Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  In the name of God, if I had to hit you and break a couple of ribs, I had to do it.

  That didn’t make me a bad person. A badass pitcher? If batters and opposing benches thought so, I didn’t mind and I didn’t care.

  I thought of myself as David from the Bible—small but with a big heart.

  Opponents misunderstood my mentality as often as they underestimated my heart.

  “In your hands, I lay my spirit. Keep me healthy, and I shall do the rest.”

  And the rest became my history.

  An amped-up Reggie Sanders became the first big leaguer to lose his mind with me on the mound. We were playing the Reds at home, and I was making my second start of the season, April 13, 1994. I had hit two batters and lost my first game (one run, three hits allowed in six innings) against the Cubs. Against the Reds, I was in control early against a lineup that was pretty free-swinging. Sanders was my first strikeout victim, and he worked a seven-pitch strikeout in the fifth. Each at-bat featured an up-and-in pitch that Reggie didn’t seem to like, and he shot me a look each time. He stared at me, I stared back at him, and the at-bat went on—I didn’t give him a second thought.

  When he came up in the eighth inning with one out, we were ahead, 2–0. More relevant than the score was the fact that I had a perfect game going. Twenty-two Reds up, 22 down. So after Reggie watched my first pitch sail in for a called strike and then swung at and missed the second pitch, I didn’t want to waste a pitcher’s count. I was well aware that I had a perfect game going. I didn’t want to lose it, which is why I didn’t want to allow a hit or a walk or have Sanders do a thing against me. When I got underneath a fastball on my third pitch, the ball tailed in and nipped Sanders, who was starting to swing, on the left elbow.

  I was pissed at myself and threw both hands up in the air in disbelief and looked toward our dugout along the first-base side. Of course I was trying to pitch inside, but not inside enough to hit him. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I saw that Reggie was running straight at me, full speed. That ball hadn’t even bounced out of the batter’s box before Reggie was on the go. I could not believe it. He thought I had hit him on purpose? In a perfect game? How dumb was I?

  I waited until he got near me and then took a step to my left and tried to swat him in the head with my glove. I tried to let his momentum carry him past me so I could throw him down. That worked, but I lost my balance too, landing on my right elbow and side as we rolled around. Both benches cleared, and Darrin Fletcher, my catcher, got to Sanders first. The scrum got big very quickly, but there were no punches thrown, just a bunch of tugging and pulling. Felipe and Joe Kerrigan, my pitching coach, kept asking me if I was okay, which I was. I thought it was ridiculous, almost funny, that Sanders had charged me.

  Were major league hitters really that sensitive?

  I know amphetamines have been around baseball for a long time and were quite common in the ’90s. I’ve wondered since if Reggie that day had popped a greenie or else just had one too many cups of coffee, because his reaction was so strange and so out of line.

  I got out of the eighth inning with my no-hitter intact, but I gave up a single to the first batter in the ninth, so Felipe pulled me out of there after 94 pitches.

  After the game, Reggie did not speak with reporters, but I did.

  “It was just a normal day,” I said before stating the obvious. “There was no way I was trying to hit him. I guess he took it the wrong way. I was surprised he charged out. Surprised, but not afraid.”

  Felipe took a swipe at Sanders’s professionalism. “You have to have a spirit of forgiveness in this game,” he said. “Martinez is a guy of 155 pounds. I’d like to see Sanders charge one of those big 220-pound specimens.”

  Predictably, Sanders’s manager, Davey Johnson, complained that Sanders wasn’t the only batter I had gone up and in against. As if that were a crime.

  Gerry Davis, the home plate umpire, said he had not seen any reason to issue any kind of warning to either team before I hit Sanders.

  “I think that one at-bat has been taken out of context by some people who just saw the replays,” Davis told Newsday. “You have to know that in [Sanders’s] previous two at-bats, Martinez came up and in as well.” Davis said he told Sanders in the first at-bat, after the first ball, “That’s just an 0-2 pitch,” and that Sanders did not say anything. When Sanders came up in the eighth, “I think he was still upset,” said Davis. “I didn’t see anything wrong with the way he was working the hitters. He was pitching inside the way he had to.”

