“Get Cobra up.”
Cobra was my nickname from September when the Dodgers bullpen guys decided I had an arm like that cartoon character, Cobra the Space Pirate, who had a bazooka on his (left) arm. I got up in a rush to warm up and got in the game for the seventh. I had a 1-2-3 inning, then pitched part of the eighth, gave up two walks and a hit, and left, getting charged with two runs.
We wound up losing, but by relieving Ramon, I made us the first set of brothers to pitch back to back, one relieving the other, in baseball history. That was a nice little footnote to the start of my almost-full first season in the big leagues.
I had arrived—this time for good, I told myself. I wasn’t starting like I wanted to be, but I would forget about that once I got on the mound. Mainly a fastball-changeup reliever, I had command of both pitches and my confidence was high.
I got off to a rough start, allowing five runs in my first two outings, but by the beginning of June I had whittled my ERA to 1.78. I notched the first win of my career, against the Mets, pitching two hitless innings. The sixth out was a satisfying seven-pitch at-bat against Bobby Bonilla, who was having one of his monster years. The at-bat ended with Bobby swinging and missing at strike three.
On July 2, we were in Montreal, and I had just given up a couple of runs and a couple of walks to the Expos when the legendary Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, who was doing TV for the Dodgers, came down to the clubhouse.
“I want to talk to you, Pedro.”
“Yes, Mr. Drysdale.”
“I think you’re tipping.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah, I think those guys are getting you.”
He grabbed a glove and a ball and showed me what I was doing.
When I threw a fastball, my fingers stayed on top of the ball and I kept the glove closed tight around the ball. When I threw the changeup, my fingers splayed around the ball and the glove fanned out as a result.
“Can you get that finger and wrist inside and keep your glove open all the time?” he asked me. As soon as he pointed it out, I knew he was right. I had seen Greg Maddux and a lot of the other good pitchers fanning their gloves like that, but I had never stopped to think why.
Sadly, later that night Don had a heart attack in his hotel room and died.
From that day forward, I kept my hand and wrist fully inside my fanned-out glove, courtesy of Mr. Drysdale.
The Dodgers began to trust me to appear in more and more late and close, high-leverage situations, and I rewarded their trust. There was one four-game stretch later in July at home against the Expos that I know caught the attention of their manager, Felipe Alou, and general manager, Dan Duquette. I pitched in three of those games, and in 4⅔ innings, I didn’t allow a run and struck out nine Expos.
My catcher on most days was Mike Piazza. Piazza was a rookie like me, although he had gotten called up that first day in September of 1992 from Albuquerque, where I was held back for no good reason. I had known Mike for years, dating back to the summer of 1988, when he spent a summer at Campo Las Palmas. Everybody there was surprised to hear that he was the son of a millionaire, because he was such a hard worker, spending all day with us and then going to catch with Licey on some nights. I didn’t think he had much talent for catching back then, and he wasn’t much of a hitter in 1988 either.
Mike and I had played together in Albuquerque in 1992 and had no problems, although I still wouldn’t have called him a good catcher. I didn’t see how he could improve, defensively, given the tools he had: he was a tall, lanky guy who was slow. As far as calling pitches, it took him some time to get to know what I liked and to adjust to what I was trying to do. He saw too much as a catcher, which meant that he tried to react to everything, and the result was that he was not that smooth of a receiver. When it came to throwing out runners, he had an average to below-average arm. But by 1993, boy, could he hit. Like so many hitters that decade who found sudden success at the plate, he had added some weight and bulked up that lanky frame of his. His bat started to fly! In 1993 he wound up having a great offensive season for a catcher: 35 jacks and 112 RBI.
The more the Dodgers needed me, the better I felt. Still, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that Tommy Lasorda and the Dodgers did not think highly enough of me. I was being trusted in key situations more, yes, but nobody seemed motivated to switch me out of the bullpen and into the rotation. I don’t think they trusted what I was or could be.
