Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

I remember throwing a couple of good ones right away. Something clicked when Ramon said to take the top finger off and just spike the ball downward to create the spin. We didn’t devote a whole lot of time to my curveball right then—it was more just fooling around with it—but I remembered how natural the ball felt spinning off of my finger.

  I had my first drink when I was in the big leagues: a Budweiser, on the plane from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Ramon gave it to me, and I remember that I just started laughing after I finished it. After we landed, we went to Ramon’s apartment, and he had this bottle of Dom Perignon.

  “This is sour, Ramon—it tastes like vinegar, I don’t want it,” I said and passed the champagne glass back to him.

  “Muchacho, that’s a fine drink. Learn how to drink something that’s really fine.”

  When Ramon told me to do something, I did it. I took the whole thing and drained it and went straight to bed. About a second later I’m going “whooaaa, whooaaa”—the room had started spinning, and it was dragging me along with it. I landed next to the toilet, which I clung on to for dear life for the rest of the night. All from one Budweiser and one glass of champagne. I didn’t drink again for a long time after that. Maybe a sip of beer here and there, but that was it. I had business to take care of.

  6

  “It’s Ramon’s Little Brother”

  WHEN MY OWN teammate started chucking baseballs at me, it was only the latest message relayed to me in the 1992 season that not everyone was as thrilled with my success as I was.

  On a blistering August afternoon in Las Vegas, our Albuquerque (Triple A) Dukes team was taking batting practice. During BP, pitchers shag fly balls in the outfield. It’s what we do. There’s no real value to the experience for pitchers, other than somebody’s got to throw the balls back, so it might as well be the pitchers. That day, like a lot of days that season with the Dukes, I just wasn’t in the mood to stand in the outfield and bake under the desert sun, waiting for a fly ball to track down. I liked a little more action than that, so wearing this little glove I used to use, I stood in shallow left-center field, a little behind our shortstop, my friend Rafael Bournigal, waiting for a fungo to get by Raffy, or else I’d snag a stray ground ball hit by a batter in the cage. I was shagging balls in the infield, basically.

  But that’s not what pitchers usually do.

  Soon balls started flying by me, but they were coming from the outfield—from behind me. When one nearly hit Raffy, he turned to me and said, “Who in the hell is throwing balls this way? The bucket’s over there.” He waved his glove at the ball bucket behind the screen in shallow center field. I glanced behind me and identified the culprits who had been throwing balls at us. Standing in the outfield and staring back at me was Dan Opperman, with his sidekick, the hulking, broad-shouldered, blond-haired Zak Shinall.

  Of course.

  Earlier that season in Colorado, those two pitchers, along with another pitcher, Mike James, had threatened to kick my butt because I was being too fresh. They cornered me in the bathroom of the clubhouse, but I talked my way out of bodily harm that time. Nothing came of it, but I had lost respect for all them, plus a few of our coaches who did not try very hard to disguise their lack of respect for me either.

  A first-round pick from 1987, Opperman came out of the same high school as Greg Maddux, right there in Las Vegas. He was supposed to be one of those hard-throwing studs like Ron Walden, but he could not stay healthy. He had elbow surgery right after he got drafted, then another surgery in 1991. That summer of 1992, five years after he was drafted, he was 23 years old, he was still hurt, and he still had not gotten out of Triple A.

  And who did he have for a teammate?

  Me, this 20-year-old who couldn’t breeze through the Dodgers system any more quickly. My brother was a big leaguer, and I had a big-league attitude too: “I belong here, I belong anywhere I step.” I was this very secure Dominican. A little cocky, I’d say. Others would say a lot cocky. The previous year I had won The Sporting News Minor League Player of the Year, and I also was named the Dodgers’ Minor League Pitcher of the Year. In 1992 I was playing with a lot of teammates who were having a hard time getting out of Triple A, and it was as clear to them as it was to me that this was just a pit stop for me.

  I had an attitude, and I had results. That combination led to jealousy.

