Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  “Mo, talk to him, I didn’t mean it, I was just trying to get on base.”

  I could hear it. Gonzalez was frightened.

  “Pedro, he’s scared shitless. Let him go.”

  So I let him go. For Mo’s sake.

  Two starts later, at home against the Giants, I started off the game by throwing three balls to Darren Lewis: up and away, low and in, and then in again, the ball coming close to hitting him.

  The home plate umpire was Bruce Froemming, and he came well rehearsed for his umpire show that day. As soon as that third pitch sailed in on Lewis, he took off his mask and stepped out to yell at me.

  “Warning—you throw one more pitch inside and you’re out of the game.”

  This was three pitches into the game.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  That’s a magic word with umpires. He took off his mask and lumbered toward the mound so he could give me a proper lecture about baseball etiquette. I responded with silence. I was mad at myself as much as him, and I could tell that I was very close to snapping. Felipe came out to take the heat off of me and got in Froemming’s face, and the two went off on each other. “I’m a veteran umpire, I do what I do,” and Felipe, pointing to his head, countered with, “You see these white hairs I have? Talk about a veteran.”

  Our general manager, Kevin Malone, spoke up for me too. On a Sunday afternoon in the middle of June, he was sitting in the media dining room in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. I wasn’t even pitching that series, but because we were the Expos and I had led the league in hit batsmen the prior year, beginning with the Reds’ Reggie Sanders, and I had hit four batters in my first 10 starts this year, the Reds TV announcers naturally focused on me. On the pregame show, Malone heard Marty Brennaman say that Carlos Perez and I “were going to get somebody killed” one day because Carlos used to make fun of batters when he got them out and me because I hit so many batters so often.

  Kevin left the dining room and marched into the broadcasting booth and yelled, “You got something against Latin Americans?”

  “I don’t care if they’re white, black, blue, or green,” said Brennaman. “I didn’t originate the idea. It’s all over the league.”

  “You don’t even know them. How can you say something like that on the air?”

  I appreciated what Kevin said, but he got in a little trouble himself for losing his cool, and it didn’t change a thing about how I was perceived.

  At that time, in the middle of June, 17 starts into the season, I was 8-5 with a 2.84 ERA. Batters were hitting .213 and slugging .362 against me, and I had 99 strikeouts and 36 walks in 111 innings. Those were good numbers, but I wasn’t satisfied.

  I knew I was still wild and hitting people, and it detracted from those numbers. The Expos knew that I wasn’t trying to hit people and that I was still finding my way, but I was bothered by the label “headhunter” and did not understand why everyone else was obsessed about the way I was pitching. Yes, I hit batters, but I didn’t hit anyone in the head back then, not with a fastball at least. I never hit anyone in the head with a fastball in my entire career as a big-league pitcher.

  I wanted people to look at the numbers I was producing and consider the possibility that my style of pitching was working for me. By the middle of 1995, I was putting up numbers that showed that I was a good, not dominant, major league starter.

  My style worked for me, and at times I showed flashes of what I would become. On June 3, 1995, I went nine perfect innings in San Diego before Bip Roberts led off the 10th with a double. Felipe took me out, and we went on to win, but according to the rulebook, I could not be given credit for a perfect game even though I had gone nine perfect innings.

  Reporters afterwards told me that the last person to lose a perfect game in extra innings was Harvey Haddix, back in 1959. He lost his in the 13th inning.

  “Oh, that’s tough—but I still don’t know who he is,” I told reporters.

  I really wasn’t that upset about losing a perfect game according to a technicality. Everyone on the Expos thought I received some vindication.

  “This was the best answer Pedro Martinez could give to all the harassment he’s been going through,” Felipe told the Montreal Gazette. “I’m not surprised that he threw this kind of game.”

  I was defensive:

  “I know I’m still young, but I’ve been around long enough now that I think I’ve shown people what I can do.

