Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  Well before we pulled into Dodgertown, 40-10 began lecturing us about some of the rules. No littering, no loud talking, no sloppy clothes. When you saw people walking on the pathways, you were to treat them with respect, make room for them.

  I never heard what 40-10’s real name was, but I knew the origin of his nickname. He was a young baseball player taking an English class, and it came time for him to practice his counting. So he started to count out loud: “ . . . forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, forty-ten—”

  Baseball players can’t let a beautiful moment like that just slide on by.

  When we got to Dodgertown, extended spring training was about to begin and the big leaguers were close to breaking camp. For a couple of days, we were all squeezed in together in the dormitory. The big leaguers, like Ramon, got their own rooms, while all the prospects buddied up. Sleeping in the same room with someone wasn’t new to me. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I didn’t have any choice yet.

  Up close, Dodgertown was about three times the size of Campo Las Palmas and as clean and neat as Miami looked from the sky. There were six practice fields and more than 60 different pitching mounds for all the minor and major leaguers to get in their work. They paid close attention to the grounds, cutting and watering the grass constantly. Nobody left trash lying around. And 40-10 was right: there were a lot of people always walking around Dodgertown or zipping around in golf carts, some middle-aged, many more white-skinned people than I had ever seen in one place. Everyone was always headed somewhere, looking like they were running late for a meeting.

  The players, the staff, the coaches, even the media, we all ate in a cafeteria that had all the food you could want—good food too. You filled up your tray and then walked into a dining room that was filled with tables covered by white tablecloths, with shiny silverware and cloth napkins. Along one wall was a panoramic photograph of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and along another wall was a bank of windows that looked out on the practice fields and allowed plenty of natural light into the room. The place had a lot of class. It took me a while to get used to it and not feel as if everyone was staring at me to see if I was using good manners at the table.

  The dormitory was not that much different than the one in Campo Las Palmas. Maybe the biggest difference was that there was never a power outage to contend with in Dodgertown.

  There were a lot of famous people at Dodgertown, and I could put faces to names I had only heard about. I remember Sandy Koufax was there. He took me and some of the other prospects aside one day that first spring and talked to us about “hooking the rubber.” Johnny Podres had once visited us at Campo Las Palmas to teach us the same thing, but I had abandoned it because it was too hard. Hooking the rubber meant placing the bottom of your back foot (my right) at a 45-degree angle to the front leading edge of the pitching rubber. What I had always done was place the outer side of my right foot up against the rubber and then push off the side of my foot. What Sandy told us was that if you only put the side of your foot against the rubber, your back foot slides on the ground as you push off it. That makes your arm angle and release point get lower and lower. If you use the rubber as an anchor by hooking it with your cleat, you stay level and as tall as possible from the mound. By establishing a stable base and standing tall, you can maintain your mechanics better, plus get the best break on your balls and the crispest command of your pitches.

  At first, it wasn’t any easier for me when Sandy taught us than it was when Podres did, but I wanted to get it right. Koufax was my teacher. I needed to listen to him—plus I had to. Hooking the rubber was the Dodgers way. It’s still taught, and I think it’s the right way to pitch. It’s not easy to get used to, but the sooner a pitcher gets used to hooking the rubber, the better a pitcher he will become.

  When Koufax and I spoke, we focused entirely on the art and craft of pitching, the mental side of the game, how to approach a batter. He listened to me, patiently, as I expressed my thoughts, and I was glued to whatever he said. I asked him about his elbow, and he told me that for pretty much as long as he could remember, it was barking—if it wasn’t, he didn’t feel right. So he pitched his entire career in discomfort. That sunk in. He would feed me compliments all the time, telling me how impressed he was that I was taking my side work so seriously and could keep my focus.

  I soaked in as much as I could about being in the United States. At that point, I couldn’t detect much of a cultural shock at all from being in the States. As nice as it was to see Ramon again, he didn’t bend over backwards to make sure I was adjusting okay. He had his own concerns, like being sure that he was part of the Dodgers’ major league rotation from the start of that season instead of being yanked up and down like he had been in 1989, the tough season the year before. Ramon had never been the tender type toward me anyhow, and now that I had reached this stage of professional baseball, he did not change his stripes. He had always been tough on me, always hard. He wanted me to become a man before I was ready, and I really wasn’t ready at 18 years old.

  Soon after Ramon and the rest of the big leaguers left camp, the rest of us did too. We had to move down the coast about half an hour to Port St. Lucie and begin extended spring training alongside the Mets’ prospects in their spring training base.

  For those first two weeks in Port St. Lucie, against the Mets, everything began to change with my pitches, and the changes were not positive. I was still growing and getting stronger, and I discovered that the low-90s fastball I had the summer before in the Dominican was topping out at 94 and 95 miles per hour in Florida. I loved that. That power just seemed to come all at once for me. With it, though, came a loss of control with my breaking ball, plus my changeup was only so-so. My fastball was good, but I quickly realized that the hitters in extended spring were a lot better than in the Dominican and that if the only pitch you had was a fastball, you were going to get hit. And boy, did I start to get knocked around. I really struggled those first two weeks. I was like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that now, at just the right moment, I’m choking, with all my pitches.

