forgotten and the basepaths riddled with my sister’s flurry of misguided steal attempts, I took on the Ortiz stance and braced for the impending pitch. In my mind, the ball had already been sent sky high, deep into the woods that bordered the yard. Another slugged home run within the lineage of kids who wanted to be just like the game’s most clutch hitter.
Instead, when the pitch arrived, I swung in such a full-bodied demeanor that the momentum of the bat and my torso slipped my legs out from under me and deposited me flat on my stomach across home plate. In that moment, the insecurity of my alleged athletic prowess returned. I thought of my hometown recreational sports leagues, in which I was always the last kid called off the bench. I thought of all of my friends, who were infinitely more skilled at the games we played together than I was. I thought of the fact that the NBA was never going to happen for me. This swing, in that moment, was just another example of my inability to make simple context.
But instead of a roar of laughter, I heard, rather, a call from my uncle, who said, “That was just like Dustin Pedroia.”
“Who?” I asked him at the pitcher’s mound.
“Dustin Pedroia swung so hard last night that he fell right on his stomach,” he answered. “During the Red Sox game.”
I still hadn’t heard of Dustin Pedroia, but I nodded and smiled and returned to the plate. When the next pitch came, I forgot about the Ortiz stance and swung naturally, connecting for a dribbler down the first base line, which advanced the runner, but got me out pretty quickly after a prompt tag from my cousin.
I don’t recall the rest of the details from that game, but I do remember going home that night and using my allotted thirty minutes of “computer time” to explore Dustin Pedroia. At this point, he was tearing into the ball and raking (as he called it in his memoir, Born to Play) across the field. He had become the aforementioned “Laser Show” and was well on his way to dominating throughout the summer of 2007 en route to a Rookie of the Year campaign in the American League.
But I wasn’t struck by his killer stats, surprising power, and defensive prowess. I was struck by the fact that his ESPN profile labeled him as five-foot-eight. Taller than me, yes, but far shorter than any of his teammates or contemporaries.
That summer, I fully embraced the Boston Red Sox as my favorite team in the entire world of sports and it was largely because Dustin Pedroia became my favorite athlete in the world, too. He was everything I imagined an athlete could be. Someone with undeniable talent and baseball expertise, but who was driven mostly by heart. No matter what obstacle presented itself to Pedroia and said, “You can’t be a professional baseball player,” Pedroia would ignore it and, by little more than sheer force of will, conquer it. It seemed like Pedroia could say, “I want to be the best baseball player in history,” and no one could stop him because he had decided it and so it would be true.
Being a devout Dustin Pedroia fan (his posters still festoon my childhood bedroom, as well as this iconic Sports Illustrated cover) quickly proved delightful. In that 2007 season, Pedroia won Rookie of the Year and was a crucial piece of Boston’s second championship in four seasons. In the first game of the World Series against the Rockies, Pedroia hit a lead-off home run to start the eventual sweep. When he turned up to Coors Field for the third game of the Fall Classic and the security guard laughed at the idea that he played for the Sox, Pedroia replied simply, “Go ask Jeff Francis who the fuck I am.” (He may be little, but he packed plenty of fury and hatred within his California body, which housed a persona built for Boston or, perhaps, Denmark.)
In the next season, Pedroia went to the next level. He hit .326 and led the league in runs, hits, and doubles. The numbers and the overall levels of hustle (coupled with a 6.9 WAR and a .992 fielding percentage) led Pedroia to win the American League MVP Award, on the heels of his first All-Star appearance (of four), his first Gold Glove (of four), and his first and only Silver Slugger. The 2008 Sox didn’t win the title, but Pedroia had dominated the entire AL and, for me, that felt like enough as I raced home from the bus stop each day the trophies were announced and crowded the sports channel until the votes were unveiled.