  “I’m not here to hurt anybody. But it seems like whenever I pitch, it’s always the bad things that are brought up. It’s never ‘Pedro Martinez was 11-5 last year,’ or they never look back to how good I was in Los Angeles as a reliever. It’s only the bad.

  “This shouldn’t be my first reputation as a pitcher, because I have been here not very long, but long enough to show what I can do. When I’m fine, I can do a lot of stuff. I don’t want to fight anybody. I’m here to play the game like I did tonight.”

  The “perfect game” didn’t change much. I still had some control problems. Felipe didn’t want me to stop pitching inside, but he was caught in the middle of a jam, taking a lot of heat that I was generating.

  Joe Kerrigan, my pitching coach, decided he would fix me. My mechanics, he said, were responsible for how my two-seam fastball ran in on those right-handed hitters.

  Joe’s belief that he could change me led to two positive developments. I did begin to command my fastball better in the inner half of the strike zone, but only because his methodology backfired on him and effectively ended our relationship.

  I could admit that figuring out a way to hit fewer batters was a worthy goal, as long I could maintain my edge. My way was working. Hitters didn’t like a hard fastball inside—inside with movement.

  Kerrigan used life-size dummies, much like mannequins in a department store, as stand-in batters in the bullpen. He wanted me to work with them. Joe would plant the dummy next to the plate in a batter’s stance, and then, wearing catcher’s equipment, he would squat behind home plate and say, “Try pitching right below the elbows, right there.” The first fastball I threw was perfect—boom, right there, right below his elbows.

  “Okay, now, Pedro, throw a pitch at full-game speed.”

  I hadn’t thrown the first pitch too hard, so this time I cranked it up, and when I cranked it up to the mid-90s or 96 or 97, that was when the ball tailed more and ran in on the hitter. Because I was throwing harder, I had less time to think about my mechanics. With that second pitch, I hit the dummy square in its foam head. Twisted around 180 degrees, the dummy was looking backwards but still holding on to the bat in a normal pose.

  This cracked up Pierre Arsenault, our bullpen coach, and I started laughing too. Joe did not see the humor. He stood up and peeled off his catching gear.

  “Fuck you, I’m not working with you,” he barked. “I’m giving up on you. This is not a joke, you don’t want to work, you don’t want to improve.”

  “Joe, no, no, no, no way—I want to work.”

  “No, I’m not working with you anymore. Go to hell.”

  He shooed me off.

  “Okay, go fuck yourself then, Joe.”

  It didn’t take long before news of our blowout reached Felipe. He called me into his office for another closed-door meeting. He had already spoken with Kerrigan, who had delivered a laundry list of complaints about me. So I gave Felipe my version, making sure that Felipe understood the root of the problem.

  “Everyone wants to fix me, but I’m not doing anything wrong. I told you, I’m not trying to hit guys. Nobody believes me.”

  “I know that, Pedro, but we’re going to have to fix this between you and Joe.”

  “I don’t care about that, Felipe. Why don’t you send me to the minor leagues or send me home? I’ll go home. I don’t mind. But I don’t want to work with Joe anymore.”

  “We have to do something, Pedro, you need a lot of work.”

  “Send someone else. Send Harper to me, send anyone, but he’s not working wit
h me and I’m not working with him.”

  Felipe didn’t press me on returning to work with Joe.

  Instead, he offered his own tip. Instead of throwing my two-seam fastball in, he suggested I throw my four-seam fastball inside. I had better command of my four-seam, and as Felipe said, I just had to locate it on the inner half—I didn’t have to stop pitching inside.

  The first time I tried it on the side, it worked perfect.

  “Why can’t you do that in a game?” Felipe asked me. I said I liked to throw the two-seamer because I could jam the hitters with it.

  “Why don’t you quit doing that and just throw your cross-seam fastball inside—and outside? And while you’re at it, use your breaking ball and changeup more than you are.”

  The other pitchers chimed in. Kenny Hill echoed Felipe, saying that I should use my changeup more than I was, that it was too good to use so sparingly.

