Even after David Ortiz crushed a lot of baseballs in the first several games of the 2016 season, he laughed off the idea that he might change his mind about retirement. Maybe, Ortiz joked, he could return under the same circumstances that pitcher Roger Clemens had with the Houston Astros, playing mostly just home games.
His strong early-season performance has continued through Saturday, when he hit his 513th homer, a game-tying triple in the ninth inning and a walk-off double. With about a quarter of the 2016 schedule in the books, the 40-year-old Ortiz is hitting .320, with 10 homers and 33 RBIs. He is on a pace to hit 70 doubles, 4 triples and 44 home runs, and drive in 144 runs, in the midst of a young and dynamic group of Boston hitters that have been prolific so far.
He'd be crazy to at least not think about the idea of deferring his retirement through the end of the 2017 season, and now is the time to mull this over.
Look, it's Ortiz's prerogative to change his mind anytime he wants. If he hit like this the rest of the year and decided on the eve of Opening Day next spring that he wants to return, you know the Red Sox would happily take that phone call. You don't say no to a Hall of Famer. If he waited until then, or until the winter, there would be some impatient media folks bleating about his indecisiveness (as was the case with Brett Favre's flip-flopping), which would mostly be shouted down once he stepped back into the batter's box at Fenway Park.
But teams are scheduling goodbye ceremonies for Ortiz, and given Big Papi's stature in Boston, the city will probably all but shut down for the final days of his career. Heck, the Red Sox provided elaborate sendoffs for Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter -- and those guys were Yankees. Jake Peavy bought a duck boat after the 2013 World Series parade; Ortiz might be presented a fleet of duck boats, and Bunker Hill and Beacon Hill, for that matter.
So if Ortiz has any nagging thought about playing in 2017, it probably would be best to explore that now and, if he has a change of heart, announce that choice in the month ahead.