In 2009, I got to see Pedroia play in person for the first time — at Camden Yards against the Orioles on the same weekend Billy Mays died. He didn’t necessarily light up the diamond, but my eyes were glued to him on every pitch when he was on defense at the second base hole. Before each pitch, he’d slowly creep up to the infield dirt and take a big hop before the hitter made contact (if he did), preparing him for any possible defensive result.
The ritual paid off. Ceaselessly. I’ve still not seen a better defensive second baseman than Pedroia in my life because he made astronomically insane plays like this look easy:
Or these:
Or this:
Or, hell, even on the basepaths:
It’s probably obvious that, in my Little League games, I took to the strategy instantly. No matter what position I played (unless it was catcher), I’d take a few steps and hop after every pitch. I was desperate to be just like him. Making the most incredible plays in the infield, never giving up when trying to be ruled safe at a base, giving every ounce of power possible into a swing, even if I fell flat on my chest. Pedroia embodied the exact kind of baseball player I always wanted to be.
And he never stopped being that. Not through the messy down seasons in the early 2010s and not when a brand new crop of teammates emerged to play by his side in the 2013 title run (this allowed him to grow a full-on disaster beard to fit in better, when we only recognized his bear hugs with Big Papi). Not when Boston overturned again and bid farewell to Ortiz in 2016, as the new guys (Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Andrew Benintendi) came into their own and prepared for their own run in 2018. Not even during that 2018 run when Pedroia was relegated to essentially a bench coach, his knee injury proving to be more of a liability than something he could play through.
And he didn’t stop being that in these past three baseball seasons when every possible setback was thrown at him to keep him off the diamond. These aren’t his Red Sox anymore. Hell, he’d probably hardly recognize anyone after this COVID-shortened campaign. But through every slice of advice provided to Rafael Devers or Joe Kelly and through every offseason text about going from the “outhouse” to the “penthouse,” Pedroia was still clearly a present member of the club. Maybe his career wasn’t Hall of Fame-bound anymore, but there was still the argument to be made that his number 15 belonged right up there alongside Ted Williams and his teammate, Big Papi. He never stopped being the player I fell in love with as a directionless kid who just wanted to believe that heart mattered in sports.
I was never good at sports; this much is true. Dustin Pedroia is vastly more talented than I could have ever hoped to be. But it’s not the numbers I think about now that Dustin Pedroia has finally called it a career, choosing his health over another run at playing once more. I think about the grit and the hustle and every other cliched term one could think of to describe a Boston “dirt dog.” But the cliches are cliches for a reason and no one embodied them better than Pedroia did over his too-short, fifteen-year career. Only Dustin motherfucking Pedroia would try like hell to come back from a knee injury that’s been undefeated in the history of sports — and very nearly defeat it. (Hell, he even managed to play a couple games on it, before succumbing to the injured list once more.)
When I was a kid, every at-bat in wiffleball games and every jumpshot in backyard basketball games was mired in the notion that no matter how much heart I had, it ultimately didn’t matter when I was faced with superior athletic talents. After that one cookout, though, when I tried to be like Papi and ended up on my stomach like Pedroia, sports changed for me. Pedroia was never the tallest or the fastest or the strongest or the most gifted. Some have even said that, despite being MVP in 2008, he was never the best.
But he was the player with the most heart. The unspoken captain of the Boston Red Sox. The man who took no shit and inspired me to do the same, leading through defense and defenses and backing up your shit talk with muddy chickens and laser shows. Dustin Pedroia won three titles with the Boston Red Sox, despite allegedly never being the “best,” as many proclaimed Mike Trout or Troy Tulowitzki or Joe Mauer or Ryan Braun to be. Heart alone doesn’t win baseball games. Unless you were Dustin Pedroia. Then, maybe (and only maybe) that extra force in the swing, that quick maneuver of sliding arm, that extra hop before a batter swung. Maybe they could be enough. Maybe if you were Dustin Pedroia, heart was always enough.
Thank you for everything, Dustin Pedroia. The game and the city will always be here if you feel compelled to come back — in any capacity. To show us what heart can do.