  Felipe felt that I had been rattled by the headhunting accusations, and he was concerned, as he had expressed to Coleman, that it would get inside my head and weaken me.

  “I believe Pedro knew 100 percent in his head that he could succeed as a pitcher by doing it his way, but a lot of other people didn’t think so,” said Felipe. “He really did not appreciate the vision that other people had of him. Once he began to command his pitches better and see that the umpires would not take away the inside, he became more determined to become the pitcher he knew he could be.”

  I began to see results by the end of the 1995 season, and the drama began to subside some.

  My last game of the season, Pete Schourek of the Davey Johnson–led Reds drilled me with a pitch. Later on, when we were teammates on the Red Sox, he admitted that he had been under orders to hit me. By the end of 1995, though, I had had my fill of being in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

  12

  Click

  FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE it was time for me to make my final start of spring training in 1996, I was at my locker calmly going through my things, changing into my game shirt, and plunging myself into my game zone that few can penetrate.

  But here came Bill Stoneman, the assistant GM to Jim Beattie, who had replaced Kevin Malone.

  I had been avoiding Stoneman all day because I knew he and Fernando had been getting nowhere on my 1996 contract and I certainly didn’t want to deal with the topic on a day I was pitching. But he walked right up to me and handed me an envelope.

  “Here’s your letter. You’re being renewed.”

  And I went off. I flipped over the table I had just eaten breakfast on and then went for a bat and connected with the coffee machine on the counter, smashing it into pieces.

  “Are you kidding me? You couldn’t find another time to bring me this?”

  Stoneman didn’t say much. He never did. This was my last year before arbitration. I knew that my salary would take a big jump in 1997, but I could not believe that I was going to make $315,000 that season, $45,000 more than the year before. That was a raise and still a lot of money, of course, but back then, even in the wake of the 1994 strike that changed so much, the Expos were by far the cheapest of teams.

  My teammates who were still there were cynical enough to be amused that spring, knowing that the contract talks had gotten under my skin.

  Mel Rojas made fun of me. He said, “Pedro, go get your Vaseline, they’re going to stick it up your ass. They’re going to do it again this year, you watch. Same thing with me, same thing with everybody.”

  Stoneman’s renewal letter was the punch line to Mel’s joke. I stormed out onto the field, and Mark Routtenberg chased after me, knowing he had to cool me off.

  “Forget it, that’s the way the Expos are running things,” Mark said. “It’s not personal, Pedro. Don’t ruin your career by doing something stupid.”

  I was mad, but not mad enough to become stupid.

  “Doesn’t what I did for you last year count?”

  It didn’t.

  I realized, once again, that I was not going to get much sympathy. I wasn’t the only one, and everyone just had to accept it. Or quit. It was the Montreal way.

  “You’re going to get what you deserve in arbitration”—that was the motto on the lips of every front-office member. What they didn’t say was that it would most likely be another team that paid the arbitration-based salary. The Expos would rather trade the player than be on the hook for his paycheck.

  Once again, baseball had flipped an ugly switch inside me.

  As far as I was concerned, there I was, being disrespected again, being taken for granted. Just as with the Dodgers, it released my fury, but this time that fury was different.

  With the Expos, I had done a good job and become a key member of the Expos’ rotation. And I still kept getting screwed. I looked around at the other clubs, especially the Dodgers, who at least would pay up when their players did well. I saw guys making more money than me and yet doing less. I was a good starter, a starter who hadn’t broken down like the Dodgers had feared, and it still wasn’t enough.

  My 1996 season brought me to the brink of the stage in my career where nobody could slip a renewal letter by me.

  In my third full season as a big-league starter, I inched ahead with my numbers. I broke the 200-inning and 200-strikeout plateaus for the first time, finishing with 216⅔ innings and 222 strikeouts. After throwing one complete game in 1994 and two more in 1995, I sprinkled in four complete games in 1996, in May, June, July, and August.