  This is when Guy Conti stepped in and saved me.

  Guy had been one of the Dodgers coaches who flew down to the Dominican Summer League the summer before to check in on me and some of the other pitchers. I remember that I threw on the side one day, trying to impress him. All I knew then about how to impress coaches was to throw the ball hard, and I was throwing hard that day. He told me then, “Wow, Pedro, you have some serious quick hands and arm speed—your arm has a ‘whisper’ to it that I can hear when you throw.”

  Guy read something in my arm that nobody had ever expressed to me before. When he saw me giving it up in Port St. Lucie, he quickly realized that I needed some help—not with my fastball but with my off-speed pitch. I didn’t have one.

  My changeup then was Ramon’s changeup. He kept his thumb on the bottom of the ball and the next three fingers spread out, the middle one on top. It worked great for Ramon, whom Guy had worked with as well. Guy realized that, as long as my fingers were, Ramon’s were longer and that was why his grip wasn’t working for me. Instead of spreading out my three fingers on top of the ball, Guy had me curl the index finger real tight along the side of the ball, tucking the tip along the side of my thumb. My middle finger and ring finger straddled the top of the ball, with the pinky along for the ride.

  The first time we went to the bullpen to work on it, Guy told me, “Just use those two top fingers to control the ball, let the ball spin off your fingers.” By keeping my index finger inside, I could generate backspin and a rotation that would cause the ball to break away from lefties and come in on righties. At that time, I was having a lot of trouble getting lefties out with only a fastball. I had been throwing the old changeup too hard, and I was really giving it up. Every time I tried to throw a strike, I had to take something off it and pretty much lay it in there because I was so wild.

  The new changeup grip felt totally wrong. I said, “Guy, are you sure?�
� I wasn’t sure that I even had it right, never mind that I’d be able to control it. He said, “No, Pedro, you have to practice it.” He told me to take a ball and practice tossing it, over and over, with that grip. We went to the outfield, and he said, “Throw it out there,” like we were playing long toss. “Keep throwing it, keep throwing it.” I did, and I began to notice how much late action the ball was having.

  Guy saw it too. He said, “See where I’m standing? Throw it there”—and he pointed to his right side—“so it ends up here where I am.” I threw it that way, and it went zzzooop!—breaking what seemed like a foot, left to right, from where I stood.

  And Guy went, “Yay, Pedro! That’s how I want it!”

  And off I went.

  To a left-handed hitter, my changeup was a “strike ball,” meaning that it looked like a strike coming out of my hand, but then it would disappear and dart five or six inches down and away from the hitter, who would flail and miss. To a right-handed hitter, the pitch was a “ball strike.” When the ball came out of my hand, it looked like it would be a ball the way it was headed outside, so the batter would usually take it, but then it would dive in at the last second and nick the outside corner of the plate.

  My command of the pitch then was not as good as it would get later, but the pitch was a marked improvement over the old changeup, and my control was good enough that I started to get immediate results.

  Guy’s changeup was a priceless commodity, but beyond baseball, he and his wife Janet helped me deal with the homesickness and worries that were starting to pile up.

  The players stayed in a hotel not too far from the hotel where Guy and Janet were, and Guy and Janet would stop by to pick me up to go out to eat or visit a flea market they liked to go to. My teammates would tease me and say, “Oh look, everybody, say good-bye to Guy Conti’s son,” but I ignored them. I was so happy that I had someone who wanted to be with me. Guy was really like a father to me then. He was my white daddy, and he’d talk to me like a son. Not only had I started to feel homesick, but the more I struggled the more I worried about a rumor that we all had heard.

  If you don’t impress anyone in the first couple of weeks of camp, you’ll get sent right back to the Dominican.

  I saw one player get hurt, and the Dodgers flew him back to the Dominican. I thought, Oh my God, this is no joke—I might get sent back. I had been working so hard, trying to control my fastball, learning about my changeup, and running and training harder than anybody else, but I wasn’t getting results. I had started to turn things around with that changeup, but still, I was worried.

  Guy was big into exercising and spent a lot of time on the stationary bike. He would dare me to keep up with him. I thought this should be easy—he was a middle-aged guy after all. I wasn’t too familiar with the bike, though, and I’d let Guy set it up for me. He’d set mine on Mt. Everest, and his on Easy Street. As I’d start to slow down, barely able to keep my pedals going, Guy would be pedaling free and easy and cackling at me.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe you can’t do that—you’re a young guy, aren’t you? That’s so strange because this is so easy for me.”

  I quickly started to learn how to do my own bike adjustments. Working out with Guy and continuing to run—the Dodgers didn’t care how much I ran—became a release for me, just like running had been in Campo Las Palmas.

  I was also intent on improving my English. I started to pick it up by watching TV and conversing in English with the coaches when I could. But Guy saw that I wanted to learn more than that, and he asked Janet, who used to be a high school librarian, to work with me.

  When Guy left town, he’d ask me to check in on Janet at their extended-stay hotel when I could. I’d come by and help her bring in the groceries from the car or carry the laundry up to their room before class went into session. Janet would give me a word in the morning, like “cologne,” and in the afternoon I’d come back and be able to say it and spell it correctly and use it in a sentence.

