Talks with the Orioles and Giants never materialized.
The main object of interest in talks with the Rockies was 22-year-old Jamey Wright.
And then there were the Red Sox.
After their 1996 season, Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette gave Roger Clemens some extra motivation to take the second half of his career to unforeseen and eye-popping levels—four more Cy Youngs from the age of 34 on!—by saying that Clemens, now a free agent, had entered “the twilight of his career.”
What Dan didn’t say was that when Clemens left Boston to sign with the Blue Jays, he also left the Red Sox in a bind. They had Aaron Sele, Tim Wakefield, Tom Gordon, and ex-Brave Steve Avery in their 1997 rotation, and their combined stats—50-53, 4.95 ERA—helped explain an attendance dip at Fenway Park that year and the club’s fourth-place finish in the AL East. That was also the season when Nomar Garciaparra won the AL Rookie of the Year Award, Mo Vaughn was just two years removed from his MVP season, and the team traded for a young catcher, Jason Varitek, and right-hander Derek Lowe from Seattle. The Red Sox definitely had building blocks, but they were missing an ace.
When Duquette learned in September that the Expos were shopping me, he focused exclusively on me as the answer to what ailed the Red Sox.
Of course, Dan had traded for me once already when he brought me to the Expos, but now, four years later, Dan didn’t know how much of an advantage he had.
The Expos team he left behind in 1994 was a masterpiece, complete in every sense, and only the strike prevented what could have been a seismic shift in the Expos-Montreal relationship. There is no telling what a playoff Expos team could have meant to that franchise, but that opportunity eroded completely once the work stoppage halted the 1994 season. Still, Brochu recognized the job Dan had done and had always liked him. When I became available, he told Dan that he wanted to be sure the Red Sox were part of the talks. In fact, Brochu had singled out Dan as his preferred trading partner, but he never let on to Dan about that preference.
On the Red Sox, the Expos zeroed in on Carl Pavano. A six-foot-five 21-year-old built like a tight end with broad shoulders and powerful legs, Pavano had struck out 147 and walked just 34 in 23 starts for the Pawtucket (Triple A) Red Sox in 1997 and was, along with Jaret Wright, one of the highest-ranked pitching prospects around. Just behind him on the Red Sox’s pitching depth chart was another 21-year-old, Brian Rose, who had also had a strong year with Pawtucket. Pavano and Rose were attractive to the Expos, plus three others: right-handers John Wasdin, 24, and Tony Armas Jr., 19, and 23-year-old outfielder Trot Nixon.
In early November, talks intensified. Duquette balked when the Expos asked for both Pavano and Rose, but later he admitted he was bluffing—he would have been fine dealing them both away for me.
On November 18, at the Phoenix Convention Center, Major League Baseball held its expansion draft where the two new teams, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, could fill out their rosters with players left unprotected by the other 28 teams.
By the time of the expansion draft, Beattie had zeroed in on three teams as trading partners: the Yankees, the Rockies, and the Red Sox. With the Red Sox, the package had become Pavano and either Armas or Nixon.
The Expos liked the Red Sox package the most and coming into the draft, Beattie had told the Red Sox that. The framework of the deal was in place but not finalized, so Beattie kept the Rockies and Yankees in the mix as well. When the first round of the expansion draft ended with the Red Sox losing a good right-hander, Jeff Suppan, Beattie was surprised when Duquette came up to him after the first round of the draft.
“I don’t know if I can do this deal without some sort of assurance that Pedro signs with us,” said Duquette. “I’m giving up these players—I’m not sure I can do the deal unless you give me a window to try to sign him.”
“Dan, we agreed, I’m not going to do that. We talked that through.”
“Well, I just don’t know if I can do this, I have to think about it.”
Crap—it wasn’t enough, thought Beattie. He hurried out of the room and hoped that Dan was watching when he headed straight over to first the Rockies’ general manager and then the Yankees’ GM.
I’ve got to show Dan that if I don’t trade Pedro to him, I may trade him to somebody else, it’s not like a deal isn’t going to get done, Beattie thought. When he walked out of a room after a meeting with the Rockies, Dan was waiting for him.
“No problem, Jim—we’re going to do the deal.”
The deal was announced after the second round of the draft—Pavano and a player to be named later. The Expos went down to Mexico, where Nixon was playing winter ball, to check on the condition of his back injury, and their doctors went over Armas’s medicals. In the end, they went with Armas over Nixon.
When Beattie got me on the phone to give me the news, I could not believe it. He caught me completely flat-footed, and I laid into him.
“How could you trade me to Boston?”
Other clubs had been in the mix, he started to explain, but the Red Sox gave him the best return, simple as that. He tried to send me to a contender, he said, but making the Expos a contender trumped everything.
“Boston’s a good city for you, Pedro.”
I hung up on him.
Dan’s a low-key guy, but I could tell from how he couldn’t stop smiling at my first press conference in Boston exactly how elated he was to have me on the Red Sox.
Because of me, he said, “the Red Sox are back in business.” He and his staff had run internal projections about me, taking into account my age and what I had done through the 1997 season. The profile they came up with for what kind of career I would have was Sandy Koufax.