  I began slowly, unimpressively, posting a 6.19 ERA after my first three starts. I whittled that down to 2.97 by the end of May, and it fluctuated between there and 4.36 the rest of the season, ending at 3.70, the third consecutive season that it rose while I was with the Expos.

  My walk, strikeout, and home run rates all improved slightly in the right direction, as did my OPS against, slugging against, and on-base percentage against, but my WHIP, hits per nine innings, batting average against, and WAR trended in the wrong direction.

  By the All-Star break, my numbers were still good enough to get me, along with my teammates Henry Rodriguez and Mark Grudzielanek, selected to our first All-Star team. We flew with Routtenberg down to Philadelphia, and I got a taste of being in the middle of a lot of media attention for reasons other than hitting an opposing batter. Outside of some fans who got a little too intrusive in the lobby of the hotel we were staying at, I thought the experience was all good.

  I threw a scoreless inning of relief—I struck out Albert Belle and ended the inning by getting Mo Vaughn to ground out—but I took away some priceless knowledge. Sitting in that bullpen with Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, I watched them warm up. Each was spotting his off-speed pitches: changeup in, changeup away, curveball in, curveball outside. Up to that point, I thought the only two factors I could control with those pitches were velocity and how they broke. I didn’t even realize that locating the curveball and changeup was on the table.

  That blew me away.

  I asked Glavine, “You throw changeups on this side and then on that side?”

  He looked at me as if I had asked him if he slept in a bed.

  “Yeah, don’t you know that?”

  “No, first time I’ve seen that.”

  I wasn’t able to master that kind of command right away, but I was inspired on the spot. Glavine was as good as any other pitcher in the game by then, part of a Braves rotation with Maddux and John Smoltz that was unlike any other. I came back from that game and told Felipe that as often as he could, I wanted him to alter my spot in the rotation so that I was matched up with the best starters in the game: Maddux and Glavine, Denny Neagle, Kevin Brown.

  We were way behind the Braves in the National League East, and even though we were in the hunt for the wild card up until the end, I began to put myself above the team and gave up trying to win for the team. I felt like we had no chance, and I told Felipe, “I just want to learn how to pitch like them.”

  Felipe agreed to try, but the schedule never allowed for th
at to happen. Still, I came away from that All-Star Game understanding that I still had room to improve in order to become great.

  I couldn’t force it. There was more to learn.

  As I applied laser-beam focus to elevating my pitching to the level of Glavine and Maddux, the Expos’ downward spiral since the strike became an afterthought for me. They weren’t paying their players enough, they were losing the good ones as a result, and the fans responded in kind by staying away from Olympic Stadium.

  My own progress had stalled. I wanted to be great, and I wanted to be recognized for that greatness. That drive to dominate intensified after the All-Star break. The tip from Glavine, along with the work I had done with Felipe on my four-seam fastball, began to pay off. People noticed how my command of my fastball on the inner half of the plate had improved.

  So it rankled me deeply to find myself in more headhunting nonsense in August.

  I was matched up against Doug Drabek and the Astros for the second start in a row, this time at home. I gave up three runs in the first inning, and we were down, 3–1. In the second inning, I came up with one out and one on, and Drabek hit me with a pitch. I knew it was intentional. I asked him, “Did you hit me on purpose?” It wasn’t unusual for me to pop off, but I made the mistake of keeping the bat in my hand as I walked to first base, still yapping at him. I should have never done that. I had no idea that I was about to snap. Felipe ran out of the dugout.

  “Pedro, where are you going? Give me that bat.”

  He took it away.

  “I’m just asking him if he hit me on purpose.”

  “Yes, but don’t walk with a bat, Pedro.”

  “Felipe, I just want to know if he hit me on purpose.”

  By this time, everyone had come out in one of those gatherings that flare up and die down with absolutely nothing happening.

  I kept staring at Drabek, though, and yelling at him.

  “You know what, I think you hit me on purpose—you’re going to get hit later.”