Pedro
Page 18
When the vote was announced, George was on vacation in Anguilla, and a hurricane there postponed the shit-storm he walked into when he came back into contact with civilization.
We met for the first time a couple years later, in 2002, when I let him know that I was annoyed that he had reported recently that my shoulder was hurting instead of my groin. When he sought me out, we spoke briefly about the 1999 vote, and he repeated the whole “starting pitchers don’t impact the game like position players do” argument. At the time I was more bothered by having to field calls from my family about the nonexistent shoulder injury than the exchange about the 1999 vote.
To this day I am suspicious of the potential for discrimination to factor into writers’ decisions regarding these awards. In 2002 I lost a close vote to Barry Zito for the AL Cy Young.
I think when it comes to awards, people like George and La Velle vote the way they do to bring attention to themselves. I even suspect that those two got together in 1999 and conspired to vote against me, but I’ve been told by people I trust not to get wrapped up in conspiracy theories.
Fine, I won’t.
When all is said and done, I believe I was treated unfairly in 1999, and that there was no legitimate reason why I did not at least appear on all 28 ballots for the MVP vote. George and La Velle had their opinions. Too bad for me they were the wrong ones.
17
Art and Craft
AS A PITCHER, a start for me began each time my last one ended.
I would let my body recover for a couple of days—no throwing, just running. On a treadmill tucked into the home clubhouse at Fenway, I’d jog along to my Dominican music and watch, with the sound off, video of a succession of pitchers our video coordinator, Billy Broadbent, had dug up for me. I was more interested in what worked for other pitchers than in what worked for the hitters, so I would look for recent film of pitchers whose style was similar to mine and who also threw hard—Tim Hudson, Johan Santana, Roger Clemens—and see how they had fared against the team I’d be facing next.
It didn’t matter if a hitter was a lefty or a righty, it was simply a question of speed: could he catch up to my fastball? If a hitter was going to be late against the fastballs from any of those three pitchers, he would be late against mine too. I had a better breaking ball than Roger did, but when it was working, he had the devastating splitter. Our fastballs were pretty much the same. I looked to see how Roger beat them. If he beat them with his splitter, I would try to beat them with my breaking ball. The more recent the game pitched the better. This routine allowed me to identify tendencies, such as what kind of pitches a hitter was guessing on, what kind he sat on, what his swing path was like. Into the memory bank it went.
If I was throwing a side session between starts, the main purpose, as I had been taught, was to work on my weaknesses, not to strengthen my strengths. If I’d had trouble commanding my breaking ball in my previous start, then I wanted to tweak my mechanics and get it right. Usually I knew why I missed location the instant after I threw a pitch. Being able to correct and then repeat the proper delivery in my side session became my primary goal.
On game day, first pitch could not come soon enough for me. I turned to flowers, my first love, to keep my mind off the clock. In Montreal, I used to walk from my apartment to Crescent Street for lunch at an outdoor restaurant whose balconies were draped with roses and flower boxes. With the sun on my face, I’d sit and gaze at the flowers. In my townhouse in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, I built a balcony in the back of my unit so I could have space for my garden. When I pitched with the Mets, I had a backyard in Westchester, New York, filled with flowers. On the mornings and early afternoons of my starts, I would dive into my flowerpots and flower beds, clipping off dead leaves, weeding and puttering, until it was time to leave for the ballpark.
When I got to Fenway Park, Jason and I would sit down before the game and go over our attack plan. What mattered to me, since I knew how smart Jason was and how much work he put into his craft, was learning by listening to him. He had a baseline database of the strengths and weaknesses of each lineup for each series, and he had custom-fit that knowledge to each starter’s strengths and weaknesses.
Jason and I shared an understanding that had been forged early in the 1999 season, and we would draw on that during those pregame sessions, collaborating on our game plan as we shared our knowledge about the nine hitters.
