David Ortiz’s time as a Seattle Mariner

During Spring Training in 1996, the Seattle Mariners held a brief ceremony near home plate at Peoria Stadium to honor their farm system’s standouts from the previous summer. The club’s player development department had selected an MVP from each of the organization’s Minor League affiliates, and those productive prospects were to be awarded an engraved bat just before the big league ballclub played a Cactus League tilt.

Lou Piniella, who at that moment was the reigning American League Manager of the Year, was the one bequeathing the bats to the promising youngsters. And for at least one of those players — a 20-year-old power-hitting first baseman named David Arias — this interaction with the wizened and respected skipper was eagerly anticipated.

“I thought,” the man who would ultimately be known not as David Arias but David Ortiz says now, “I was gonna get an inspirational speech from him.”

Not quite, as Big Papi remembers it.

“Here,” Piniella said. “Congratulations.”

Ortiz, who all these years later will receive a much more meaningful honor with his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Saturday, howls in laughter at the memory.

“He just went out there,” Ortiz says, “and handed me the bat and said, ‘Here. Congratulations.’ Next! I couldn’t believe it.”

When we think of Ortiz’s origins, we tend to think more of his time with the Twins, who infamously released him in the winter prior to the 2003 season. The Red Sox pounced, and the rest is history. But the Mariners were the first team to sign Ortiz … and the first to let him go too soon. Like Piniella in that brief award ceremony, they didn’t savor the moment with a player who would become one of the great clutch sluggers of all-time.

That’s not totally indefensible, mind you.

The Mariners needed help for the 1996 postseason push, and they used Ortiz as the player to be named in a deal for third baseman Dave Hollins, who did help them (.916 OPS in 28 games), even if the playoff bid fell flat. Ortiz was raw and lean and many years from developing into a world-class designated hitter.

“We recognized that he was a prospect — and a good prospect,” recalls Larry Beinfest, then the Mariners’ Minor League director. “But it was still going to be a bit of a time before he made it.”

Regardless, every superhero story needs a foil. And Ortiz’s story happens to have two of them in the form of the Twins and the Mariners.

We’ve heard a lot…