  Beginning in spring training, when reporters started to seek me out in the early morning, I felt the eyes of my teammates on my back and a few mutterings and wisecracks when I did a one-on-one interview. I started to get fan mail, which was flattering, but I had to hide it deep in my locker. I felt embarrassed to get it while others got nothing.

  Kevin Kennedy and I had gotten along great when he was the Dukes manager in September 1991, but he was gone in 1992, replaced by Bill Russell. From the start, I could tell Russell never took to me and some of my friends on the team.

  Once, Russell chewed me out for being late to a meeting he had called suddenly. I had been in the bathroom and yelled out, “Tell him I’ll be there in a minute, I’m in the bathroom.” Somebody yelled back, “Okay, Pedro, sure thing.” The message never made it to Russell somehow. I swallowed that one, never told Russell a thing, just let him lay into me in front of my teammates. Some of them looked as if they were enjoying the moment.

  When I locked eyes with Opperman in the outfield, I saw a jealous man staring back.

  “It was Opperman,” I told Raffy. I glanced back again and saw another ball sailing toward me. Opperman made no attempt to pretend he hadn’t thrown the ball.

  I gave him the same death stare I reserved for batters.

  “Hey, you fucking prick, come over and shag behind us,” he yelled to me.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You better get your skinny ass back here shagging behind us or else I’m going to kick your ass.”

  “No, you’re not. And you know what, as a matter of fact, now that you’re coming closer to me, why don’t you throw another ball? Maybe you won’t miss me this time.”

  He walked right up to me and said, “You want me to kick your ass now?”

  “Why don’t you try?”

  Opperman reached out to grab me at the same time I took a swing at him. I’m sure that I landed a punch on his nose and he went down, bleeding, but to this day he swears neither of us landed a punch. Too bad there were no TV cameras there that afternoon, because they would have recorded an ugly scrum among teammates. All the infielders and outfielders, plus the batters, raced in to pull us apart, but not everyone was in peacekeeping mode. Another teammate, Steve Searcy, also a pitcher, wrapped his arms around me to keep me from diving on top of Opperman, who was trying to stand up. Henry Rodriguez, Raúl Mondesí, and José Muñoz jumped into the middle of the dog-pile, looking for someone to fight in order to defend me. Muñoz barked at Searcy, “Let him go, let him go,” so Opperman and I could fight “like two men.” Searcy held on tighter until Muñoz threw a punch and connected with Searcy’s head. That made him drop me, and I was down on the ground with Opperman. We were about to resume pummeling each other when our skipper, Bill Russell, dove in and got in between us.

  “Pedro, that’s enough, stop it,” he said. “Both of you guys, stop it.”

  We let go of each other’s jerseys, keeping an angry, wary eye on each other. Then, unbelievably, Russell told me, not Opperman, to “get back to the clubhouse.”

  Everyone on the coaching staff, including Russell, huddled over Opperman, making sure he was okay. I’m fine, thanks for asking. Disgusted, I headed to the clubhouse, alone. Just as I was about to walk in, I looked back and there were Opperman, James, and Shinall, walking in the same direction, with Russell and a trainer.

  “I’m not going in there if they’re going in too,” I told Russell. I was scared. I knew if those three went into a clubhouse with no other players in there besides me, they were going to kick my ass.

  I grabbed a bat.

  “I’m not going in there with those three
guys. If any one of them comes in, I’m smacking somebody.”

  “Pedro, let go of that bat and get in there.”

  I was way too amped up to drop the bat. I only gripped it harder, which made me wave it more menacingly. Finally, after more pleading from Russell, I put the bat down.

  My time with the Albuquerque Dukes went south from there. Russell acted as if he did not want me around him, and Claude Osteen, my pitching coach, said he wouldn’t work with me, that I wasn’t professional enough. They had already gotten upset with me once because after I gave up a home run to one of the Brewers’ Triple A kids, I went right back inside to the next batter. Boom! I didn’t hit him, but I really shaved him. I wasn’t that surprised that he charged me, but once that fight died down, Bill and Claude aired me out, right there on the mound. They told me I got the team into a fight for no good reason, and they didn’t believe me when I explained that it hadn’t been intentional.

