Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  But I said nothing and just turned and began running. I realized quickly one truth. The only thing worse than running around an open field under the Florida sun at noontime is running in cleats under the Florida sun at noontime. Cleats are good only for practicing and playing baseball, and they are to be taken off as soon as possible. As I kept jogging in them, my feet began to ache with mounting intensity on each step. I heard the bray of the horn that announced the end of the workday and watched as everyone headed to the dining room to cool off and eat some lunch.

  I continued to circle the baseball field.

  The cafeteria at Dodgertown had big windows that overlooked the fields, so I wasn’t surprised to hear later that Leo Posada, one of the minor league instructors, asked Chico as they sat down to eat, “Hey, who’s that guy running out there? He’s been running for more than an hour.”

  Chico said, “Who?” before looking out the window. Next thing I know, Chico sprinted toward me from the cafeteria.

  “Why are you running?” Chico asked.

  I had been running for almost two hours in my cleats, with no water.

  “Because you told me to run until you remember to stop me—did you finally remember?” I asked.

  Now, I could tell, Chico felt awful.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Pedro, I didn’t mean it.”

  Very calmly, I said, “That’s okay. Next time, just tell me to get my tennis shoes and I’ll run forever.”

  I sat down on the grass and gingerly untied my cleats, pulled them off, and saw that blood had seeped through my socks. My toes and the back of my heel were peeling, the skin was all gone, and I had sets of blisters exactly where each cleat had been pounding into the bottom of my feet.

  I remember Guy and the other coaches got very upset over what had happened, especially with the intrasquad game coming up.

  I told them, “No, it doesn’t matter.”

  Guy said, “Tomorrow you won’t run.”

  “I will run. But I just need my tennis shoes.”

  Three days later, I started with the rest of the extended spring guys—Mondesí, Troncoso, Mejia, a few others, mostly Dominicans, all Latin players—against Walden and the rest of the stars, all the draft picks.

  All of a sudden, who was hitting 97 miles per hour?

  Not Ronny Walden. I was.

  My feet still hurt, but the barbs from Chico stung worse and had become stuck in my head. I turned the pain to my advantage.

  I struck out the first three batters I faced, plus a few more after that.

  And Mondesí took Walden deep right away.

  We blanked the draft picks.

  And I was headed to Great Falls, Montana.

  4

  Sweet Home Montana

  LOOKING OUT THE window of our bus, I gazed for hours at the fields of golden wheat rippling across the Montana horizon. And the Idaho and Utah horizons. Canada too. Pioneer League bus rides could last six, seven, sometimes eight hours, carrying us back and forth between Great Falls and Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City, Butte, Helena, Billings, and Medicine Hat up in Alberta, Canada.

  That late summer of 1990, the Great Falls Dodgers and I traveled thousands of miles along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, up and down Interstate 15 and across I-90. Just me and my AM/FM Walkman, relying on the spotty and crackly reception, hoping to hear the complete versions of Milli Vanilli’s “Blame It on the Rain,” Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt’s “Don’t Know Much,” the Eagles, Lionel Richie, and some country music too, before we passed out of range.

  I’d half-listen to the music, occasionally getting up to jabber with my teammates, frequently having to tell Raúl Mondesí to keep it down. We all would nap as much as we could, but after a while that would become impossible. That’s a lot of time to spend on a bus. I could gaze for hours at the mountains, getting my first look at snow atop some of the peaks, while we passed by farms and forests on the near horizon with oblivious cows and more cautious deer. The Dominican has its mountains too, but the Rockies were of a vaster magnitude. I found the landscape to be stunning.

  As the sun would start to set, the wheat fields swaying in flickering waves of amber and yellow, I would turn inward and start to think about my mom and those walks I used to take with her from the bus stop in Manoguayabo when she came home from work in the dusk.

  I was 18 years old, 3,000 miles away from home.

  Some trips were harder to take than others. Those were the nights when I could not wait for the bus to return to Great Falls, so I could get to the house I lived in and take refuge with Shelley.