In 1999 I had an early stretch of seven consecutive games where I struck out 10 or more batters. Toward the end of that season, including the 17-strikeout game against the Yankees, I went eight consecutive games with 11 or more strikeouts each game.
That year Jason and I discovered something together. A large number of batters seemed to be sitting on my off-speed pitches, either the breaking ball or the changeup, late in a count. At the time I could throw my fastball like a dart, so we went against the grain: we featured the fastball late in the count, not only because the batters had stopped looking for it, but also because I could place it where I wanted to.
Jason also began to perfect the skill of positioning his body and holding his glove so as not to give away location. He knew all sorts of tricks. I told him to be careful about where he set up because if he was too far outside, a peeker could guess location. The sound that a catcher’s bulky equipment makes as he moves to set up, or the sound that his foot makes dragging along the ground, could also give away location to an observant hitter, so Jason learned to make decoy movements and sounds meant to confuse the hitter. For example, with a right-handed hitter, he would move his left foot out so that it looked as if he was moving in, but he was actually setting up outside. Or sometimes he would move forward on a fastball instead of just moving up on an off-speed pitch. Go back and watch videotape of Jason’s moves behind the plate in the moments before calling for a pitch and before receiving it from any pitcher, not just me. He’s constantly glancing up at the hitter to see how he’s set up while Jason’s shifting his gear-laden body back and forth in order to keep the batter in the dark about location.
That’s what used to piss me off about certain batters, like Bernie Williams, calling time out. Bernie would call for time so quickly, but he would glance back at the umpire to ask for it. When he looked, he peeked at where Jason was set up, creating an advantage for himself. If Jason was set up inside, most likely I was coming in hard or with a breaking ball in, because my other pitch, my changeup, was away to Bernie. And I could throw my fastball away too. If you’re looking inside, and you see the catcher inside, and you can’t catch up to the fastball, what are you going to look for? Two pitches—inside fastball or curveball, because curveballs normally wrap around and in to a lefty hitter. If I wanted to throw a back-door curveball, I wasn’t going to have the catcher set up inside.
Having a catcher like Jason who was so attuned to those finer points of an at-bat, like maximizing the diversity and movement of my pitches by minimizing the chances of a hitter knowing location, allowed me to focus on the purer and finer details of each batter’s approach.
My eyesight was excellent. From 60 feet, six inches, I could see in vivid detail every grimace, every loosening or tightening of the grip on the bat, any subtle choking up, a twitch of the hips, an inching up or back in the box, and the subtlest rise or fall of the bat in the cocked position. I didn’t just see those movements and gestures as random tics of a batter who was going up there hacking, although some of them did actually adopt that plan. I internalized and digested those movements like a computer processes a stream of data. I saw everything clearly and understood the batter’s intent as well as he did. I could slow the game down to a point where I was convinced I knew where to throw the ball and what kind of pitch the occasion demanded. When a pitcher throws his pitches with conviction, watch out.
I knew and trusted that Jason was seeing the same things I saw. That made it almost unfair in 1999 and 2000 when I had such command of my pitches.
Ah yes, the pitch.
I had loose li
mbs, really loose, and with my strong lower half driving my energy load forward from my hooked rubber, my hips rotated to allow my upper body to begin its twist and forward motion, all of the movement generating and focusing the torque up and along my right arm, from the shoulder, through the elbow, and then outward through the hand, the ball finally released as a whiplike slingshot, the ball getting its last extra millimeter of spin and break from the bonus millisecond it spent rolling off the tips of my long, flexible fingers.
My right hand enjoyed an intimate relationship with the baseball, a bond as emotional as it was physical. Think of how thoroughly a husband knows his wife. He has felt every curve, he knows each and every firm and soft spot, he knows everything that there is to find on her body. That same degree of intimacy is what I felt when I cradled a baseball in the palm of my hand and positioned it into the perfect grip between my fingers. That ball and I got to know each other. The more I touched, the more I wanted to know. The more I learned, the better the response.