  Three starts later, still in April—the first month of my Expos career—I found myself in the middle of another brawl, only this one was more bizarre.

  I didn’t have anything close to perfect-game stuff at home against the Padres, and we were ahead by just a run, 4–3, in the fifth inning. My stuff was good enough to get Derek Bell to strike out on three pitches in the first inning and then foul out to first base in the third.

  Bell fouled off my first pitch, a fastball away, and swung through the next one, a curveball that jelly-legged him. I could tell he wasn’t happy. He fouled off another one, and I decided that he needed to see a pitch up and in. I most definitely intended to put a jolt in him by coming up and in, which I did. The way he stepped back as the pitch sailed in close to his head was just a little too dramatic for my taste. He eventually got back in the box and stared me down. When that happened, I just stood there cold. Stone cold. I didn’t mind getting into a staring contest with batters, in part because I wanted to keep an eye on them. If they were going to charge me, I wanted to know.

  Derek and I had our eyes locked on one another, and suddenly he barked: “Throw the ball over the plate,” tapping the plate with his bat. I hated that. Don’t do that to me. I went “here,” nodded my head, and threw a 98-mile-per-hour fastball chest high. He swung and missed. The crowd went bananas. After he swung through strike three, I motioned with my glove toward his bench, the “go sit down and take your seat” gesture. He walked back toward his bench, and I turned away to watch the infielders throw the ball around the horn. I took the throw from Sean Berry, our third baseman, and walked back to the mound, facing first base and our bench.

  I heard everyone go “Aaaahhh!” and so I whipped around to find Derek almost on top of me. I also remember Bip Roberts coming at me from behind, trying to break me in half, launching his shoulder into the square of my back. I went down and I told Bip, “I’ll get your ass. I’ll remember—you hit me from behind.”

  This brawl turned into utter chaos. Mark Davis of the Padres started to get all pissy about me, telling Felipe and Tommy Harper that I was “too young to be throwing balls inside.” Tommy went back at him. “At least he’s got the balls to throw inside—not like you!” Mark Davis was the veteran with the Cy Young Award from five years earlier, but when I saw him pitch he didn’t have shit.

  Fittingly, that marked my first win for the Expos, but the brawl was nothing compared to the scene after the game.

  “I’m not going to quit pitching inside—I don’t care if I hit 1,000 batters,” I told reporters. “This is the second time that this happens with a hitter that cannot hit the inside part of the plate. He is going to have to turn on that fastball if he wants anyone to change their style.”

  That fight started a whole other round of whining from National League managers. Davey Johnson told the Los Angeles Times, “Somebody’s going to kill him. A whole bunch of guys are going to be after him. What’s beyond me is he hasn’t even gotten a warning. Don’t umpires ever read the newspapers or watch ESPN and see what this guy is doing?”

  The book was out on me. In May I had the nerve to pitch Andrés Galarraga up and in once. Didn’t hit him, but afterwards his manager, Don Baylor, the king of getting hit, piped up.

  “I’m not going to take it and this club isn’t going to take it. When [Martinez] talks about it he says he has to pitch inside. But don’t pitch at somebody’s head. He’s going to hurt somebody.”


  I knew Baylor didn’t know anything about pitching when I heard him speak. He should have known that Galarraga had an open stance that he closed up as he stepped into his swing—he stepped into plenty of pitches and the fact that he wore those pussy pads on his elbows only made it easier for a pitcher like me to locate in the inner half of the plate when he was up to bat.

  In Pittsburgh, in the middle of June, I was again in the middle of controversy over my style of pitching. I had ticked off the Pirates a month earlier when Don Slaught had faced some chin music in an inning where I gave up two home runs. I didn’t hit him, but those pitches didn’t go unnoticed by the Pirates. And of course, they didn’t want to be left out of the pile-on-Pedro summer.

