Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (20 page)

In May 1988 a kid from Manoguayabo came to Campo Las Palmas for a tryout. He was so skinny he could have slipped through the iron bars of the entrance gate if he wished, maybe without turning sideways. Pedro Martinez was 16 years old, weighed 137 pounds and threw his fastball no better than 82 mph. The Dodgers knew him as the younger brother of Ramon, a rising pitching star in their organization who would make his big league debut later that year. “He wasn’t impressive to look at, physically,” says Eleodoro Arias, the academy’s pitching instructor. “But looking into the eyes of Pedro, I could see he had
el corazón
. Heart. Guts. I recommended he not be signed at the moment, but that we work with him, and with some added nourishment he could be signed.”

The Dodgers did sign him about four weeks and many meals later. Pedro turned over his bonus money to Ramon as a gesture of thanks for serving as his pitching mentor. It was Ramon who had taught him how to throw a curve and a changeup and counseled him on the tenets of pitching, such as, “Remember, in baseball you have no friends.” Teammates with the Dodgers in 1992 and ’93, the brothers Martinez were reunited late last season with the Red Sox after Ramon recovered from rotator cuff surgery. When Ramon presented Pedro with his second Cy Young Award at a dinner in Boston in January, Pedro said to his brother, “There is more of you in this trophy than there is of me.”

“It’s funny,” says Pedro, who gave his first Cy Young to Dominican pitching legend Juan Marichal, “I like to think I am a man who knows what I want. But to this day, no matter what I want to do, first I must have Ramon next to me to ask him what he thinks. I will always look up to him. That will never change.”

Pedro came to be known around the academy, where he spent 1988 and ’89, as Chichilito, a pet name for a child. He was, however, so ferociously driven to win that after games he had lost, even those in which he had pitched splendidly, Arias would find him alone, crying. “I thought Pedro could be somebody,” Arias says, “but I never thought Pedro would be as special as Pedro is now.”

Every good pitcher has a strikeout pitch, the kind that should be marked
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS
. The great pitchers have two. Martinez is the only one today who has three equally lethal options. He commands them with near-equal precision. Last year he threw 67% of his fastballs for strikes, 67% of his changeups for strikes and 62% of his curveballs for strikes.

What makes him all the more treacherous is that Martinez offers no clue as to what’s coming. Every pitch is thrown with his hand in the same release slot and with the same arm speed. What you think is a 97-mph heater leaving his fingertips may be an 83-mph curveball that can turn the bravest hitter’s knees into gelatin, or it may be a 77-mph changeup that breaks like a hyperactive screwball. The spin of each pitch has its own DNA, and you’d better be quick to decode it. The changeup is particularly perplexing. Martinez varies the speed and break of the pitch—he can make it wiggle six to eight inches, generally saving the biggest break for two-strike situations—by adjusting the pressure on the ball from his fingers. “It’s a Bugs Bunny changeup; it moves so much,” Saberhagen says. “Bugs Bunny is the only one with a changeup that can move like that, and he has the help of animators.”

It is Martinez’s fastball, though, that measures his growth as a pitcher. Five months after signing, in November 1988, Martinez was throwing 89 mph. Two months after that, he was clocked at 93. He attributes much of that gain to playing long toss, which he still regularly employs, in which he plays catch at distances up to 250 feet. “That’s his holy grail,” Kerrigan says.

In 1990 the Dodgers assigned him to their rookie league team in Great Falls, Mont. Great Falls advanced to a playoff series against Salt Lake City, an independent club stocked with older players, many of whom had played Double A ball. Martinez, scheduled to start Game 2, charted pitches in Game 1 from the stands next to Dodgers roving instructor Dave Wallace. “Tomorrow,” he promised Wallace, “I will take care of these guys.”

The next night the Salt Lake City leadoff batter dug his spikes confidently into the dirt as he stepped into the batter’s box. Little 18-year-old Chichilito whizzed his very first pitch past the hitter’s chin. Salt Lake City didn’t score that night. “Right then I thought he was something special,” Wallace says.

The Dodgers, though, never did give Martinez much of a chance. He made 67 appearances for them, all but three in relief, before L.A. traded him to the Expos after the 1993 season for second baseman Delino DeShields. The Dodgers had decided that someone that small who threw that hard could never hold up in the big leagues. Dodgers physician Frank Jobe, who the year before had performed an anterior capsolaral reconstruction on Martinez’s left shoulder, cautioned that his small frame left him injury-prone.

