As he drove home from Olympic Stadium one night Duquette heard Reed on the radio, saying how insulted he was by the Dodgers’ offer.
Keep talking, Jody, keep talking, Duquette thought to himself. For the first time, he began to believe that he and Fred were going to be having more discussions about me.
When the Dodgers met to discuss trading me, Dr. Jobe expressed his concerns, based on what he saw when he cut open my left (nonpitching) shoulder after the 1992 season, about how easily that injury had happened on an awkward swing. He questioned my durability and was worried that the same injury would occur with the shoulder of my throwing arm.
There were 10 people in that Dodgers’ meeting, so it was no surprise that somebody leaked the Dodgers’ medical concern. Word reached Dan about the Dodgers’ worries, but he didn’t see any red flags. He had seen me finish the season strong, he had seen me make short work of his hitters, and he had supporters like Kennedy, who thought that back in 1991, in Triple A, I was close to the big leagues then. And Alou spoke of my makeup. He told Duquette that besides being impressed with how I pitched for him as a starter in Hermosillo, he knew that I also had the “heart of a lion” and was fearless on the mound.
Once free-agent second baseman Robby Thompson signed and the Reed situation deteriorated, the Dodgers met again about me. Claire said he wanted to hear from two people about trading me: Tommy Lasorda and Ralph Avila.
“I respected both of them and their judgment, but I thought, Here’s the manager of the team and here’s the man who signed Pedro, and here is the deal—tell me what you think,” recalled Claire. “In my memory bank, there was nothing there that said, ‘Fred, I wouldn’t do this, I think this is a mistake,’ or whatever. That being said, they didn’t make the trade. I made the trade.”
Lasorda said recently that “I don’t think I was asked about trading him, no,” and that if he had been asked, he would have said, “Don’t do it.”
I don’t think Tommy’s memory even resembles the truth. Like the Dodgers, he didn’t know who he had on his hands.
Claire called Duquette at 4:00 PM, Montreal time, on November 19, 1993.
“Jody Reed is going to be turning down our offer,” Claire told Duquette. “We’ll trade you Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields.”
Duquette said he needed to check in quickly with the Expos owner, Claude Brochu, who had already been briefed on the potential trade. “Fantastic,” said Brochu. “Let’s do it.”
The announcement was made on Friday night.
The reaction in Montreal was swift and decisively negative.
DeShields was immensely popular. One 22-year-old Expos season-ticket-holder sent Duquette a letter right after the trade, essentially saying, “How could you trade DeShields for an unknown pitcher like Pedro Martinez?” Duquette replied on November 24: “Thank you for your letter and concern for the Montreal Expos. Let me remind you how vital pitching is to a championship team. I think you will feel a lot better about our trade after you see Pedro Martinez pitch for the Montreal Expos. Regards, Dan Duquette, Vice-President, General Manager.”
In Los Angeles, the media viewed the trade as a big score for the Dodgers.
“I’ve said along the way that I should have known that the trade may not work out because the press was so in favor of our end of the deal once the trade was made,” said Claire.
But DeShields never quite made it in Los Angeles. He played three years there, and instead of becoming a better offensive player as he approached his peak age—25, 26, and 27—his numbers declined. His OPS with the Dodgers was .653, a steep drop from .740 in Montreal, his batting average dropped from .277 to .241, and while his Montreal WAR totaled 10.0 over four years, it was just 3.2 in three years with Los Angeles. For comparison’s sake, my WAR in my first three years with the Expos was 11.1. Delino went on to have a 13-season career, playing for the Cardinals, Orioles, and Cubs.
“If you judge [the trade] only in hindsight, it wasn’t a good trade, it was a terrible trade—it was a terrible trade,” said Claire. “I thought we were getting a very good young player, I knew we were trading a very good young player, and it did not work out at all. Pedro pitched great. Delino can speak for himself, but he kind of struggled in the environment of Los Angeles. It turned out to be a trade that did not work out at all.”