  We were up 5–0 in the fifth inning when the Pirates’ Carlos Garcia came up. Carlos and I were friends. We’d hung out, and so I wasn’t thinking about anything, not Don Slaught for sure, I was just trying to get the leadoff hitter out when I threw a two-seamer that tailed in too much once again and hit Carlos on his front left knee. His knee. Carlos went down as if I had reached out from the mound with a 60-foot-six-inch scythe and sawed off his leg. Thank God I had missed his major arteries and vital organs. After Carlos was somehow able to get back on his feet—it took him some time to do so—he dusted himself off and marched like a wounded warrior to first base.

  I got out of the inning, but it was clear the Pirates were not happy.

  Our first batter up the next inning, Larry Walker, knew it too. He asked hitting coach Tommy Harper, “What are the chances I’ll get hit here?”

  Answer: high.

  With the first pitch, Pittsburgh’s Blas Minor plunked Larry in the left hip, and it was on. Nobody hit Larry and got away with it, so he charged Blas, and we were in a donnybrook. Even though all I had done was try to get a ground ball by throwing a sinker, which hit a batter in the knee, my history preceded me.

  The headhunter, Señor Plunk, had struck again.

  I stayed in the dugout for this one—Felipe had told me not to even think about going out on the field. So I stayed in there, fighting as much as I could by yelling and pointing fingers. I didn’t think it was about me, but Dave Clark, a pinch hitter then for the Pirates, came over to the dugout. He was looking for me.

  “You, you’re the one I want to fight. Come out and fight.”

  I came back with, “C’mon over here then,” but didn’t take him up on his offer, which was smart because I didn’t know he had been a Golden Gloves boxer in high school. He really wanted to kick my ass, though. I thought about it later, how he and Reggie Sanders and Derek Bell, three guys, all African American, had gotten so mad at me. Maybe they had all talked about me and had it in for me? A crazy thought. Even later in my career, when I got in another famous brawl with Gerald Williams, that same thought crossed my mind. Eventually I decided it was just one of those things.

  It got ugly after that game as well.

  Jim Leyland, the Pirates manager, said, “He’s already hit eight or nine people—I’m tired of people making excuses for him. It’s a damn shame. Somebody is going to get hurt.”

  I spoke with Felipe after that game and basically told him I didn’t know what to do anymore.

  “I don’t want Pedro to start aiming everything to the outside of the plate,” Felipe told the Globe and Mail. “So far the kid has been solid for us. He’s given us innings, and he’s given us wins. But I don’t want to see him crumble, because he has a whole career ahead of him.”

  I hit eight batters in my first 13 starts . . . and my ERA was 2.55 with a .212 batting average against, and I had 90 strikeouts and 22 walks in 84⅔innings.

  There were the three fights, though. Veteran managers across the league were complaining about me. Felipe and pitching coach Joe Kerrigan even went to speak with the National League president, Leonard Coleman, to clear the air. They wanted to make sure that umpires in particular were not going to treat me any differently than other pitchers.

  Felipe was worried about me. As a reliever with the Dodgers, I had been getting by on pure gas most nights, but as a starter, I needed my secondary pitches as well. I still didn’t have the level of command that would come later.

  My fastball wasn’t perfect either.

  “If the umpires come down hard on Pedro and don’t let him pitch the way he knows best, which is coming inside, it’s going to have an effect on the pitching of a kid who could become one of the best pitchers in the game,” Felipe told Coleman.

  “You think so?”

  “We don’t think so, we know so.”

  The four days when I wasn’t pitching, I could pretty much be a normal pitcher and do my side work, but my reputation started to impact our team.

  The night before I pitched, Mel Rojas would remind me, “Oh shit, Pedro’s coming tomorrow night—everybody be ready to go in the first inning. Dammit, Pedro.”

  Everyone thought Mel was funny, including me, but it was still a burden to be tagged with a headhunter label that I knew I did not deserve.

  Tommy Harper, our hitting coach, became someone I could turn to for counsel, in part because he could listen to me without judgment and then say exactly what I needed to hear. The constant turmoil surrounding my pitching style was impossible to ignore, and at times it would get the best of me. I’d start to pout on the mound or my body language would start to sag and betray my doubts. Tommy would wait until I got back on the bench in between innings to tell me what he saw.