  Russell told me I was a piece of shit, that I shouldn’t be pitching in Triple A, and he forced me to apologize to my teammates for getting them into a fight. I did apologize to them, but from that day forward I carried a grudge against Bill and Claude for leaving me naked out there on the mound.

  I was on my own after that.

  Claude wouldn’t watch my bullpens, wouldn’t try to help, even though at one point I started to struggle and needed some help.

  That night of the Opperman fight, Ramon called. And he wasn’t pleased.

  “You know what they’re saying up here?” he said, his voice rising. “They’re saying that you’re a cancer in the clubhouse, that you’re a bad guy and causing trouble with everybody.”

  I tried to defend myself, but Ramon wasn’t listening, not when he could give me an earful instead.

  Meanwhile, Fernando, my agent, was also getting calls from the general manager, Fred Claire, that summer.

  “Fern, will you talk to Pedro? We really like him, but he’s got to control his temper.”

  The Dodgers were wondering if something was bothering me.

  Nothing was. My problem, if I had one, was that I would not back down from guys who had a problem with me. If someone was jealous of me, that was their problem. If the jealousy crossed into my personal space, then I would stand up for myself and fight, I didn’t care how big the person was I was fighting. I wasn’t going to let someone stand in the way of where I was going.

  Eat or be eaten, that’s how I looked at it.

  Later that summer, Opperman did apologize to me. He said he started the whole thing and that he should not have done it. It still did not change the fact that neither of us liked each other. But he did right by me for apologizing.

  That July I was selected to pitch in the Triple A Pacific Coast League All-Star Game, which was a nice honor, but I was bothered when Pedro Astacio, not me, got called up for a spot start on the big-league team. Everyone was proud of Astacio. He was a big, tall right-hander with excellent stuff, also my friend and running partner, but I was having a better year than he was and thought I should have been called up.

  I didn’t try very hard to hide my disappointment. I will never know who did it, but one morning I was in my hotel room and the phone rang. Someone with a gruff voice said, “Pedro, you’ve been called up to the big leagues. Get your stuff together and be in the lobby in 15 minutes, you’ve got a plane to catch.” It was 4:30 in the morning. I’m no morning person, but I bolted out of bed, ran around the room like a crazy chicken, stuffing my clothes into my bag, and made it downstairs in 10 minutes.

  The only person in the lobby was the night clerk, half-asleep.

  I went back to my room and called Ramon to tell him what had happened and see if he knew anything about my call-up. I woke him up.

  “Pedro, you got pranked. Go back to sleep.”

  They got me good, I had to admit.

  Our team was awful. We finished in last place. When September came, I still had not gotten my call-up. Everyone else, it seemed, got theirs, but I stayed with the Dukes, throwing bullpens by myself, most of my friends gone. I was thinking, Wow, what have I done so badly that nobody even wants to watch me throw?

  I called Guy Conti a lot that season. I told him how badly things were going, and I also confided in Bert Hooton, my coach from Double A. Bert and I had always got along. I complained about how I was being treated, and Bert told me to keep my composure. “Don’t lose your temper, Pedro, keep everything under control—you’ve got nothing to win and a lot to lose.”

  I tried, I really did.

  Finally, almost a week after everyone else had been called up, Russell summoned me into his office and handed me a letter.

  “You’ve been called up,” he said without smiling and also without mentioning that he had been holding on to the letter for several days.

  That was how I got introduced to the big leagues—begrudgingly.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to get the call. There’s only one first time, but it was anticlimactic. Given everything that had happened to me with Albuquerque, I felt as if nobody truly wanted me there in the first place. It was almost as if they felt, “Hey, what the hell, we might as well just get him up there already.”

  So I got called up, and for the first week or so they did not use me, not once. I turned sour. I was out in the bullpen, and I had no idea when Tommy Lasorda, my new manager, was going to put me in a game. I had been starting with Albuquerque, pitching every five days, and then I found myself not only in a big-league bullpen but not pitching in a big-league bullpen.