  She could see in my eyes the moment when I walked in that I was not right. She’d bring me down to my bedroom and sit on the bed with me while I told her how much I missed my mom. Shelley knew, and she would try to fill up that empty spot. She’d rub my back and say in the softest voice, “Oohh, my sweet boy, my sweet, sweet boy,” and keep rubbing my back. Before I knew it, I was sleeping and she’d be gone.

  Thank God for Shelley Haffner, her husband John, and their kids, Paul and Nicki, and that small, welcoming house a mile from Centene Stadium in Great Falls. They were my host family.

  Vero Beach’s Dodgertown was not a true US city, but more like a self-contained beehive of baseball. Great Falls was a real American city where baseball happened to be played.

  Lewis and Clark had portaged through the area nearly 200 years before Martinez and Mondesí pulled in to ply their trade for the Dodgers’ High A farm team in the pleasant town that sits on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountain foothills and straddles a lazy bend of the powerful Missouri River. The Black Eagle Dam now covers up most of the nearly 90-foot waterfall that slowed up Lewis and Clark and gave the town its name. The nearby Malmstrom Air Force Base, Glacier National Park, and bountiful fishing spots provided the main industries for the town of 55,000 residents.

  The Haffners were one of the families in Great Falls who didn’t mind hosting ballplayers from the Dominican. They lived just a few blocks from the stadium and had been hosting Dodgers players since 1985. They had hosted José Offerman a summer earlier. They knew all about the Dodgers.

  Even though Ramon had never played in Montana, when Shelley first saw me she said, “So you’re Ramon’s brother.”

  “Yes, but I’m the cuter one.”

  She got a kick out of that, and we hit it off right then. She and John showed Junior Perez, Raúl, and me our basement space. I immediately claimed the one private bedroom for myself. Junior and Raúl could share their room. I needed my own space, and Raúl, a year older than me, and Junior, who was an old man at 22, thankfully didn’t make a stink about it.

  We each paid the Haffners $100 a month for rent, and we were responsible for doing our own food shopping. If we happened to be home when the Haffners were cooking something we wanted to eat, we were welcome to join in, but we were on different schedules so that didn’t happen often. I immediately felt comfortable calling Shelley “Mom,” and I told her, “Mom, I’ll do the cleaning up, but I don’t want to know how to cook.” Mom couldn’t make rice and beans as well as Junior did, so he would do most of the cooking. Raúl would pretend to help. Once Mondy cooked a two-pound bag of rice all at once, which I know Shelley was not thrilled about.

  Nicki, who acted much older than a 16-year-old, was closest to me in age, and we behaved more or less like all brothers and sisters do.

  We squabbled.

  “Mom, Nicki’s in my seat,” or “Pedro won’t move over”—typical stuff like that. We’d never get too mad at each other, and if it got bad, we’d have it out and it would be over with. Nicki thought her mom spoiled me, which was pretty much true, just like I could say she was a spoiled brat herself at times. Not all of the time, of course. We liked hanging out together. She drove a Mustang almost as beat-up as Rafo’s jalopy and took me to Arby’s, where I had discovered curly fries. Nicki would always tell me to wait in the parking lot while she went in to pick them up, which I a
lways thought was a little strange. But I could see all the motorcycles and the type of crowd hanging out there, and I understood, at an uncomfortable and unspoken level, why she wanted me to stay in the car.

  Nicki would make stops too, sometimes to pick up some beer for Mondy. Having alcohol was one of the Haffner household’s no-no’s, and it sometimes led to Mondy trying to break another Haffner rule: not having any girls visit us in the basement. I cared about Mondy, but I was also concerned about trouble finding me as well. I knew the Dodgers would hear about any problem, and I could not let anything stand in the way of pitching my way into the major leagues.

  Whether it was over beer or girls, I could get so pissed at Mondy, and we’d fall into some heated arguments. Then I’d hear Nicki chime in with “Oh look, it’s Mommy’s little boy,” and, “Hey, little brother, what are you going to do, are you going to call Mama now?”