  We’d sit at the kitchen table, Janet and I, going over the word of the day plus other vocabulary words, and it started to sink in. I can remember Janet saying, “Oh my God, he’s really smart—he can speak it and spell it.” She told me later that I was smarter than a lot of the other players, but I had an advantage because I already had a base with English when I came. Plus, I wanted to learn, badly. Janet said I was like a “big computer” when it came to learning English. Not that she believed it, but she had heard from others that many young Dominican and Hispanic players were “dumb” because they had received so little formal education—it was hard to teach them not only English but also Spanish. Because I had stayed in school, even when I was at Campo Las Palmas, I was better equipped than others to absorb English. I wanted to master it as much as I wanted to improve my pitching.

  Both were coming along.

  The changeup was developing into a nasty weapon, but I remember that I was still having issues with the command of my fastball. In one game when I was struggling, my first baseman, Nolberto Troncoso, who came with me from the Dominican, trotted over to the mound.

  “Pedro, do what you used to do back home—anytime you struggled you’d back someone off the plate and you’d start doing your thing. Nothing has changed. These are the same guys that we faced every day. How come you’re not doing it here?”

  “For real?” I said. His words made me think of Eleodoro’s admonition to never stop throwing inside.

  “Yes, I think you should do what you did in the Dominican. Why change here? All of a sudden you’re pitching away, away, away. You’re trying to hit corners. Do what you used to do: back him off the plate and then pitch.”

  Butch Huskey, one of the Mets’ better hitting prospects, was up next, and I tried to throw a fastball in. I wound up hitting him in the elbow and knocking him out of the game, but as for me, I started pitching better from that point on. I didn’t allow any more runs for a few more starts after that, and it was making Guy and the other coaches so happy. I got named Pitcher of the Month, which meant an extra 50 bucks. I asked Guy to take me to the flea market, and I remember using the extra money to buy some jean shorts and this cool white T-shirt with green writing on it. Later, Guy took me out to eat. When he told me how proud he was of my improvement, my worries about being shipped back to the DR began to fade away.

  After extended spring ended in June, I was moving forward—no more looking back. The only question was whether or not to send me to the Dodgers’ rookie Gulf Coast League team in Vero Beach or the higher-level rookie team in Great Falls, Montana. All the Dodgers players moved back to Vero Beach for a couple more days of intrasquad games, so the coaches could make up their minds.

  Conti was headed to Great Falls to be their pitching coach, and he wanted me there. Dave Wallace, who was in charge of minor league pitchers, thought I needed to be in Montana too—in the spotlight, facing the best hitters I could be matched up against.

  I wanted to go to Great Falls too, but I began to hear that there were some coaches who thought I should start in the lower-level Gulf Coast League.

  I was left wondering.

  “Guy, am I going to go with you?”

  “I don’t know, Pedro, I don’t know. I’ll try.”

  His solution was to organize a game between the Dominican players back from extended spring in Vero and the high draft picks from the amateur draft.

  The Dodgers’ first-round pick, this big left-hander from Oklahoma named Ron Walden, was the sensation right then, and I was going to be matched up against him.

  Three days before the game, however, I ran into a problem.

  We were doing fundamentals work on a back field in Dodgertown. I was running over to cover first on the 3-6-1 double-play ball: the first baseman throws to the shortstop for the force at second, and then the shortstop throws to the pitcher at first base. I raced over to the bag for the throw from Roberto Mejia. Mejia could really wing it, which he did this time, but his throw was high. I jumped to
catch it, but I came down off-balance and had to tag the bag with my left foot instead of my right.

  My God, you would have thought that I had shoplifted the way the coach running the drill, Chico Fernandez, yelled at everyone to “Stop!”

  He began laying into me.

  “You know, any other time I would let this go, and I would let you”—here he began pointing at the draft-pick kids—“from the draft get away with this. I would let you, but this one”—he pointed at me—“comes from the Dominican Republic, from the academy over there. This is Ramon’s little brother, so he knows better than everybody else. He spent two years over there doing fundamentals, and he comes here and does them the wrong way. This is a good example of what not to do.”

  He stopped to take a breath and stared right at me.

  “I’ll see you in a couple of years cutting sugar cane in the Dominican,” said Fernandez. “You’re not going to make it here—you’re a pile of shit.”

  My first thought was that I couldn’t believe he didn’t see how high Mejia’s throw was. My second was that I knew that I was as good at fundamentals as anyone else in the camp. I didn’t think he meant that personally—a lot of coaches don’t always mean everything they say—but the words stung.

  I knew enough not to say anything.

  He wasn’t done either.

  “Guess what? Go out there and run until I tell you to stop.”

  I still didn’t say anything. For one thing, I never considered running to be a punishment. But I was humiliated to have to listen to him say that I was headed back to the sugar cane fields. Fernandez, who was from Cuba, understood completely that what he was saying was a total insult. The sugar cane cutters in those days, and still to this day, were mainly Haitians, and the job was as difficult and demeaning as you could imagine.