Mookie Betts sends love to “big bro” David Ortiz, a painful reminder of trade

The tributes and congratulations keep been rolling in for David Ortiz, the Boston Red Sox legend who will be the sole BBWAA inductee to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022.

On Tuesday night, Mookie Betts, the homegrown star famously traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a Babe Ruth-esque stunner, was one of many current and former MLB stars who sent messages to Ortiz:

Ortiz was already a veteran when Betts made his big-league debut with the Sox in 2014. He’d already been an All-Star nine times in the ten seasons prior, finished in the top-five in AL MVP voting every year from 2003-07, won six Silver Slugger awards (including four consecutively), and led Boston to three championships in a decade.

The rookie Betts and Ortiz overlapped for three seasons and one short-lived postseason run in 2016, Ortiz’s final season. That year, they went to the All-Star Game and won Silver Sluggers together; Betts’ firsts were Ortiz’s lasts.

Red Sox: Mooke Betts congratulates David Ortiz

In 2017, on the first Ortiz-less Sox team since 2002, Betts was the one who led the team in home runs. The following season, he led the Red Sox to their first World Series championship without Ortiz since 1918.

For Players’ Weekend 2019, Betts wore custom cleats to pay tribute to Ortiz, who was recovering from multiple surgeries after being gunned down in the Dominican Republic earlier that summer.

Betts is one of several former teammates who maintain that Ortiz made them better hitters, which made it all the more painful when the Sox traded the right-fielder to the Los Angeles Dodgers ahead of the 2020 season. He was supposed to be a Red Sox lifer like Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and Dustin Pedroia.

Ortiz made it a habit to mentor younger players as they joined him on the Sox. So when the longtime DH retired at the end of 2016, the Red Sox didn’t even wait a full year before signing Ortiz to a lifetime contract of sorts, with an emphasis on him mentoring players. His impact as a mentor is incalculable.

Ortiz’s legacy will be enshrined in Cooperstown, but in players like Betts, it lives on at ballparks everywhere.