  It wasn’t all bickering. One time Nicki showed us where her parents kept their Halloween outfits—in a dresser full of costumes, dresses, and wigs. I was the only one small enough to fit into her mom’s clothes, so I slipped into one of her dresses, stepped into her high heels, and put on a blond wig. I found a purse and started prancing around the room, acting like a lady. Raúl put on some big red long johns with a devil’s tail stuck on the backside. When Mom came home and saw us, she could not stifle a laughing fit. We popped a merengue tape into the boom box, and I started dancing with Mom, stumbling around in my high heels, teaching her how to dance Dominican-style. There are pictures of me in that blond wig, but they will not be released in my lifetime or yours.

  We did not have much downtime, but when we did, the Haffners went out of their way to be good parents for me. Once they took Mondy and me up into the mountains to go fly-fishing at Holter Lake. Mondy got a little bored and started to fish like he knew how, which was to tie the line around a rock and cast it out into the middle of the lake with that arm of his. So much for the stillness and quiet of fly-fishing. I managed to catch a catfish, which Shelley made a big deal out of, even though we both knew it was no trout.

  Shelley gave me my first driving lessons in a real car, a Monte Carlo. I had taken a few drives before back in the DR, usually in an old truck with no power steering and a real stiff clutch. The Monte Carlo was smooth, though, completely different. I would be styling in it, tooling down the quiet Great Falls streets with big trees lining each side, Mama Shelley sitting by my side.

  My English was coming along too. The Dodgers were still giving us lessons, and on the cover of my English-Spanish textbook I wrote out my name and “I need this book.”

  I got lessons at some unexpected moments. Once our bus stopped at a Sizzler, an “all you can eat” restaurant. When we got back on the bus, one of my American teammates pointed out an attractive girl standing right outside the bus.

  “Pedro, tell that girl, ‘Nice boobs,’” he said.

  I understood the word “nice,” but “boobs” was a new one. If he had said, “nice tits,” I would have said, “No way, I’m not saying that.” But “boobs,” that sounded safe. I stuck my head out the window.

  “Hey, girl, nice boobs.”

  “Thank you, asshole!” and she gave me the middle finger.

  Raúl was not shy about dating girls, but I was. After games he always wanted to go out to places, but I was more of a homebody.

  I did try to start up a romance once with a tall volleyball player who was 18 years old. She kind of liked me, so I asked her, “Would you like to be my girlfriend?”

  “Oh no, I don’t want that—you’re leaving after the summer.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I said. “I’ll come back.”

  I was innocent. I didn’t know what else to say, other than to keep asking her to be my girlfriend. She said, “I barely know you,” and I finally asked if we could just go to the movies one night. She said she’d think about it. I took that as a yes, and I came back to report the good news to Shelley, who then knocked me on my butt.

  “Pedro, she can’t be your girlfriend. Maybe she’ll go out with you and have fun, but it’s only for the summer. After you leave, she will date somebody else.”

  “No, no, no, no, she likes me, really,” I said. “She’s a good girl, that’s why I like her. She’s serious, not like the others.”

  In the Dominican, if you ask a girl to be your girlfriend, she’s supposed to think you’re going to marry her.

  Mom kept telling me that things were different in Montana, that a summer romance was only a summer romance. I finally got the message. The girl and I stayed friends. We went out to a park once and walked around. I kissed her once and that was it—my summer romance was short and sweet.

  Playing for the Dodgers, I tried hard to do everything 100 percent correctly. I wanted to pitch well, of course, but I also wanted to follow every rule and execute every drill perfectly, in part not to have another coach get in my face.