They needed me. They had lost credibility with the fans when Clemens caught his second wind in Toronto, and attendance had flattened out.
After the press conference, Dan, Fernando, and I went to dinner at Legal Sea Foods in the Prudential Center in downtown Boston. We had a bottle or two of Matanzas Creek Chardonnay, I remember, and had a very nice dinner. At least the food was good. But the meal felt like a dine-and-dash to me. Boston was a pit stop, a one-year layover for me before I could choose the team I wanted to play for. I knew Dan was happy, but it felt like an awkward one-way date where one person is head over heels and the other keeps looking at his watch.
“Pedro, what will it take to keep you in Boston for a long time?”
I knew by then that Dan sensed that he wasn’t seeing any sparks flying from me. I didn’t try to let him down easily, I just told him the truth.
“Dan, I’m sorry, I’m not staying in Boston—you made a bad trade. I don’t want to be on a last-place team. I like you, and I will play for you this year, but then I’m out.”
I don’t think Dan even heard me. He kept coming at me.
“Well, we want to keep you here, you know that.”
“I know that, but I don’t want to play here. Montreal was a great place for me to play. There was no pressure, nobody bothered me, I could pitch and be myself—1994 was a great year, when we almost won. That’s what I want to do, win. You don’t stand a chance, Dan. I’m not playing for a last-place team.”
To his credit, Dan didn’t get defensive, but I could tell he realized how I felt and that I wasn’t playing hard to get. He sat back for a second, then leaned forward again and asked me to hear him out. He laid out a detailed blueprint of how he wanted to build the Red Sox around me. He was working on a contract extension for Nomar, and he said that even though things were tough right then on striking a new deal for Mo, he would keep trying. And he talked up Boston and Fenway Park, about how electric the atmosphere was, how much fun it was when the team won, how much I’d enjoy playing in front of a full house.
After what felt like a couple of hours spent listening to Dan sell the Red Sox to me, I finally had heard enough. He had presented a better case than I’d thought he could, but I still didn’t think it was enough. I knew the conversation was goin
g to turn to money, and I didn’t need to be there for that.
Before getting up from the table to go walk around the mall, I told Dan, “Just talk to my agents.”
That began a three-week period of talks in which Dan and my agents hammered out a long-term deal. My comment to Dan about being one-and-done with the Red Sox was not scripted, but my agents were happy to hear it. For Dan, it reaffirmed the risk that nearly caused him to back out of the deal with the Expos. He had just traded away highly valued young prospects for a single season from me.
He appealed to Juan Marichal, one of my heroes and the only player from the Dominican Republic in the Hall of Fame at the time, to work on me. Juan made a persuasive pitch. He had pitched his next-to-last season in Boston in 1974, and even though it was injury-shortened—he pitched just 11 games—he had enjoyed the summer. Marichal told me what to expect in Boston. Getting lost driving on the streets was about the worst of it. He told me that Boston was a special place to play baseball, and that its atmosphere was very much like winter ball in the Dominican. Fans were demanding, just like in the DR, but Juan knew I enjoyed a challenge. “Do what you’re supposed to do,” he told me, “and you will love Boston.”
His arguments softened my resolve to leave, but I still had to have more than that.
Maddux had the highest pitcher’s contract at the time, a five-year extension he had signed late in 1997 worth $11.5 million a year. I was due to make close to $8 million in arbitration in my final year before free agency, so everyone understood that if I was going to agree to a long-term extension in which I would forgo free agency, something like the Maddux deal would not even come close to what it would take.
My agents called me when the talks got to $72 million for six guaranteed years and said that we were still $3 million short of the $75 million mark ($12.5 million average annual value) we were shooting for. They were waiting for their chief executive officer, John Harrington, to land from a West Coast trip to see if the Red Sox would agree to $75 million—what did I want to do? I called Mark Routtenberg.
“Oh my God,” he said, “that’s unreal. You’re the best-paid player in the game.” He reminded me that nine months earlier he and I had spoken about an $18 million deal.
I called Ramon too.
“They’re at $72 million, we want $75 million.”
“Take it, take it, bro, you don’t know.”
“Yeah, yeah, but I’m waiting. I haven’t decided yet.”
Dan was at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel hammering out the final details of the extension with my agents. He was speaking on the phone in the bedroom suite of one of the owners when a knock came on the door. Duquette went to open the door and saw a serious-looking man with two German shepherds. Duquette didn’t say anything. He just stayed on the phone and shut the door.
Dan didn’t know that President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were arriving in New York City that night and were checking into the hotel room directly above the room of Red Sox minority owner Harold Alfond, so the room had to be checked out. When the Secret Service officer asked Alfond, who was from Maine, why the man on the phone had shut the door, Alfond told him that the general manager of the Red Sox was in the other room trying to sign me. The other Secret Service officer in the suite was from Maine too. Once he heard that, he said to the other officer, “Hey, that’s Dan Duquette, the general manager of the Red Sox, and he’s trying to sign Pedro Martinez to a long-term contract—President and Mrs. Clinton can wait.”
