by Seth Mnookin
Finally, the Red Sox were rocked by the arrival of Curt Schilling. Even before he signed his deal with Boston, Schilling had logged numerous hours on a popular Red Sox Internet fansite called Sons of Sam Horn. (Horn was a below-average slugger for the Red Sox in the late 1980s.) As soon as the deal was completed, Schilling became an active participant on the site, and quickly demonstrated why he had a reputation for being someone who liked to hear himself speak. In December, at the end of the A-Rod trade discussions, Schilling responded to press reports that Garciaparra had become estranged from some of his teammates by writing, “The media has no idea what the state of our clubhouse is, or isn’t,” despite the fact that the closest Schilling himself had been to the Red Sox clubhouse occurred in June 2002, when the Diamondbacks had played the Red Sox at Fenway Park. “Until you hear otherwise assume Nomar is doing just fine,” Schilling wrote. “He’s a grown man, and he doesn’t need people reading tea leaves to tell you how he feels.” Garciaparra, who says he had not spoken with Schilling about his feelings during this period, was, in fact, estranged from some of his teammates and upset by the Red Sox’s overtures to Rodriguez.
A couple of weeks later, Schilling also belittled players who used agents to negotiate their contracts, a list that included almost every major league ballplayer except for himself. “At some point there becomes zero need to have an agent represent you,” he wrote. With so many of the team’s players entering their contract years, he went on to say, “If you have an ounce of integrity, pride, you know your place in that market, you know your worth within the sport.” He followed this up by taking a swipe at Scott Boras, who represented both Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek, among others. “With someone like Boras,” Schilling wrote, “the groundrules are laid out…. IF that’s what a player is after, top dollar, then that’s your guy I guess. I have never liked Scott Boras, nor anything he’s done.” Despite the fact that almost none of the other players on the team were known to frequent the website, word of Schilling’s late-night missives got around. Before spring training even began, some players were saying it seemed as if Schilling thought he was better than they were. For a player who made a point of how perceptive he was, Schilling failed to take an accurate pulse of his new teammates, and his constant appearances, newly ubiquitous ad campaigns, and self-anointment as the new face of the team rankled many of Boston’s players.
No one was more upset by Schilling’s arrival than Pedro Martinez. Thirty-two years old, Martinez had been the best pitcher in baseball for most of the six years he’d been with the Red Sox, and in 2004, he would be the highest paid pitcher in history. Martinez had begun his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers, where manager Tommy Lasorda had questioned whether the slight Martinez, listed at 5 feet, 11 inches but actually about an inch shorter, had the size or stamina to be a successful starting pitcher. He was traded to the Montreal Expos before the 1994 season, where the fiercely proud Martinez blossomed into one of the most dominant hurlers in the history of the game. “I just didn’t like the comments they made about being too small, and not being able to last 200 innings,” he said. “It was good being able to prove them wrong.” In the late 1990s, Martinez featured a ferocious fastball that he could throw at more than 95 miles per hour, but his dominance stemmed from the fact that his changeup and his curveball were also so devastating. This combination of three “plus” pitches, Bill James once wrote, was the difference between Martinez being good and being one of the all-time greats.
Impish and playful, Martinez lived by his own set of rules. Since coming to Boston in 1998, Martinez habitually arrived at spring training late, clowned around in the dugout, and skipped the team’s annual photo. But once he was on the mound, no one questioned his fierce competitiveness. For all his light-heartedness, Martinez was also driven by an irrational (and slightly contrived) fear of being disrespected, and the Red Sox’s pursuit and acquisition of Schilling gnawed at him. Boston, after all, was supposed to be his town. “I can’t help that they wanted to sign Schilling,” Martinez said in February. “If it doesn’t belong to me, it doesn’t belong to me. If I don’t belong in Boston, it’s up to Boston. They run the team. They know what they’re doing.” Instead of viewing his new teammate as one more weapon in the Red Sox’s arsenal, he saw Schilling’s arrival as a potential challenge to his supremacy. Days before the season started, he asked a reporter, “If they want him [more than me], why don’t they just say that?”