I felt, I saw, and I heard.
If I could not feel the wind on my face or on my body, I would toss a few blades of grass in the air to find out where it was. If I had the feel for my changeup or my breaking ball that day, I would play to the wind. I would know how big of a break I could create based on the strength and direction of the wind. If the wind was blowing against my face, I could generate a changeup that would almost stop in midair, plus I could get the extra break and extra rotation I wanted—into a right-handed hitter, away from a lefty. My rotation would get so tight that I could get that changeup to dive two feet away from a lefty hitter. If the wind was behind me, I could not get nearly the amount of movement—I had to force the break. But on the plus side, the wind at my back gave my fastball some extra hop. Even without my changeup, my number-one pitch was always the fastball.
Three pitches: my fastball up and in or spotted on the outside corner, down or up; my changeup, thrown with the same arm action and speed as the fastball but thrown about 10 to 12 miles per hour slower and with that nasty tailing action away from a lefty, in on a righty; and my breaking ball, which I was able to command at another level in 1999 and 2000, but also had great success using as a weapon against left-handed hitters as a back-door breaking ball on the outside corner.
After the pitch, more data poured in to be digested for the next pitch.
What was the reaction? What happened? Contact? Swing and miss? Fouled off? Did the batter dive? Was he fooled? Stand and stare? Charge?
Even though my command was so precise that I could, as Jason liked to say, hit a gnat’s rear end with any one of my three pitches, I didn’t hit my location with every pitch. But my mistakes were teachable moments for the next pitch.
“Say that Pedro decided to go up and in, but he missed by two or three inches and the guy took a good swing,” said Jason. “Instead of going, ‘Ooohh, he took a great swing, I’m not throwing that again,’ like a lot of pitchers would, Pedro had the awareness to go, ‘Uh-uh, I missed—now I’m going to execute what I tried to execute in the first place and get a totally different swing in return.’ That awareness he had, the ability to trust his vision and make the game go slow enough with his stuff and competitiveness made him absolutely elite.”
As the game developed, Jason and I would notice more macro tendencies of a lineup, especially one like the Yankees.
Either during a mound conference or back in the dugout between innings, Jason was really good at pointing out details such as, “Hey, these guys are taking pitches on you, let’s go strike one and make a quality pitch with your second pitch, and we’ll try to frame it.”
When they tried to swing early, they had less hope. They had their best chance when they took pitches and gave me strike one and strike two, just hoping that their guess of a breaking ball or changeup for the next pitch was right. That’s why Jason and I switched it up in 1999 and kept throwing gas, because that wasn’t what the hitters were expecting. When I did make a mistake, it would be a big one, like the homer that Chili Davis hit off of me.
Bernie Williams once told me, “I couldn’t look for all three pitches from you. I had to look for one. If you didn’t give it to me, I was done the whole night.”
That’s what smart hitters did—they waited for their pitch, and if they were extra disciplined, they waited for it to be thrown in a zone—up, down, in, or out—before committing to a swing.
“In my opinion, teams that waited for one pitch the entire game made trouble for Pedro,” said Jason. “Because if you went up there trying to hit everything he threw up there, you were going to have a confused day. If you were overaggressive or extremely passive without a game plan, he was going to destroy you.”
Yankees manager Joe Torre and his hitting coaches delivered this same message before games. Torre’s opinion was, “‘Look for a pitch and try to stay with it.’ That’s why guys took a lot out of Pedro because Pedro, to me, he was always trying to throw pitches that looked like strikes. They weren’t, because he had the ability to do that, which is very rare. I think basically we were trying to stay in the middle of the field with him. We weren’t trying to pull him, we were just trying to stay on the ball. He could embarrass you, but so be it—you can’t play this game afraid of being embarrassed.”