“That pissed him off,” said Lasorda, “because I already had my starters from last year. We were kind of breaking him in nice and easy. I knew he wanted to be a starter, sure, but at that particular time, we weren’t ready for another starter.”
Fernando took an angry call or three from me that summer, when I would complain that I was being wasted in the bullpen, I wasn’t pitching enough, and the Dodgers didn’t like me.
In the off-season prior to 1993, I had surgery on my left shoulder because I had hurt myself on a weird swing at the end of the 1992 season. Dr. Frank Jobe had done the surgery, and after seeing my shoulder, he put one and one together and thought he got to two: Pedro hurt his left shoulder swinging—how long before he hurts his right one throwing?
Tommy says now, “sure, absolutely,” that he thought I could be a starter, but in the same breath he adds that “Dr. Jobe said he couldn’t stand up to being a starting pitcher” and that he could not help but be swayed by Dr. Jobe.
Even though I never had any physical issues with my right shoulder while I was a Dodger, I sensed that there was more to me being parked in the bullpen and not in the rotation. They said they did not have a vacancy there, but things got weird.
In the middle of September, the Dodgers did ask me to start, in Colorado. It was Tom Candiotti’s turn, but either he or the Dodgers or both decided that a knuckleballer at mile-high altitude was a bad idea. So they told me I’d get my first big-league start at Coors Field. And I had nothing—I blew up like a balloon. Maybe it was pitching on five days’ rest after five months of pitching every other or every day, maybe it was the thin air, maybe it was both. At least I kept the ball in the park, but I gave up five runs on six hits, three of them triples, with three walks in 2⅓ innings.
Toward the end of the season, I remember Orel Hershiser championing my cause. He would tell Tommy, “Hey, you’ve got to let Pedro be a stopper or a starter.” Neither happened, but at least Tommy trusted me to pitch in high-leverage situations, and I usually came through.
When I got to save somebody’s skin in the game, or if someone told me, “Hey, drill that guy,” I was happy to do it, which is one reason why the season ended on a high and happy note.
We were out of the pennant race, but the Giants were not. Our seasons ended with a four-game series at Dodgers Stadium. The Giants arrived with 100 wins and tied with the Braves.
We lost the first game, and in the second game Ramon got the start. He had a history with both Will Clark and Matt Williams, dating back to some 1991 home runs and hit batsmen.
Clark had a history of popping off to the media, and he came into Los Angeles with a big mouth too. To me, he did not look like a nice guy, and when Ramon pitched to him, I was almost ashamed to see that Ramon was not pitching him aggressively. First time up, Clark, with two outs, hit a single, and when he got on first base he held up one finger, like That’s the first one, that’s one. That’s disrespectful. I saw that from the bullpen and thought, Look at this piece of shit. I couldn’t wait to see what Ramon was going to do with Clark in the next at-bat. I was positive Ramon was going to hit him. With his first pitch, though, he pitched away, and Clark went with the pitch, doubling it down the left-field line, deep, for a double.
From second base, he held up two fingers.
That’s two.
I was fuming. Between innings, I ran in from the bullpen and went right up to Ramon’s ear when he got back to the dugout.
“Bro, are you going to hit him or what? When are you going to hit him, when are you going to h
it him?”
But Ramon never hit him, and he gave up one more single to him, and we wound up losing. The Giants were still tied with the Braves, with two games to go in the season.
The next game I got the ball in the ninth inning. We were trailing, 5–3, and J. R. Phillips, Clark, and Williams were due up. As I warmed up I saw Clark come out with Phillips to take a few swings from the on-deck circle and get a look at me. I wasn’t thinking about the standings or Phillips—all I could think about was Clark disrespecting Ramon the day before. I improvised a plan. I made sure that one or two of my warm-up pitches went over Piazza’s head and mitt, reaching the backstop on the fly.