It’s rare that any trade is either a win-win or a loss-loss. Time would show that, for the Dodgers, it was a clear loss, but to me their mistake was not making a lousy trade. Their mistake was forcibly removing me from the first baseball home I ever had. Years before Eleodoro signed me, I had identified with Dodger blue the moment Ramon signed with them in 1984, when I was a 12-year-old.
In awe of my older brother, I bled blue like he did.
I never had the backing of everyone in the Dodgers, but enough people—like Eleodoro Arias, Guy Conti, Goose Gregson, Dave Wallace, Burt Hooton, and Kevin Kennedy—thought highly enough of my competitiveness and inner drive to help me become a better pitcher and keep my head on straight when I bumped up against adversity.
After all the adversity I overcame, from cultural shock, jealous teammates, distrustful coaches, and ultimately disbelief that my head and body would hold up as a big-league starter, the Dodgers prized an outsider more highly than one of their own.
The Dodgers gave up on me. They turned their back on me, which is why, to this day, my back is turned on them.
10
Far North of the Border
THAT JANUARY, I stepped off the plane in Montreal, my first time as an Expo, and the warmest article of clothing I had with me was the short-sleeved shirt I was wearing.
Temperatures hovered between the single and negative digits while I was there. Never before had I experienced coldness even remotely like that in my life. That one time in the mountains near Reno, when we stopped the bus and I got out to make a snowball—my first encounter with snow—lasted about five minutes and it was maybe 60 degrees at the time. That was fun. Quick fun. This visit to Montreal felt like walking into an ice locker and having the door slam shut behind me.
To a Montrealer, the weather didn’t even rate a mention. Mark Routtenberg, one of the minority owners of the Expos, saw me that visit and said that I had turned almost white I looked so cold. The Expos handed me a puffy blue satin Expos jacket as soon as I got off of the plane, and it never came off me. I think I slept in it.
I didn’t read the papers while I was there, but I knew from the questions and the tone of the questions that the city of Montreal was not thrilled that DeShields was gone. They didn’t seem to care that I didn’t view myself as his replacement. I got it that he was popular and that everybody thought he was going to become a superstar. And that I was a nobody to them. All I knew of DeShields was that I had faced him three times in the summer of 1993: I struck him out looking, and he got to me for a couple of singles the other times. I didn’t see what the big deal was.
I also heard the cracks that the Expos wanted me as Dennis Martinez’s replacement because they wouldn’t have to spend the money to buy a new jersey for me. That one had the ring of truth to it.
They bused us around the city during a winter caravan designed to drum up interest in the team during the dead of winter. I got a taste for part of what was in store for me after only a couple of hours with Larry Walker, one of my newest teammates. An established veteran from British Columbia, Canada, he was the Expos’ best player (0-for-2 against me the previous summer, with an intentional walk). Larry was an authentic Canadian, so I trusted him to help me with my French, and he was only too eager to help me. I noticed right away that the women in Montreal were gorgeous. I didn’t get enough chances to meet many on that first trip, but when I did, I found out quickly that I spoke better English than they did, but I could not speak any French.
Suddenly, learning French became very important.
I leaned on Larry for advice.
He suggested that “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir” was a good icebreake
r. I tried it out on one girl, and she furrowed her eyebrows, shook her head, and clucked, “Oooooh.” I thought I had just told her, “You’re beautiful,” not “Do you want to go to bed with me?”
Maybe I should have just asked Larry how to say “nice boobs.”
Felipe Alou, my new manager, and I shared a couple of conversations, in Spanish, during that caravan. In his deep, gravelly voice, he reminded me about playing against my dad when they were both amateurs in the Dominican. “Your dad was more of a man than you are, better developed. You’re skinny. And he had a better arm than you. You think you’ve got a good arm—your dad threw harder.”
The best piece of news Felipe gave me was that I would be one of his starters.
I met Dan Duquette for the first time too. I didn’t know this, but he was about to take a job with the Red Sox as their general manager. Dan told me that I was his favorite player. I didn’t realize at the time how much heat he took for trading away DeShields. He got ripped for it.