Martinez’s wounded pride could, potentially, have been a good thing for the Red Sox. Martinez was often most effective when he felt as if he had something to prove—witness his transformation after Tommy Lasorda questioned his potential. But in 2004, Martinez was in a much different place than he had been a decade earlier, when the Dodgers shipped him to Montreal. No one questioned his abilities anymore; by this time, the debate was whether his 1999 and 2000 seasons had been the best two-year run ever by a pitcher. Now, Martinez was more worried about his health than his legacy. He’d missed much of the 2001 season with a frayed rotator cuff, and ever since then, there’d been speculation in the press that his shoulder hadn’t fully healed. More recently, there’d been concern about Martinez’s labrum.*
Rotator cuff tears and labrum tears both occur for the same reason—the force used to throw a baseball rips apart the very supports that are supposed to hold the human shoulder together—but players can generally rebound from rotator cuff injuries, while ripped labrums often mean the end of one’s career.† What’s more, labrum tears are almost impossible to detect with any degree of accuracy; the only real way to tell the extent to which a labrum is damaged is to do exploratory surgery. Most shoulder trouble manifests itself as pain that comes when throwing hard, and that discomfort often brings with it an attendant loss of speed. Labrum tears may also cause a pitcher to feel a catch in his overhand pitching motion. Since 2002, Martinez, as the Red Sox baseball operations staff was well aware, had taken to throwing from a three-quarter-arm angle more often, eschewing the full overhand delivery that is more powerful but carries more risk.
Martinez knew all too well that an injured shoulder could mean the end of a once-great pitcher’s career. By the time Martinez arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, his older brother, Ramon, had already established himself as one of the Dodgers aces. Ramon Martinez was one of his younger brother’s biggest influences; Pedro had once said, “What I know about baseball and life off the field, I owe to my brother, Ramon.” Ramon Martinez instructed his younger brother to become as fluent as possible in English because it would ease his transition into professional baseball. Ramon never was fully comfortable with English, while Pedro became the best-spoken non-native English speaking player in the game.
In 1990, at age 22, Ramon went 20-6 with a 2.92 earned run average and struck out 18 batters in one game. In 1995, Ramon went 17-7 and threw a no-hitter against the Florida Marlins.* After that season, he signed a three-year deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, with a club option for 1999, and from the beginning of the 1996 season through the middle of June in 1998, Ramon compiled a 32-14 record with an ERA of 3.34. The Dodgers, it was all but assured, would exercise his option for 1999. Pitchers with his track record were valuable commodities.
But, on June 14, 1998, the 30-year-old Ramon Martinez injured his shoulder. An MRI revealed he had tears in both his rotator cuff and his labrum, and the Dodgers cut him loose. Ramon pitched only 164 more major league innings in his entire career—70.1 innings fewer than he’d pitched in his first full season in Los Angeles. In 2000, while playing with the Red Sox, he amassed a 6.13 ERA. He started four games in 2001 for the Pittsburgh Pirates, giving up 15 earned runs in 152/3 innings. And after that, his baseball career was over. The lesson for his younger brother was clear: Career-ending injuries can occur at any moment.
With Schilling on board, Martinez wondered if the Red Sox were planning on keeping him around beyond the 2004 season, and without a contract, he was both hesitant to risk further injury and worried about giving t
he impression he was less than totally healthy. Martinez’s anxiety about pitching during one season before he knew if he’d get paid for the next had been apparent since 2003, when, during spring training, he began agitating for the Red Sox to pick up his 2004 option. Now, when he spoke of Grady Little’s decision to leave him in during Game 7 of the previous fall’s American League Championship Series against the Yankees, he talked not of the fact that the game was on the line but of the risk to his arm. “I was actually shocked I stayed out there that long,” he told Sports Illustrated. “But I’m paid to do that. I belong to Boston. If they want me to blow my arm out, it’s their responsibility.”
The same fragility that made Martinez anxious about securing a long-term deal made the Red Sox concerned about giving him one. “The arm angle Pedro had in spring training was very worrisome,” says John Henry. When Henry asked one of the team’s top baseball operations executives what kind of season Martinez would likely produce, the answer stunned him: “I was told, ‘He’ll win 12 or 15 games, have a 4.00 ERA or a 3.50 ERA.’ And I was like, ‘Fuck.’ ” Despite this prediction, the team wanted to re-sign its star. “I thought he should finish his career in Boston,” says Henry. In an effort to hedge their bets, the Red Sox tried to find a local insurance company to insure Martinez’s contract. Henry thought the move could be a public relations coup for the insurer, especially since Martinez had agreed in advance to do advertisements for whichever company signed on.