Hey, typical rookie—I didn’t have much control, I guess I was a little wild that day.
When Clark came up, I gave him something that he couldn’t hit with my first pitch, and he fouled it off. With my second pitch, I threw a pitch pretty close to his head. He ducked down and barked at Jerry Crawford, the home plate umpire, “Is that little shit trying to hit me?” And Crawford went, “No, Will, I don’t think so. He was a little wild warming up.”
As Clark jawed with Crawford, he was staring at me the whole time because he knew what I knew: I was trying to hit him—not in the head, but any other body part. I stared back at him, hard. He knew that I would try to hit him again, which is why I painted a fastball away on the outer corner, on the black, for a called strike.
Clark fouled off the next pitch, but I was toying with him at this point. The count was 1-2 and I could waste a pitch, so I threw it behind him, just to piss him off. Clark turned to Crawford this time and yipped, “Wahh—he’s trying to hit me, he’s trying to hit me!” Crawford didn’t want to hear it. None of the umpires liked Clark—he was a whiner and a yapper. Crawford clapped his hands and said, “Let’s go.” Clark was backed so far away from the plate this time, I just went boom and painted a strike away that he flailed at for strike three.
The next batter up was Williams, and I could hear Clark’s shrill voice whining about me from the Giants’ dugout the whole time. We lost that game, but the next day—the last day of the season, with the Braves and Giants still tied—we kissed Clark and the Giants bye-bye with a 12–1 victory.
I finished the season with a 2.61 ERA, 14 holds, two saves, and 119 strikeouts in 107 innings. I finished ninth in National League Rookie of the Year balloting, and I felt like a success. Not a total success, but I felt like I was on my way to where I wanted to go.
Orel had kept telling me that I should be a closer or a starter, and Ramon told me I always should be a starter. And I knew that I still wanted to start. I knew more than that. After a full season of successfully getting out big-league hitters, my conviction that I needed to start grew only stronger. In fact, I knew I could dominate.
As soon as the season was over I told Tommy Lasorda, “Tommy, I think I had a good season for the Dodgers. I did this in relief, but that’s not my role. If you can in the future, I’d like for you to give me a chance to start.”
“Well, Pedro, we’re going to make some decisions after we come back from Taipei and Japan,” said Tommy.
Ramon and I went overseas on a weeklong exhibition tour as soon as the season ended. The flights were grueling, back and forth across the Pacific, and when I got back home to the Dominican, I was beat up and gassed, ready to relax for the off-season.
In the middle of November, I traveled up north to a resort. The first night I got there, I learned that the Dodgers had made their decision about me.
They made me a starter.
A starter for the Montreal Expos.
PART III
1993–1997
9
Je Ne Parle Pas Français
“PEDRO, WE TRADED you to Montreal for Delino DeShields,” Fred Claire said over the phone. “We were in need of a second baseman, and we had to make this move. I think over there you’re going to have a chance to start.”
I was distraught.
“Fred, why? Why? What have I done to you? What about my friends, what about Ramon? I don’t know anybody there, Fred,” I said.
He had little to say by way of an explanation.
“They’re going to take care of you over there,” he said.
I put the phone down and found myself once again with wet cheeks.
I wasn’t going to be with Ramon, I wasn’t going to be with Bournigal, not with Henry, not with Mondy, all my teammates. Even Piazza. Who was going to catch me? Everyone who was with me from the minor leagues on would still be in Los Angeles and it would be just me, alone, in Montreal.
And I didn’t know any French.
That’s what I thought. I wasn’t thinking. Just reacting. I thought Montreal was a nice place for a city, but as a baseball town, it was a dump, the furthest thing from Los Angeles in terms of exposure and payroll. I had pitched there only twice, the last time in July, when Mr. Drysdale gave me that tip about tipping pitches. I never thought of it for a second as a place I’d ever pitch or that there was a single person there that I knew.