“Tommy Lasorda never told me, but he thought I couldn’t be a starter,” Martinez says of his Los Angeles manager. “He pitched me five days in a row out of the bullpen, but thought I’m not strong enough to pitch once every five days? That makes no sense.”

Martinez blossomed into a star in Montreal, going 55–33 in four years without missing a start for manager (and fellow Dominican) Felipe Alou, who believed in him as a starter and whom Martinez still quotes as a priest does scripture. To become a true master, though, Martinez had to harness his fastball. That 82-mph floater from Campo Las Palmas had grown up to be the most hazardous pitch in the majors. Martinez threw it with his index and middle fingers along two seams and slung it in such a way that it broke by as much as nine inches toward the hands and heads of righthanded hitters. That’s the way Martinez and the Expos explained it, anyway. Hitters regarded him as a headhunter. “He pitched inside aggressively and hit people for the effect,” says Mets first baseman Todd Zeile. “He’d hit you or put the ball right under your chin, and he’d stare right at you, not like most guys, who’ll look away.”

In 1995 Kerrigan, his pitching coach in Montreal, changed Martinez’s grip to a four-seam fastball. Martinez gradually gained control of the pitch, trading that erratic, sideways-riding movement for a late, explosive giddyup that appears to make the ball hop as it nears the plate. In the past two years Martinez has also learned how to cut his fastball, making it bore in on the hands of lefthanded hitters. “Since 1994 I don’t think anybody else has gotten better and better the way I have,” Martinez says. “Every year I know more and more about the hitters and how they react to me. There are some guys I know how to get out every single time, and I’ll keep doing it unless they make an adjustment—and then I’ll adjust. If my ability remains the same as I continue to get experience, I’ll have a bunch of Cy Youngs.”

Martinez threw the ball with his usual zing this spring training and pronounced himself fully recovered from his shoulder injury last October. Then again, his durability will always be a question. Only one pitcher under six feet tall born after 1900 has made the Hall of Fame: 5′10″ Whitey Ford. In 1998 Martinez was physically unable to pitch on short rest in a win-or-go-home Division Series game against Cleveland. (Boston lost.) He missed two starts last July because of soreness in his right shoulder. He doesn’t throw off a mound between starts, choosing to conserve his candlepower by long tossing and lightly spinning his off-speed pitches on flat ground. The Red Sox dare not use him as a traditional workhorse at the top of a rotation. They give him an extra day of rest between starts whenever possible. He was 13–0 in 15 such starts last year. “We’ll do it again this year,” Kerrigan says. “As Felipe used to always say, ‘We’ve got to take care of the little man.’”

WITH EACH passing hour of the afternoon the air above four-lane Avenida George Washington in Santo Domingo, hard by the Caribbean Sea, turns bluer. It is the noxious, hazy blue of fossil fuels being burned often and inefficiently. The boulevard is a cacophonous conga of compact rattletraps enmeshed with brazenly driven scooters that clatter like an army of power saws and leaf blowers. In the middle of this mayhem Martinez drives a … spaceship.

Well, it is not exactly a spaceship. But the black Mercedes convertible might as well be an alien craft to judge by the way everyone ogles it. Virgin steel and paint! Gleaming chrome and glass! Former Reds pitcher Jose Rijo used to drive his Bentley deep into the Dominican countryside, where children would gaze into the automobile’s hubcaps, mesmerized. Twenty percent of the country lives below the poverty line.

“It’s uncomfortable sometimes,” Martinez says of the attention he gets driving his luxury car, “but I like having the top down.” He is wearing jeans and a short-sleeve, button-down orange oxford shirt. Three years into a six-year deal that pays him $75 million (that’s 1.196 billion pesos), he still lives in the modest fourth-floor apartment he’s kept for five years. He gives away money, baseball equipment, houses and his time without ever an accompanying press release.

Martinez is driving the hour or so to Manoguayabo after one of his daily four-hour workouts at Centro Olimpico, sessions devoid of weights or baseballs. (He uses medicine balls and rubber tubing for strength training.) Of course, if you factored out all the time he spent laughing, yapping and needling, and boogying to the salsa blasted out of speakers the size of steamer trunks in another of his vehicles, a Lexus SUV, the workout would take about 2
¹
/
₂
hours. But then it would not be a Pedro Martinez workout.