“We essentially struck a long-term deal,” says Henry of the preseason negotiations with Martinez. “We didn’t come to complete terms on dollars, but we pretty much had a deal—it was just about getting insurance. And we couldn’t…. [The insurance companies] took the position that the worst thing that could happen is for people to know publicly that they’ve insured him, because if he breaks down, they’ll look like idiots.” As spring training wound down, Martinez and the Red Sox remained at a stalemate, but continued talking.
*The rotator cuff is a group of four muscles that secure the humerus, or upper arm bone, to the shoulder socket. The labrum, a thin sheath of collagen, rests between the head of the humerus and the scapula, or shoulder blade, functioning as both connective tissue and as a shock absorber.
†Curt Schilling, who had surgery in 1995 to fix his labrum, is perhaps the only pitcher of note to come back from a labrum tear to anything like his previous form.
*Pedro Martinez has never thrown a no-hitter; however, 41 days before Ramon’s no hitter, Pedro threw nine perfect innings while pitching for the Montreal Expos against the San Diego Padres. The Expos failed to score until the top of the 10th. In the bottom of the 10th, Padres left fielder Bip Roberts led off with a double. Martinez got credit for the win, but under baseball rules Martinez’s 27 consecutive outs to begin the game did not count as either a perfect game or a no-hitter.
Chapter 31
Treading Water
CURT SCHILLING AND KEITH FOULKE were obviously the offseason’s biggest pickups, but, just as he’d done the year before, the Red Sox looked for undervalued players they could snap up. They’d signed Calvin “Pokey” Reese, a two-time Gold Glove winner, to a one-year, $1 million contract to play second base, and nabbed Mark Bellhorn from the Colorado Rockies in exchange for a minor leaguer. Bellhorn, who made less than a half-million dollars in 2004, was just the type of player Boston was inclined to take a flier on. Most years, he had a low batting average, a high on base percentage, and had some stretches during which he’d hit for considerable power. The Sox had also re-upped Byung-Hyun Kim to a two-year deal worth $10 million, with the intention of having Kim pitch as one of the team’s starters.
On April 4, the Red Sox began their season in Baltimore. Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon were both on the disabled list. Pedro Martinez got the start, and Gabe Kapler took over in right field with Bellhorn manning second base and Reese playing shortstop. The Sox lost, 7–2, and while Martinez pitched well, he wasn’t dominant. Two days later, Curt Schilling made his Red Sox debut, going six innings and allowing only one run while striking out seven. It was Schilling, the team’s new star, and not Martinez who set the tone for the rest of the month, in which the Sox went 15-6. More than a third of Boston’s victories came at the expense of its rivals from New York, with the Red Sox winning six out of seven contests against the Yankees. (Almost as satisfying as the wins was the fact that Alex Rodriguez, the latest pinstriped villain, went 2-for-17 in his first four-game series at Fenway as a member of the Yankees.) The Red Sox pitching staff looked as if it might be poised for a historic season, and at one point late in the month, the team’s pitchers threw 32 consecutive scoreless innings—more than three full games’ worth.
Then, on April 30, as the Red Sox sat in the visiting clubhouse in Arlington, Texas, waiting for a thunderstorm to pass, Martinez decided to chat with the Herald’s Michael Silverman, his favorite reporter on the beat. Martinez told Silverman he was cutting off all negotiations with the Red Sox until season’s end. “I’m just really sad for the fans in New England who had high hopes that…I was going to stay in Boston,” Martinez said. “[The fans] don’t understand what’s going on, but I really mean it from my heart—I gave them every opportunity, every discount I could give them to actually stay in Boston and they never took advantage of it. Didn’t even give me an offer.” His contract status, he said, wouldn’t be a distraction for him or the team “because I’m not going to allow it.”