I had never even thought about being traded at all. Nobody had ever mentioned to me that that was what the Dodgers were thinking. And why would they think about trading me?
I called Ramon.
“I got traded—to Montreal,” I sniffled out.
Ramon was tired of listening to me cry over the phone. He got right to the point.
“Hey, this is your chance,” he said. “You got traded, now you’re going to be a starter. This is your chance to be whoever you want to be.”
I slowly stopped feeling so sorry for myself. I did stop crying, at least. I remembered that Felipe Alou was Montreal’s manager. He was Dominican, and he had played against my dad when they were both teenagers. I thought playing for Felipe could be all right, but he wasn’t going to be my friend. Who would be? Felipe’s son, Moises, was there, and also Mel Rojas, another Dominican, but they were five, six years older than me and were part of Ramon’s crowd, not mine.
Again, sadness washed over me.
Why, Fred?
What did I ever do to you?
My issue was not so much with Montreal. I understood why Montreal and its general manager, Dan Duquette, wanted me.
But why did the Dodgers give up on me?
I can’t say I ever got an explanation that I believed or that made any sense.
Yes, the Dodgers had many good starting pitchers: Ramon, Orel, Pedro Astacio, Tom Candiotti, and Kevin Gross. That was a strong rotation—still on the young side too.
And yes, once free agent second baseman Jody Reed turned down the Dodgers’ offer after the 1993 season, the club needed to find a second baseman. Twenty-four-year-old DeShields was an attractive choice.
At least Fred accepted responsibility for pulling the trigger on this trade, and at least Fred made the call to me himself. I know now there was a lot more to the trade than needing a second baseman. Fred was the type of GM who listened to those on the inside. He wouldn’t go rogue on a trade like that. When it came time to speak up, nobody told him, “Fred, this will be a terrible mistake—don’t do it.”
Nobody on the Dodgers tried to stop Fred, and the Expos did everything they could to grease the skids to get me to Montreal.
When the Expos’ inner circle met at the Fort Lauderdale Marriott in September 1993, my name came up as a solution to Dennis Martinez’s departure.
Dennis Martinez, the Expos’ ace that season, was headed for free agency, and even though he was turning 40 in 1994, the Expos were not going to be able to afford his next contract. They needed to replace his innings—he led the team with 224⅔ innings in 1993—and wanted to find a young pitcher for the job. They had identified three targets: Aaron Sele of the Red Sox, Pedro Astacio, and me.
I had left quite a good impression on the Expos that season—16 strikeouts in 10⅓ innings and a 1.74 ERA in eight games against Montreal. Everybody at that meeting—Dan, his top scout Eddie Haas, their manager Felipe Alou, Kevin Malone, the scouting director, and the
scout Eddie Robinson—wanted me.
I had pitched for Felipe once over the winter, when he took our Dominican team to the Caribbean Series in Hermosillo, Mexico. “You’ve got to jump on that,” he told Dan about seizing the moment if they could trade for me.
They had other voices advocating for me too. Kevin Kennedy, my first Triple A manager, was with the Expos then as the farm director, plus Tim Johnson, a former Dodgers minor league coach. They each liked me more than Astacio—they thought that my stuff was better, that my fastball was more electric, and that since I was three years younger I had more potential.
And they all thought I could start.
In November, when the general managers held their annual meetings at the Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, Duquette and Haas went to visit Claire and Mel Didier, a top scout, in the Dodgers’ suite.
Duquette said that Fred told him that he had his eye on second basemen. He had some interest in DeShields, and he would think about trading me for Delino, but he made it clear that if he could re-sign his free agent second baseman, Jody Reed, they wouldn’t need DeShields and there would be no reason to make a trade.
Dan had to wait for the Reed negotiations to play out, and they played right into his hands. Reed’s agents asked for a three-year deal worth many millions of dollars more than the Dodgers offered. Claire balked, and to the delight of Duquette, Reed took his gripe to the airwaves.
Pedro Page 9