One day a seven-year-old boy carrying a tennis ball approached Martinez as he worked under the concrete stands of the park’s track and field stadium. “
Soy el segundo Pedro
,” said the boy. (“I am the second Pedro.”) Martinez hugged him, then played ball with the kid for 10 minutes, the two taking turns trying to strike each other out with the tennis ball.

“Pedro,” Duquette says, “has natural charisma. He’s comfortable being a star. He loves it.”

No one in the pantheon of Red Sox icons has ever appealed to a more diverse audience than this slight man with a child’s smile and an assassin’s pulmonary system. At an autograph event in Boston in January, people began queuing up at seven in the morning to see him four hours later. One of the first in line was 69-year-old, Irish-born Margaret Flynn, a Red Sox fan since 1953. “Pedro’s the one,” she says. “He’s going to get us there.”

Here’s how Martinez greeted Flynn upon meeting her for the first time: “Mommy!”

Parents handed their babies to Pedro for pictures—he didn’t just hold them like sacks of groceries, he snuggled them and cooed—Latin kids shouted to him in Spanish, and women swooned and shrieked girlishly, including one who asked him to marry her. “I’m a nurse,” she purred. “I can take real good care of you.”

REPLIED MARTINEZ, “I’m not ready yet. I’m having too much fun.”

When he blows the horn of his Mercedes at an iron gate in Manoguayabo, one of his nephews slides it open. This is where he grew up, though the tiny house he shared with three brothers, two sisters and two foster boys raised as brothers is no longer standing. In fact, no house stands in this compound, a place that serves as an informal gathering spot for the extended Martinez family. There is a small clubhouse attached to a four-car garage, and a two-story pavilion built expressly to host family parties. Between the two buildings there is a gravel parking area that overlooks a grassy ravine. As boys Pedro, Ramon and Jesus, the youngest brother, who is a pitcher in the Red Sox organization, would throw rocks across the ravine toward an abandoned house tucked behind trees and bushes. Then they’d listen for the triumphant tinkle of glass breaking. Even now the brothers will sling rocks across the ravine to see who can throw the farthest. The rocks always land out of sight, enabling each hurler to claim superiority.

Sometimes Pedro comes alone. The old mango tree is still here, though now he prefers to do his thinking on a brick wall at the end of the gravel parking area. What he does not like to think about is how his parents, Paulino and Leopoldina, used to fight before their divorce, when Pedro was six. The bouts of utter silence between them that hung over the house like a stalled front of Arctic air were bad enough. The arguments were much worse. Even now when he recalls their straining voices, he winces. “No, no, enough. Ugh!” he says, shaking his head as if it were an Etch-A-Sketch, making the picture go away.

After his father left, Pedro would work in the garden with his mother, developing a love for flowers that he still has today. The garden and the mango tree and a diary he kept under lock and key provided respite. At 16, when he signed with the Dodgers, the crying subsided a bit. But two years later, during spring training, he could not pitch for a week because of the heart murmur, which doctors had long ago related to the stress of his youth.

Around the same time Ramon blossomed into an established big leaguer and principal wage earner in the family, and he found the confidence to bring his mother and father together on friendly terms. By 1993 Pedro, too, was a confident professional who encouraged Paulino and Leopoldina to share moments together. His heart murmur disappeared. He burned the diary. “Looking back, I have to say [the family strife] made me stronger,” he says. “It forced me to become a man at a young age.”

The little boy in the mango tree is all grown up. This gift he has for throwing a baseball has helped transform him. So, too, has he transformed baseball. “There is a time in baseball before Pedro and a time after Pedro,” Arias says. “Before, no one wanted to sign a pitcher as small as Pedro. After, now they begin to think, He could be another Pedro.”

One afternoon at Centro Olimpico an American asked Martinez to ask a teenage minor league prospect what Martinez meant to him and his country. The youth gave a lengthy, measured answer. Martinez turned his eyes away and said nothing. It wasn’t until that night, about eight hours later, that Martinez translated the prospect’s response. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything then, but it felt strange to ask about myself and hear the answer,” he says. “What he said was that I am a great example for the young people and that I show what can be done through hard work. Wow. It makes you feel good. And if you think you can ever run away from that responsibility, you can’t. It pushes you every day.”