David Ortiz doesn’t miss baseball because he’s having too much fun

MANHATTAN — The chandeliers that hang from the ceiling in the Gansevoort Hotel on Park Avenue match David Ortiz’s shirt. Both are very purple, but the color looks better on the retired slugger than it does in the gaudy lobby. Prince might as well have started designing this room and then given up halfway through the process.

It’s 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, and Ortiz has just emerged from the elevator after a day spent in one of the hotel’s soulless conference rooms answering reporters’ questions about his new book, Papi: My Story. He looks exhausted. At least that’s the vibe I get from his slumping shoulders; I can’t see his eyes because he has orange mirrored sunglasses on.

An entourage of suits surrounds Ortiz as he makes his way through the lobby and out the revolving doors, speaking rapid-fire Spanish into his phone. Fans are waiting for him outside, holding out baseballs and pens, yelling his name. His handlers guide him past outstretched arms and into a black SUV that’s waiting on the corner.

There’s some confusion as Ortiz’s whole team attempts to get into the car at the same time. When everyone is finally situated, Ortiz seems surprised to find me squished between him and a publicist. I wonder if anyone told him I’d be riding along with him to the Barnes & Noble in TriBeCa where he’s about to sign books for two hours.

Either they didn’t or he forgot, because he doesn’t seem thrilled to have to talk to one more person during what he probably thought was going to be 30-minute respite from his media tour. But here we are. He fields the first few questions I ask him about his first year of retirement with short, polite answers.

Then I tell him I’m from Boston.

“Oh, is that right?” His face lights up. At least he smiles big; I can’t see his eyes behind his glasses.

Yes, I tell him, and explain that we’ve met before. During the Red Sox’s AL Championship run in 2004, I was a student at a high school down the street from Fenway Park. I skipped soccer one afternoon in October to go down to Yawkey Way with a few friends. We spotted players coming out a back entrance, and I shouted Ortiz’s name through the chain-link fence. He came over, and I realized that while I’d brought a marker, I hadn’t brought anything for him to sign. In a moment of panic I took off my flip flop, shoved it under the fence, and asked him for his signature. He wrote his name on my shoe, and I walked back through Boston barefoot.

Ortiz cracks up.

“That’s probably the weirdest thing I’ve ever signed,” he says. “Though I’ve signed some weird stuff. One time this lady got me signing her leg because she said she was going to get a tattoo. And she did! She tattooed my autograph on her leg! She came back to me the following season and she was like, ‘Look.’”

It’s almost surprising to me that more people in Boston don’t have Ortiz’s signature on their legs. For Red Sox fans, Ortiz is frozen in time as the guy who helped break the Curse of the Bambino and then stuck around long enough to win two more World Series. He earned god status in New England.

Now, Ortiz spends most of his time filming commercials, promoting his book, teaching his 15-year-old daughter how to drive, planning a move to Miami so his kids can play baseball outside year round, and turning down party invites from his good friend Lil Wayne (retirement is busy).

Which brings me to the bad news, Sox fans: While you probably miss him at Fenway, he doesn’t really miss being there.

“My teammates and I go a long way back,” he says as we pull onto FDR Drive. “That’s one thing that I miss. That’s the only thing I miss about the game, hanging out with the boys. I played the game for so long that I basically am OK with not playing now.”

Ortiz’s laughs often; it starts with a booming “What?!” or one big “Ha!” and then fades into a low chuckle with a long tail, like a half-life of funniness. He completely cracks up telling me about his recent trip to the Kentucky Derby, where he had the first 11 a.m.-drink of his life (seriously, he swears). Apparently there’s this room near Millionaires Row that’s filled with bottles of fancy bourbon that blew his mind.

“The entry of the secret room is behind this one picture that’s right next to a giant door,” he says. “This lady did something tricky and the door just opened. Boom! I’m like, I need one of those in my house. They tell you before you go in that it’s all-you-can-drink in like five minutes. Everything is perfect in there. They let me stay a little longer because the lady was a fan.”

“Wait, they just put famous people in there and try to get you really drunk?” I ask.

“Yeah, famous people just go in!” He’s laughing again. “There’s no way you can go crazy drinking bourbon, though. Because a couple of them can get you tipsy. But I heard a story while I was there about Sylvester Stallone. He loved the room so much he didn’t wanna leave.”

“Is Sylvester Stallone still in the secret room?” I ask. “Did they just leave him there at the Kentucky Derby?”

Ortiz laughs harder.

“They had to kick him out with security and everything,” he says. “I was like, ‘No way!’”

Once Ortiz gets going, he doesn’t stop talking — he tells me not to give up on my dreams, that he can’t swim, that he and Daddy Yankee are close, and that it’s good I drink Dunkin’ Donuts (even though I think it’s kind of gross) because I “have to represent my city.” He tells me he’s glad he wrote the book so that he could address questions people ask him all the time — including what playing for Bobby Valentine was like for that disastrous year. He tells me that he doesn’t wear his World Series rings. In fact, he’s not totally sure where they are. He’s pretty sure they’re in a safe.