I told Dan that I appreciated the opportunity to come to Montreal and be a starting pitcher, but I never got to pitch for him. The next time I saw him was in spring training in 1994, when the Expos played the Red Sox.
He gave me a big smile and said, “Hey, Pedro, how you doing?”
“Ohhh, it’s Dan Duquette—nice trade, Dan! You bring me to Siberia and then you leave! Thanks a lot, Danny.”
“What’s the matter, you don’t like the weather up in Montreal?”
“Man, it’s cold. If it was such a great place, how come you left?”
He said he had grown up in Massachusetts and he had always wanted to work for the Red Sox.
We got to continue our conversation a few years later, long after I learned how to love Montreal.
In Montreal, I never had a problem being a person of color. A blend of everyone lived there—blacks, Caribbeans, Greeks, Jews, Asians, whites—and everyone lived peacefully with one another. Sports-wise, Montreal was a hockey town. The Expos never drew a large crowd to Olympic Stadium, whether or not I was pitching. The fans who showed up were very vocal and loud, but baseball was a sideshow. Besides hockey, there were too many other things for people to do in Montreal than for a critical mass of them to show up to watch baseball.
I had a two-bedroom apartment in the heart of the city, and I used to leave my car parked there for days at a time, never once needing it during a homestand. I’d walk out the door and walk up and down Saint Catherine Street, Peel Street, wherever I wanted, and nobody would ever bother me. They wouldn’t even recognize me.
Once Mark Routtenberg and I went out to eat after I had pitched and won a game. We walked up and down Saint Catherine Street, and I started to feel restless. I didn’t want attention, but at the same time I thought it was kind of odd that nobody even recognized me.
I had just started and won a game for the city’s baseball team, and nobody knew who I was? I was a private person, but c’mon, I didn’t need that much privacy. After eating, Mark said he wanted to visit one of his Guess Jeans stores, so we went there, and again, nobody had a clue who I was. Mark told me that he took Larry Walker into the store once and it turned into a big deal. I was not even a tiny deal, so I decided to have some fun with it. I went up to one of his employees and asked if I could borrow his badge. I started walking up to customers.
“Hi, can I help you?”
A guy said, “Yes, I would like to see these in a medium.” So I found him a medium. I spent maybe half an hour directing customers to the dressing rooms, helping them find the right size, offering my advice on which pair to choose, and ringing them up from behind the counter.
Mark kept saying he couldn’t believe I was doing that, but I didn’t want him to say anything to anyone. Nobody ever caught on.
My teammates, along with some of the security guards who worked near the dugouts at Olympic Stadium, helped me fine-tune my French, especially the dirty words. For the other words, I practiced when I could, trying to read the newspaper and applying the same rules as Spanish. I could roll my r’s no problem, but I never could master the way French-speakers could roll those double r’s, like in arret (stop), from the back of their throats.
I got along just fine with my English, enough French, and even a little bit of Spanish here and there.
I was single then and had plenty of motivation to learn enough French to speak, properly, with all the beautiful women. Whenever I wanted to date someone, I could. The bountiful strip clubs were not my scene. If I saw the prettiest woman in the world, I would rather see her in clothes on the street than dancing naked for me at a strip club. In fact, I would pay her not to see her dancing in those places. I still had fun in Montreal, but it didn’t occur in the strip clubs.
Watching naked women dancing wasn’t my thing, but believe me, I had no hang-ups about the human body. Au contraire, beginning in Montreal, I started to shed my own clothes when it came to spending time in the clubhouse and it was only my teammates around. One of my teammates then, Cliff Floyd, told me I should build my own compound with high walls so that I could walk around and be a nudist. My wife, Carolina, thinks I would be happiest living in a jungle like Tarzan, wearing nothing and just eating fruit from the trees. Part of the reason why I felt comfortable was that once the 1994 season got under way, I was beginning to feel as if Montreal was going to work out fine for me.
