In an interview with ESPN Boston, 38-year-old Red Sox slugger David Ortiz said he has no plans to leave the game with a retirement tour like the ones enjoyed by Mariano Rivera last season and Derek Jeter in this one:

“What Derek Jeter is doing is fine because he’s Derek Jeter. What Mariano did is fine because it’s Mariano,” he said. “But I don’t know if I’m going to go through all that. I’m not going to wake up and be like, ‘I’m going to play this year and then not anymore.’ To me, it’s going to be how things go through the season and how I feel, and then I’m going to be like, ‘Mama, it’s over.’ I’m going to let her know.”

The whole feature is well worth reading, and covers Ortiz’s thoughts on playing out the stretch on a disappointing club and his Hall of Fame case, plus more about his eventual retirement — whenever that comes.

Whether Ortiz will actually forgo the scheduled adulation that comes with a retirement tour remains to be seen, but good for him if he follows through. While the likes of Rivera, Jeter and Larry “Chipper” Jones — Hall of Famers all — certainly deserve praise for their careers, the retirement-tour trend is at serious risk of spiraling out of control and leaving opposing teams wondering how to usher out journeymen, randos and total scrubs.

Plus, if guys keep doing it, eventually someone’s going to make a comeback after a retirement tour and it’s going to be crazy awkward when he returns to all the parks that just gave him going-away gifts, like, “oh, hey, my bad, but thanks for the super-tacky cowboy boots, I totally wear ’em. Seriously.”

(Thanks to Hardball Talk for calling our attention to this story.)