Paul O’Neill said, “I always looked fastball with Pedro. To look for that changeup, even if he threw a good one, you knew you weren’t going to hit it anyway, so hopefully, you adjust to other pitches. I always looked for fastballs, especially at Fenway, where he’d pitch in a lot more because right field was deeper, just another smart thing he would do. He’d challenge you with fastballs in when he needed to. Even if you hit the ball hard and drove the ball, it was nothing but a long out.
“But at Yankee Stadium, with its short right field, he would still pitch you in certain times. Certain pitchers will show you in, but not throw you a strike in. Pedro wasn’t afraid. I always thought you would get his fastball early, in your first at-bat in the game, and I thought as the game went on that might not be the case.”
Unfortunately, when I was pitching, I didn’t get to hear the reactions from a lot of hitters like Jason did.
“Really?” was a popular response after swinging and missing on a changeup, Jason said. Sometimes it was, “He’s just filthy,” or, “Oh great, here we go.”
Jason thought the umpires enjoyed the show too.
“Oh, there was a sense from them that they had the opportunity to sit back there and be a part of something special every time he took the mound, absolutely,” said Jason. “More so, they were going to enjoy it because he was going to work quick, he was going to throw strikes, they were going to be back there for not a whole lot of time and see something special. Over and over, I would hear comments like, ‘I got the good draw today.’”
From the mound, I studied the hitters’ reactions after outs as well. Often that would carry over to their next at-bat—and their next one. There were certain hitters who I owned, whose eyes betrayed panic or complete surrender. Ricky Ledee and Jay Buhner were two who come to mind. I looked at them at the plate, and they looked at me like, I have no chance, what the fuck am I doing here?
I knew then. I knew they would not get me. They would try to swing harder and harder, but their swings would become slower and slower.
Meanwhile, Derek Jeter and Edgar Martinez were two of my toughest outs. Same with Barry Bonds, but he was tough on everybody.
In 1999 and 2000, nearly everything Jason and I tried turned to gold.
Hard work and good chemistry, yes, there was plenty of that, especially in an age when hitters had gained an edge over pitchers.
But when theory, knowledge, and talent result in execution at a dominant level, there’s some mystery and grandeur in play as well.
Sometimes the magic of baseball steals the day.
In my hometown of Manoguayabo, Dominican Republic, nobody I knew growing up owned a camera. In this photo, believed to be taken in 1976, I’m the boy o
n the right, around 5 years old, with my cousin Angel in the middle and my brother Jesus to the left. My aunt is across the street, standing on the porch of her mother’s house, which was destroyed by Hurricane David in 1979.
Pedro Martinez Collection
In this family-plus-one photo from around 1990, I’m standing with my arms around my father, Paolino. Also in this photo are (back row from the left) my brothers Nelson and Ramon, my sisters Luz Maria and Anadelia, Hall of Famer Eddie Murray behind me, and my younger brother, Jesus, to my left. My mother, Leopoldina, is to the left in the front row, next to a cousin, Chicho, and my two nephews in front: Jose Miguel Abreu and Jose Antonio.
Pedro Martinez Collection
Beyond pinpoint control and a willingness to pitch inside, I didn’t have much else going for me when I was first signed as a 17-year-old by the Dodgers. Here I am with Pelagio Martinez (left), no relation, in 1988.
Pedro Martinez Collection
It was always a challenge for me to stand out from the other Dodgers’ prospects at Campo Las Palmas. That’s me, sixth from the left in the back row, with the black stripe across my white shirt.
Pedro Martinez Collection
The Dodgers never would have signed me when I was a scrawny, soft-throwing teenager trying to get myself noticed at the Dodgers’ baseball academy in the Dominican Republic if not for Eleodoro Arias’s faith in me.
Pedro Martinez Collection
In the summer of 1991, I was only 19 years old but I raced through the Dodgers’ minor league system, advancing from Single A, Double A (here, with the San Antonio Missions), and Triple A ball. I thought I should have made it to the majors as well, but the Dodgers made me wait until very late in the 1992 season for my first call-up.
Pedro Martinez Collection