For me, the hardest adjustment to life in Montreal was not having Ramon right there to turn to. I had always relied on him for advice—on baseball, life, everything. And now I was largely on my own. I felt liberated living in a nonjudgmental place, and I grew into a man during my time in Montreal. I often wondered what would have happened if I had stayed in Los Angeles, close to my brother but still in his shadow. And stuck in the Dodgers’ bullpen. Nobody with the Dodgers in a high-enough position had seen me as part of their long-term plans. And I realized that the Montreal Expos wanted me as much as the Dodgers didn’t.
And eventually, that was okay.
As a starter with the Expos, I felt like I was where I belonged. When I wasn’t pitching, I was the one practicing my French with the fans near the Expos’ dugout, tossing bubblegum into the stands, putting bubblegum bubbles on top of the caps of unsuspecting teammates, or taping myself to the pole in the dugout during games, even when we were behind, just to lighten the mood.
We were playing baseball for a living, and I was laying the foundation for the greatest stage of my career.
All that confidence I had as a teenager and young adult, the cocksure certainty that I was going to be not only a major league starter but a good one, began to turn into a reality as an Expo.
What I never saw coming along with the fame, however, was an unforeseen and unwelcome twist.
11
Señor Plunk
IF YOU WATCHED me closely when I pitched, you saw that when I walked from the dugout to the mound, I skipped over the foul line. What you couldn’t know was that in that instant when I was airborne I said a prayer in my head.
“In your hands, I lay my spirit. Keep me healthy, and I shall do the rest.”
That was my prayer, words written by me.
Backed by my faith, I could be the baddest-ass on the planet. In my mind, it made zero difference that I was a skinny squirt with a jheri-curled mullet and a wispy mustache. With my mind and body—the long, flexible fingers that took so long to unfurl from a baseball to give it that extra rotation and movement, an elbow that never failed, four limbs that I could learn to coordinate in exactly the mechanics I needed, a solid lower half strengthened by years of running and conditioning, and perfect eyesight that noticed the slightest change in tilt in a batter’s stance or grip on a bat—I could pitch the way I was born to pitch.
Without fear.
By the time the Expos entrusted me with a position as a starter in 1994, each time I headed to the mound I was absolutely convinced that I would come out on top.
Everyone who had told me “no” in the minor leagues?
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br /> I had passed them by. They were too far behind me to hear. Someone much more powerful than them, stronger than me even, had said, “Yes—you belong, Pedro. I have you there.”
And because God allowed me to cross the white line with my mind and body healthy, then in the name of God I would have to pitch the only way I knew how. That meant using the entire plate. I never completed high school, but my math was always good enough to know that it takes two halves to make a whole. I needed the whole plate to pitch like I had to pitch.
“Never quit pitching inside,” Eleodoro had told me, and I never forsook a pitching style that came naturally to me anyway. Pitchers are supposed to attack hitters. Pitching is not defense. Pitching is offense. By being able to command where I threw the ball and how hard or soft I threw it, I held control of each at-bat. I didn’t simply throw to the catcher’s mitt and place the ball where he had set up. Constantly monitoring the flow of the game, knowing the score, knowing what shape our bullpen was in and how much I had in the tank, I would watch the batter and see if he was vulnerable to an outside pitch or if he needed to be backed off the plate by heading inside.
If a pitcher concedes the inner half of the strike zone to the batter, then the pitcher has abandoned half the battlefield. I was not about to cede the inner half—not ever, not to anyone. I never understood why other pitchers, especially those who were taller, heavier, and stronger than me—which was nearly everyone—would give up on the inner half. It was as if they feared the drama that pitching inside would generate from hitters, hitters who had grown way too comfortable with their pussy pads on their elbows and some with their steroids flowing through their bodies, making them even more ornery when a pitcher dared to challenge them.
I was never afraid of that drama, because I was never afraid.
If God put me out there in a healthy body and strong mind, “I shall do the rest.”
Pedro Page 10