Do I know that World Series rings are smaller than Super Bowl rings? I don’t, so Ortiz tries to show me by gesturing to his huge, diamond-encrusted watch — which matches his massive diamond earring — to indicate the size of a football players’ rock. He adds that “his boy Brady” (Tom, that is) doesn’t wear his championship rings, either.

Speaking of his boys, Ortiz talked to another one, Isaiah (Thomas, that is), before the Celtics won Game 7 against the Wizards.

“Isaiah told me this,” Ortiz says. “He says, ‘Papi, I promise you we’re gonna win this. You can put it down: I promise you we gonna win it.”

“It’s hard being a Boston sports fan,” I say sarcastically.

“We know that Boston is a big city of sports,” Ortiz says. “Sports mean a lot to people over there. Boston always pulls the best out of you. That’s how I feel about Boston.”

But Boston doesn’t always give the best back. Fans at Fenway recently called Orioles outfielder Adam Jones the N-word and threw peanuts at him on the field. Ortiz stops laughing and shakes his head when I bring this up.

“Adam, that’s my boy, man,” he says. “Adam is a very, super nice guy. He’s very emotional, and you get a couple knuckleheads out there trying to be smart-asses, saying things they shouldn’t, and it’s frustrating.”

Ortiz says he never experienced racism when he played in Boston. Maybe that’s because he was Our Guy, a local hero. But he insists that “Boston ain’t like that,” and that most people there are “nice and humble.” He also knows, however, that these experiences other players have are very real and very upsetting.

“Now, you know, I had a couple players saying that’s how they feel when they come to Boston,” he says. “You know they have their reason to say it. I don’t see that in Boston — I never experienced anything like it, but on the other hand, planet Earth is jam-packed with stupid people.”

We’re pulling up to the bookstore now, where a line of people wearing No. 34 jerseys stretches down the block and around the corner from the entrance. Ortiz grins; he might be used to it, but this never gets old. We drive around to a loading dock entrance in an attempt to sneak the star in undetected, but one wily little kid somehow manages to sneak in behind the SUV.

Ortiz’s people start to shoo the boy away, but Ortiz tells him to come over. He takes a selfie with him.

One of the guys running the event is almost half Ortiz’s height. They look somewhat similar, so Ortiz starts calling him “Little Papi.” Little Papi and the rest of the entourage follow Big Papi as he swaggers through the underbelly of this New York City mall as though he were walking up to the plate to hit a grand slam.

We reach the door of the Barnes & Noble. Ortiz takes a deep breath, says he hopes his hand doesn’t cramp up, and enters the room to screams and applause.

Each fan approaches the signing table with a different story. Some thank him for their childhoods. One tells him he’s the reason her son got back into baseball after being diagnosed with type I diabetes, another tells him he inspired her in her fight against cancer. Some ask him to say hi to their parents on the phone. Some cry. At least three fans’ hands are shaking so badly as they try to snap selfies with him that they have to ask the person in line behind them to take the picture.

Many of them say things like, “Thank you for everything you did for Boston.” One guy comes up to the table and tells Ortiz he clerked for the judge who presided over the trial of the Boston Marathon bomber.

“Thank you for speaking for us,” the man says. Ortiz smiles and shakes his hand and tells him of course. An hour before in the car, Ortiz told me that he didn’t realize what he’d said — “This is our fucking city!” — until the clip of his speech at Fenway after the 2013 bombings went viral afterwards.

“I was like oh, ah, did I, ah, really say that?” He laughs again. “But I was angry, man. I can’t tell you right now, I was so mad.”

I watch Ortiz sign books for an hour and 45 minutes. Not once does he show signs of flagging. He’s still wearing his orange shades, but he’s so effervescent that it doesn’t ever seem strange: it’s just what he does. He’s especially happy to talk to little kids and people who come up to him speaking Spanish — “my man!” He spends extra time with a little girl in a wheelchair, with the cancer survivor, with a young man wearing a Dominican Republic World Baseball Classic shirt.

But he never gives less than all of his attention to anyone in line. He appears to understand that what might be one handshake in a million to him is the greatest grasp of someone else’s life. That a flip flop he forgot he signed 12 years ago becomes a prized possession. That even in retirement, he represents all of baseball and all of Boston to the people who love him.

Aside from playing baseball, this — being something bigger than himself, the beating heart inside the memory of a spectacular era — seems to be what Ortiz was born to do.

With a half hour left, one of the Barnes & Noble employees comes over to him.

“Do you want to stand up and stretch?” she asks. Ortiz looks at the line of people in front of him, each one clutching the picture of his face that graces the cover of Papi.

“No,” he says, reaching for the next book and readying his pen. “I’m good.”