Magglio Ordonez: a superstar in disguise: White Sox slugger rates among the most productive players in the majors, but still receives little recognition

Baseball Digest, July, 2003 by Bonnie DeSimone

SPRING 1999, FENWAY PARK, WHITE SOX AT RED SOX. TWO OUT, PROMISING young player on second. Promising young player bolts for third base, is caught stealing. Rally snuffed. Manager shakes head in dugout.

A moment later, Jerry Manuel took his talented right fielder into the tunnel where he could speak to him privately.

"I said, 'Magglio, you're an All-Star, and All-Stars don't make those kinds of mistakes,'" Manuel said. "I was really kind of hot at him. I don't know what it did, but he looked at me real strange."

Thing was, Magglio Ordonez hadn't made an All-Star team--yet.

"I remember that night," Ordonez said. "I needed someone to tell me that. Sometimes you need a push. Sometimes you need somebody to say you're this and you can make that. When they tell you that, you challenge yourself.

"I made All-Star that year. The game was in Boston, too."

That exchange from four years ago illustrates the essence of Ordonez, a self-starter who rarely needs someone else to turn the key in his ignition. His career has been a steady upward incline, a rising line drive of the kind he routinely smacks these days.

With near-numbing consistency, Ordonez has batted .300-plus, hit 30 or more home runs and driven in 100-plus runs for four straight seasons. His career-best numbers from last year: a .320 average, 189 hits, 38 home runs and 135 RBI.

He has been named to three All-Star teams since Manuel's prescient scolding, earned the respect of teammates and opponents, done everything, it seems, except become a celebrity. That's partly by choice and partly because the White Sox have made the playoffs just once during Ordonez's ascent, exiting in the divisional round in 2000.

Ordonez, 29, is a Clark Kent among ballplayers, an amiable, unassuming man who is transformed into something else by his uniform. Off the field, he is a product of his laid-back coastal hometown in Venezuela, a place where life is lived at a Caribbean tempo. At work, he is a resolute crusader.

Like the fictional Superman, Ordonez isn't crazy about being recognized when he's in civvies.

"I like my freedom," he said.

He is a known quantity in his native Venezuela and in Chicago, where Sox fans serenade him by chanting "Oh-ee-oh, Mag-lee-oh" to the familiar march from "The Wizard of Oz." But he can move around in Miami, his off-season home, and elsewhere relatively undisturbed.

"Because of his personality, it's probably the way he likes it," Manuel said. "I think he likes to be noticed, but I don't know if he likes the responsibility that goes along with all that stuff."

But that ambivalence doesn't diminish Ordonez's zeal to help lift the Sox to a division title and beyond.

"It's not enough for him to have these numbers at the end of the year and go home and say, 'Look at me, look at what I did,'" Sox general manager Ken Williams said. "He wants to do it on a championship team.

"He wants to win a batting title, and I think he's capable of it. He wants to drive in more runs, hit more home runs, but he wants to do it all in the team concept--which makes him a little different from some other players I won't mention. You don't see many fourth hitters in major league baseball who will try to hit a ball to the second baseman to move a runner from second to third with no outs."

Ordonez is notably dedicated to his conditioning, arriving earlier than most of his teammates most days, putting in extra time lifting and running. He worked out last off-season with fellow Miami resident Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers in the gym used by the University of Miami football team and hired a track coach to keep up with his speed work.

He is also the kind of person who puts stock in motivational words that might roll off someone else. "I call him 'the Philosopher,'" Manuel said. "He says these things that are a little different but have great meaning to him."

Cheerleading is not in Ordonez's nature, but he searched over the winter for a quiet gesture that would show his desire to lead by something other than example. He asked Sox conditioning coach Steve Odgers to help him design a T-shirt for the team to wear in spring training. Ordonez outlined the things he wanted to express, and Odgers came up with the wording.

The shirt bears this manifesto on its front:

Great teams possess great leaders

Leaders step up when opportunity and circumstance call

Get ready, your chance will come

Together: All of us are better than one of us

And these more specific marching orders on its back:

Chicago White Sox 2003

Championship Season

Commitment to Team

Commitment to Discipline

Commitment to Excellence

It's verbose, unlike the man himself. When Ordonez is asked to reveal his own heart's mantra, in his first language, he pauses before uttering one lyrical, multisyllabic word:

"Perseverancia."

Perseverance. "That's the most important," Ordonez said. "I was not really that good a player when I was in the minors. I was like everybody else. Nobody knew my name. And I did it. That's why I'm here, because I had discipline and I never gave up."