The Red Sox proceeded to lose the next five games, including one the next day in which Martinez gave up six runs in only four innings. Boston stumbled through May, a month in which the team went 16-14 and lost its lead over the Yankees in the American League East. Derek Lowe, after talking in spring training about how a dominant year would only make him more expensive for the Red Sox to re-sign, was particularly bad, and became convinced the team was trying to limit his effectiveness in order to drive down his price on the free agent market.* He went 1-4 with an 8.19 earned run average in May. The Derek Lowe Face was back with a vengeance.
But there was good news for Boston, too, in the forms of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the team’s Dominican sluggers. Ramirez, after repeatedly asking for a trade and moping his way through 2003, began 2004 on an inauspicious note. Despite his and his agent’s constant conversations with Red Sox management during the offseason, Ramirez had unleashed a bizarre rant on Red Sox executives during spring training, calling them “motherfucking white devils” for trying to trade him to the Rangers. His introduction to Terry Francona, his new manager, wasn’t much better. When Francona first saw the star at spring training, the manager stuck out his hand to introduce himself. Ramirez responded by swearing at him as well, and proceeded to skip the start of the first team meeting of the spring.
None of that frustration or unhappiness followed Ramirez into the season. Red Sox staffers joked that he seemed to have gotten either a personality transplant or access to some strong medication. In 2004, he was not only hitting as well as ever, he also seemed to be having fun for the first time since arriving in Boston in 2001. On May 10, Ramirez missed his first game of the season—but only, he said, so he could travel to Miami for a ceremony granting him U.S. citizenship. Upon returning to the team, he joked with reporters, “It was 15 questions. They give you the book. It’s not hard.” The next day, he ran jubilantly onto the field, waving a small American flag. About a month later, Ramirez flubbed a routine fly ball in the top of the ninth that would have sealed a 1–0 victory against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Upon returning to the dugout, he sat down and deadpanned, “Well, there goes my Gold Glove,” as his teammates burst into guffaws. (The Sox won the game, 2–1, in the bottom of the ninth.) Ramirez later explained, not very convincingly, that he’d always wanted to be more outgoing but was insecure. “I decided to open up more to the press because before I was kind of shy,” he said. “But I try to give [reporters] five, 10 minutes, at least guys are going to say, ‘I know he’s not that good [speaking English], but at least he’s
trying to talk to us to get to know him.’ ” Ortiz and Ramirez combined for 41 home runs in the first half of the season, and Ortiz, with little fanfare, signed a two-year extension with the Red Sox that would keep him in Boston through 2007.
For all their offensive prowess, the Red Sox were having trouble getting into a groove. Even when Schilling and Martinez performed like the dominant duo the Sox had envisioned, the rest of the club seemed to falter. In June, for example, the two aces at the top of the Red Sox rotation went 7-1, while the rest of the staff went 4-13. Some of the problem was erratic starting pitching—Derek Lowe in particular continued to struggle—and some of it was an increasingly porous infield defense. For that, Nomar Garciaparra, still generally considered the most popular Red Sox player of the last decade, got most of the blame.
Garciaparra rejoined the Red Sox on June 9, after missing the first 57 games of the season. He received a rousing welcome from the Fenway faithful in his first trip to the plate, and responded by smacking a single to left, prompting another standing ovation. But already it was clear that the relationship the city of Boston and the Red Sox had with Garciaparra had been altered. At the press conference announcing his return to the team, Garciaparra was asked whether his mysterious injury had been a case of the shortstop “sticking it” to the only team he’d ever played for. Even Garciaparra’s approach to the game was being criticized. His penchant for swinging at the first pitch of an at-bat, regardless of where it was in the strike zone, was at odds with the Red Sox’s new organizational philosophy, which tried to teach batters to force opposing pitchers to throw lots of pitches. Balls he’d once been able to drive were now coming off of his bat as weak flares, and soon, “Nomie” was increasingly being referred to with a new nickname: “Garciapopup.” Unlike Pedro Martinez, whose intelligence allowed him to remain a dominant pitcher even after his years as a physically blessed flamethrower had passed, Garciaparra seemed simultaneously confused by his inability to perform as he once had and unwilling to alter his approach to the game. Just as glaring as his diminished offense was his woefully erratic defense, which drew a sharp contrast to his April and May replacement, fan favorite Pokey Reese.