  I asked Ramon, “How is this supposed to work? When do I throw on the side?” Ramon said, “No, you don’t throw on the side anymore, you just throw when you need to throw.”

  I was completely on my own.

  On September 24 at Dodger Stadium, I was feeling jumpy. It was the seventh inning, and I was figuring today was going to be another day for me to sit and watch a Dodgers baseball game from the bullpen. The Dodgers relievers had a cramped space, nothing more than a shack tucked into the bullpen in left field where we would sit with a beat-up TV and watch what was going on. I would get claustrophobic in there, so that day I stepped out and told the bullpen catcher to set up, I wanted to throw. I was pent-up and pissed off about not pitching, and I worked it out with my pitches. I started unloading fastball after fastball, pounding the catcher’s mitt. Boom, boom, boom. Pow, pow, pow.I worked up a sweat quickly and took a seat on a picnic table to catch my breath.

  The phone rang. Tommy barked at the bullpen coach, Mark Cressey, to get left-handed veteran John Candelaria up. Candelaria was a 38-year-old veteran in his 18th and next-to-last season, and he was not exactly worried about his job. He had been drinking beer in the bullpen that afternoon.

  “Johnny, let’s go, Tommy’s calling for you.”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself,” said Candelaria. “Tell him to use one of these rookies he has here.”

  Cressey translated Candelaria for Lasorda.

  “Candy doesn’t want to pitch,” said Cressey.

  Tommy asked Cressey who had been warming up.

  And Cressey said, “It’s Ramon’s little brother.”

  Now, as proud as I was to be Ramon’s brother, and as much as I wanted to be like him, we were two totally different people. He was a superstar, and I was still a nobody. But still, I had earned the right to be where I was.

  Ramon’s uniform then read “MARTINEZ, 48,” while mine was “P. MARTINEZ, 45.”

  I had gone through every single level in the minor leagues, I did everything I had to do to get in the big leagues, and when I got my first call to pitch in my first big-league game, the Dodgers didn’t even use my name.

  I was still “Ramon’s little brother.”

  So instead of running to the mound to throw my first pitch in the big leagues with butterflies fluttering in my stomach, I’m running out there packed hard with gunpowder, my fuse lit.

  I wasn’t Pedro Martinez, I was “Ramon’s little brother.”

>   I wanted to throw nothing but fastballs, just so I could get hit. If I got bashed around enough, maybe they’d send me home, to a place where people knew my name.

  I don’t know how or why, but my anger did not ruin my control, it only made it sharper. When I’m mad, my face turns to stone and my eyes narrow, and that’s the look I had for the first major league batter I ever faced, Reggie Sanders. He hacked at my first-pitch fastball and popped it up behind home plate to the catcher. I gave up a single to future Hall of Famer Barry Larkin, no shame in that, and then I got Tim Costo to strike out looking on my third pitch of the at-bat—my first of 3,154 career strikeouts.

  It was the first strikeout of my professional career, but I was not impressed, only seething.

  I gave up a single and my first walk, to Paul O’Neill, in the top of the ninth, but I stranded the base runners on second and third base and left the game, an 8–4 loss, without giving up a run.

  I saw no reason to celebrate.

  The clubbies tracked down a game ball, and Mitch, the clubby with the good handwriting, wrote on it: “Pedro Martinez, first big-league game.”

  He handed the ball to me, but sparks were still flying inside. I walked out to the right-field corner and airmailed that ball up and over Dodger Stadium’s right-field seats, over the back wall of the stadium, and into Chavez Ravine.

  I told one of the radio guys after the game, “I don’t consider this my debut. This is not the way I expect it to be in the big leagues. I’m a starter, I’m not a reliever.”

  Of course, I heard about that comment from Ramon afterwards.

  “You know what, Pedro, this game is not easy. You need to understand, that’s not the way you go about things here. You needed to say, ‘Oh, I’m really happy, and I’m excited to have had the opportunity,’ and all that.

  My big brother was right, but I still couldn’t help myself.

  7

  Off the Bus

  THE DODGERS AND I were arguing over two games.