  “Pedro, you’ve got major league stuff, I’ve seen a lot of pitchers, and I know you’re going to be outstanding, but, Pedro, you can’t control your fastball until you control your temper. You have to control your emotions on the mound—then you can concentrate.”

  Tommy just wanted to calm me down, and even though I could not always do it on command, I knew he was right.

  Opposing benches used to think that my catcher, Darrin Fletcher, and I were part of a dynamic duo, in cahoots on pitching inside, because before I came along Darrin already had a reputation for being fond of calling for the inside fastball. We made for a good unit, but Fletcher would hear opposing managers and coaches yelling at him during my games, “If he hits somebody, Fletch, we’re coming at you.”

  Felipe said Reggie Sanders would never have charged me if I had been bigger, and that bothered me. I was convinced he was right. It was easy for a big, bruising hitter to run out to the mound and pummel a small man like myself. It’s easier to call him names, like “headhunter.” It’s tough to pass up on a chance to beat up on somebody smaller than yourself, and guys like Sanders, Bell, and Clark didn’t want to pass on the opportunity.

  Cliff Floyd thought that the bullying instincts of the bigger batters played into all the trouble that I got into.

  Like Fletcher, Floyd saw that I had trouble controlling two things: my two-seam fastball and my need to pitch inside.

  The result was often Cliff finding himself in the middle of a scrum. He told me, “‘Listen, here I am at the bottom of the pile, and your ass is at the back of the mound. At some point we’re going to get hurt here.’”

  Cliff knew that as much I was bothered by my inability to control my two-seamer inside, it bothered opposing batters more.

  Cliff thought opposing hitters took this view: “‘If I can’t hit you, I might as well try to fight you and get you thrown out of the game and get into the bullpen.’” And he believed my mind-set was: “‘If I throw this fastball up and in, I’m going to spook you for the whole game and now I’m in control.’”

  But that wasn’t what I was trying to do at all.

  My only goal was establishing the inner half of the plate—that was all. I didn’t want to spook hitters. I understood what Cliff meant about what batters were thinking, but I never stepped back and plotted that out. I had been pitching that way since I was a teenager and had been told that it was not only legitimate but also necessary for me to succeed.

  I finished 1994 with 11 hit batsmen . . . and an 11-5 record and 3.42 ERA, str
iking out 142 in 144⅔ innings.

  The following year I tried harder to fix my two-seamer. I didn’t decrease my hit batsmen—still 11—but I didn’t get into any fights either. It would have counted for a draw, but my reputation was already sealed.

  I was 23 years old in 1995, still young for a starter in his second season. I increased my innings to 194⅔ and reached 30 starts for the first time, but my numbers didn’t take that big of a leap forward. My ERA and WHIP edged up a bit, while my strikeout and walk rates also went in the wrong direction.

  And I seemed to be in a state of permanent probation with the league.

  In the middle of May, I hit Luis Gonzalez with a pitch.

  Gonzalez was 27 years old—this was the season when he should have been entering his peak offensive years. As it turned out, he was one of those guys whose numbers, especially in the power department, took a big jump in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he was in his thirties. But in 1995 Gonzalez was a scrawny outfielder without any pop.

  When I hit him with a breaking ball, he went to the umpire, “Oh, he hit me,” and I got hit with a $2,500 fine. I thought Gonzalez’s appeal to the umpire was so weak, so transparent, that I wanted a piece of him. Next time I saw him, he was going to get hit. That’s why I got so mad later that series when I ran into him and Moises outside of a well-known Montreal nightclub.

  “Moises, if you’re hanging out with Luis, I’m sorry, but I’m not walking with you anywhere because I’m going to hit the shit out of him.”

  “No, you forget about him, Pedro. He’s a good guy.”

  “No, I’m hitting him.”

  Moises thought he was out having a good time in Montreal, but here I was, his pissed-off younger teammate, spoiling his night.

  “Hey, Louie, Pedro’s mad at you, he’s going to hit you.”

  Luis said, “No, Mo, tell him I’m a nice guy, I’m not a bad guy.”

  I refused to talk to Gonzalez or even look at him.

  “I don’t care who he is, I’m going to hit him.”