The dogs were let into the room while Dan was still on the phone. When he hung up, the room was secured and my deal was closed: six years for a guaranteed $75 million, an amount that included a seventh club option year worth $17.5 million or a $2.5 million buyout. The annual average value of the deal was $12.5 million a year, $1 million a year more than Maddux was making.
The Red Sox wanted me badly enough to make me the highest-paid player in baseball.
The only answer was yes.
PART IV
1998–2001
14
Well, I Love That Dirty Water
FROM THE DAY I became a Bostonian, my outlook changed.
It had to.
I won the 1997 NL Cy Young by a unanimous vote, I was recognized as being almost as good as Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, and I was being paid more than any other ballplayer on the planet. I could be stubborn about a lot of things, but I could no longer carry the same chip on my shoulder, the belief that people were still trying to hold me back.
I spilled a great many tears, came close to quitting, and lost my temper a few too many times in my climb to the top, but when I got there, the negativity that fueled me had just about run out.
Expectations were high when I arrived in Boston, but it was distressing to me how much focus was placed on the money I was making.
I can remember sitting in my Boston hotel room before the press conference where my Red Sox contract would be announced and listening to the Red Sox TV network, NESN, air a report that calculated how many dollars I would make with every pitch, every inning, every game.
The report felt surreal to me—not because I didn’t know how much I was making, but because of how it made it look as if money defined my success in the game.
When I became the highest-paid baseball player in the history of the game, I said that money would not change who I was. I stayed true to my word. But the unimaginable wealth from that first big contract transformed my life and everything around me—my God, of course it did. I didn’t stash it away in my bank account and head up to the hills each winter to sit on my pile of cash and count it. Other forces pressured me to the point where I cracked and showed some of my weaknesses at times, but when it came to money, I tried hard not to let it twist me into somebody I didn’t want to become.
Even before that Red Sox deal and my first million-dollar season with the Expos in 1997, I had been channeling a substantial portion of my paychecks back home to my family, just like Ramon had been doing since he signed with the Dodgers in 1984, 13 years before I signed the Red Sox deal. Ramon was the insurance policy for our family. His signing bonus and then his paychecks as a minor leaguer, which were modest to anyone but us, allowed us to move to a nicer, bigger house in Manoguayabo. Because of Ramon, we began our journey from being just another poor Manoguayaban family to being one of the lucky ones.
Since the Dominican Republic achieved its independence after a series of bloody battles with our Haitian neighbors to the west, our half of the island of Hispaniola has struggled to achieve a secure financial footing. The struggle continues today. The gap between the rich and the poor is immense, and the size of the middle class in the DR is pitifully small.
If you have been to Manoguayabo yourself or flown to the Dominican Republic and made that drive from the airport into Santo Domingo or to one of our resorts to the north or the east, it’s impossible not to notice the poverty in our country. Stop at almost any intersection in any town or city and boys and girls, men and women, from the ages of eight and well into their forties, pour in from the sidewalks. They file by the cars, holding for sale crates of bananas and strawberries, water bottles, and phone chargers, sometimes T-shirts and baseball caps.
Because I grew up poorer than most US ballplayers, and also because I returned each winter to a country that remains proportionately poorer than the United States in every way, I wanted to put my wealth to use. Along with Juan Guzman, a good pitcher also from Manoguayabo, and Ramon, we established a sports academy in our hometown, and I built a church, a school, and a health clinic there as well. We have given out a great deal of money along the way, much of it spontaneously in reaction to hearing about a friend, or friend of a friend, a cousin or niece or nephew who is sick or in a tough spot. But some of the giving is much more deliberate than that.
I am eternally grateful for being in the position to help others in need, but I also knew by the time I had signed with the Red Sox how much hard work and careful attention it took to manage my
wealth.
The other misconception about my arrival in Boston was that people thought I came to replace Roger Clemens.
“I’m not here for Roger,’’ I said in my press conference. “Roger left here two years ago. I’m coming in today—Carl Pavano and Tony Armas are the guys they traded for me, they’re prospects. I’m not here to do what Roger did.”
From 1998 on, I was less determined to make people forget about Roger Clemens and to live up to the contract than I was to stay on top and be the king of the jungle for as long as I could. As long as I could hop over the white line with a healthy body every five games, “I shall do the rest.”
From 1998 on, playing baseball became a matter of respect and making it to the playoffs, where I had never been, and winning the World Series.
Respect was key: nobody was going to go out there and make a fool out of me after I had risen to the top. I didn’t want anyone to get fresh with me. I was a veteran, I had paid my dues.
Of course, I still had a rap as a headhunter, and that meant hitters would still try to mess with me if they could. I hated when hitters would stand in the batter’s box with their pads and lean over a curveball or any off-speed pitch in order to get hit by it. I saw brave Brady Anderson do nothing to avoid a Tim Wakefield knuckleball once, and the next day I hit him square in the back with a fastball. “You want to take a knuckleball or a curveball? Here, take a fastball.”
That was me telling him and baseball, “You’ve got to respect me, respect the game. Beat me clean. Don’t rely on a pad you have on your arm to try and beat me. How tough are you? I’m not allowed to wear a pad out there if you hit a line drive off my chin. So take it.”
Pedro Page 14