  We had just finished our first road game, against the Helena Brewers, about an hour and a half from Great Falls. I heard someone say to get dressed and go, so Mondesí and I went straight to the bus in our uniforms. All I knew from bus rides in the Dominican was that you left the academy in your uniform and you got back on the bus in your uniform. So Mondy and I sat near the front, waiting for the rest of the team. I was excited to have just played my first night game ever, happy that we had won, happy with everything about the start to my American baseball journey. The other players showered, dressed in their street clothes, and then walked onto the bus—and so did Joe Vavra, the manager.

  When he saw Mondy and me, still in our uniforms, he exploded.

  “You fucking dirty bastards,” he ranted. The rest of the full bus grew silent. “You don’t do that in the States, this is not the Dominican Republic.”

  “But, Joe, I didn’t know—”

  “Shut up, you’re fucking dirty—you don’t do that.”

  “Okay, Joe, I’m sorry,” I managed to blubber, my eyes welling up. Before the bus had left the parking lot, my cheeks were wet, and they stayed wet the rest of the bus ride. I stared out the bus window, the silhouette of the distant mountain ridges barely discernible against the Montana night.

  I didn’t know the rules. Nobody had explained to me about showering. Maybe I had missed the instruction to go shower and change, but that would only have been because I left the game quickly so that I would not be late for the bus. To me, that was a misunderstanding, not a crime. But if it was a crime, did I deserve that kind of punishment? At least treat me with decency. When Guy yelled at me, he did it like a father would, with tough love.

  And what kind of adult had the nerve to call me “dirty”? Next to calling my mother a name, calling me dirty is the worst insult, and I still had not let go of what Chico had told me about being sent back to cut sugar canes. By the time we pulled into Great Falls, my tears had dried, but in my head I was engaged in a fierce battle with my fear, anger, pride, and confusion.

  I knew I had to swallow what Joe said and not fight back, or else Chico would be right.

  Oh man, I thought, This is a disaster. Me and Mondy, we’ve messed up.

  As soon as I opened the front door and Shelley saw the hurt in my eyes, that started my tears all over again. She hugged me and waited for me to quiet down and explain what happened.

  She spoke to me like my own mother.

  “Those things happen, Pedro. So you were embarrassed. You have to realize that he’s the coach and it’s his rule. You have to follow those rules. Maybe you just didn’t hear them tell you what to do.”

  Joe was a fiery man, hard-nosed and intense. A couple of days later, we had a talk. He didn’t apologize, but he explained why he was upset, and I was able to explain what I had been thinking.

  He told me, “Petey, don’t worry about it,” but he knew that I took criticism harder than others.

  “Off the field, Pedro was like a little kid, like somebody’s little brother, smiling all the time, just a great persona
lity, but he was sensitive, really sensitive to how others thought of him,” said Vavra later. “If you scolded him in a nice way, sometimes it was overwhelming for him, but Pedro understood. He always would take it to heart.”

  I turned all of my attention toward my pitching, where Vavra found little to correct.

  “He didn’t have the size of Ramon, he was a small kid, wiry, and he had a totally different demeanor off the mound as he had on the mound, unbelievably different—he was a man in a little boy’s body out there throwing a baseball to where he wanted to,” said Vavra. “He pitched no differently in the big leagues when he had success than how he did in Great Falls, Montana. His demeanor on the mound was all business. You don’t see it very often out of any player. There was no fear. He was ready to take on whatever consequences his pitches brought.”

  On the road, I got lit up once against the Butte Copper Kings, who got me for 10 runs in just three innings. I suppose I had an excuse for pitching so badly. We had ridden a bus about seven hours overnight, from Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, in order to get to Butte. They told me that since I was the starter I had to get my sleep, so I got down on the floor of the bus with a pillow and blanket and spent the next few hours bouncing and rolling around the floor of the bus, not catching a wink.

  We arrived in Butte sometime in the late morning, and we stopped at a pizza place for breakfast. I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t eat pizza for breakfast. Nobody on that bus felt much like eating, nobody had showered, and we went out there and lost big-time, with me leading the way, unable to get anyone out.

  I got yanked early.

  It was a long ride back. When I got home, I told Shelley, “I pitched like crap tonight, Mom.”