David Ortiz Immortalized with a Lego Statue

Photo courtesy of Elevate Communications

In case you somehow missed it, David Ortiz is retiring this year. And the MLB has been celebrating the superstar’s upcoming bittersweet goodbye all over the country. He’s been gifted a whole fish in Seattle and a cowboy hat in Houston, reunited with Nomar in L.A., and even scored his own golf cart at home (not to mention we gave him a big shout-out on the BoMag cover). There have unfortunately been some, ahem, missteps.

But now we have one more way to celebrate the incomparable power of Big Papi: A life-size statue of the slugger made entirely out of Legos.

“It took 34,510 bricks and 290 hours to build the statue, which weighs 170 pounds, and stands at 6’7”, says Steve Saleeba, from the PR firm Elevate. “Lego Master Builder Erik Varszegi oversaw the construction of Lego Ortiz at the company’s North American headquarters in Enfield, Connecticut.”

The unexplained emergence of the statue on the field earlier this week had us curious about what, exactly, it was. Saleeba says the Sox stood the structure up at home plate Monday so Ortiz and his son D’Angelo could preview it.

It will be on display today at Fenway’s Kid’s Concourse for Lego Day.

Turns out it wasn’t the permanent bronze Big Papi that fans have been calling for. That’s a tribute for which Red Sox nation will have to wait another day.