Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  That was one of the four games in 2000 when I faced a bases-loaded situation. I didn’t allow a hit at any time.

  Tightness in my left rib cage in late June led to a stint on the disabled list. I didn’t want to go on the DL, but Jimy and Dan overruled me. I came back in July, and in my third start back I threw a shutout that lowered my ERA to 1.38 and improved my record to 12-3.

  I had a relapse with my shoulder, experiencing tightness that knocked me out of a game in mid-August after just four innings, but nobody, including me, was alarmed.

  I made my next start on schedule, and my next one too, in Kansas City.

  My line for that game against the Royals was terrible: six runs and eight hits in eight innings, but there was much more to it than those numbers.

  I am as proud of that start as I am of any other in my career.

  We had burned through our bullpen in the three days leading up to my start, and Jimy had told me that the team really needed me to pitch deep into the game, to go eight or nine innings so the bullpen could recover.

  I went out there and could not get the job done. It was one of my worst beginnings to a game ever: I gave up five runs on six hits in the very first inning. But I came to a realization when I finally got my third out, nine batters later: that was my day to take a punch. I knew I just had to pitch for as long as I could.

  We scored a run in the top of the second, and I told myself to just relax, trust my stuff, mix my pitches, and rely on my knowledge of the hitters.

  I gave up a home run in the second, but after that I battled, and I won the battle. I lasted eight innings. My final six innings were scoreless, and I allowed only one hit. We wound up winning, 9–7. I was extremely proud to pick up my teammates that day. It hurt my ERA a little bit—it jumped from 1.53 to 1.77, which was not that much—but the gain was worth far more.

  “I just remember how he gave up all those runs, but when he came in on the bench, he didn’t throw his glove, he just went and sat down,” said Jimy. “Then I watched him pitch, and he was pitching like it was a tie game or we were ahead. And we gradually came back in that game. That was one of the most courageous performances I ever saw from him, even though he had 17 strikeouts in New York and the playoff game in Cleveland. Sometimes you really find out about a person when things aren’t going so good. He never dropped his head, he just kept pitching, fighting, and shutting guys down.”

  I didn’t have much time to relish the Royals game.

  My next start was at Tropicana Field, and with my fourth pitch of the game, I hit Tampa Bay’s Gerald Williams on the left wrist with a 94-mile-per-hour fastball. I am sure it hurt, but his pain was not on my mind as he took one or two steps toward first base. I had never hit him before, we had absolutely no history with each other, and this was not an instance where I was hitting him on purpose.

  I walked toward the umpire, holding up my glove to ask for a new ball. Williams kept looking down at his left arm like he was checking the time on his wristwatch and then looking back up at me. After one last glance at his wrist, Williams spun to his left and bolted toward me as if he were trying to steal second base.

  In the first split-second that I saw him, I thought, Is he really going to charge me? His eyes told me he wanted to inflict serious pain on me.

  But I froze. It had been a few years. I was not ready for him.

  He reached out with his right, good hand and smashed it into my face, and then landed another, knocking me back on my ass. Lou Merloni, my third baseman, reached Williams and tackled him down low at the same time that Varitek caught up to Williams up high and from behind. Williams was sandwiched between the two, and the three of them collapsed to the artificial turf so hard that Merloni sustained a concussion from the impact.

  This fight was more real, more intense, than even the Mike Williams brawl from 1996. Real punches were being thrown, and they were connecting. Williams was still raging and roaring from the bottom of the pile, but Varitek had him pinned to the ground, so he had no hope of getting up. I strained to reach him. I could hear Williams screaming and crying, “Don’t let them hit me, I’m bleeding, don’t let them hit me.”

  I think I was able to nip him with a kick of my cleats while he was down there and draw some blood.

  Joe Kerrigan pulled me out of there, and eventually the game resumed after eight Devil Rays players and coaches were ejected.

  I stayed in, but all I wanted to do was drill someone. I was furious, but it took a lot of calming words from Ramon to talk me out of that. “Don’t do it,” he kept saying, and my teammates urged me to not give in. Unlike the Devil Rays, we still had a shot at the wild-card spot, and I was aware enough to realize that retaliation would be stupid for both me and the team. I listened. They were right.

  Then it was lights out. Gerald had awakened a sleeping lion.

  I channeled all that fury into my craft, and as I breezed through inning after inning I grew more calm and more confident. I did not allow another base runner after Williams over the first eight innings. While I bore down, the Rays lost their composure. They kept throwing at and missing my teammates Brian Daubach and Trot Nixon, a real toro loco (crazy bull) who did his best to keep the rage alive. At one point, Nixon swung and let the bat go right at the pitcher.

  In the top of the ninth, I still had a no-hitter.

  John Flaherty had worked a 2-2 count when I noticed that the clasp of the chain I wore around my neck had come undone and the white-gold cross it held had fallen to the mound. I thought about putting it back on, but I said to myself, No, if it’s God’s wish that I take it off now, I’ll leave it off. I stuffed it in my back pocket, and on my next pitch Flaherty singled into center.

  John Flaherty, a guy who couldn’t hit himself, took a 97-mile-per-hour fastball away and dropped it into right-center field. Go figure. If John Flaherty could ruin my no-hitter in 2000 and Bip Roberts could spoil my perfect game five years earlier, there was no reason to be upset with never having one of those on my résumé. In my case, that just wasn’t meant to happen.

  After the game, I kept my composure but was still steaming.

  I poked fun at Gerald through the reporters afterwards, reminding him and everyone else who would listen that “there’s no crying in baseball,” and that if you’re going to charge someone and then start crying, “Don’t let them hit me,” you’re a crybaby.

  “Don’t cry later, just stand your ground.”

  After the game, Jimy was sitting in his office when he was told that there were some Devil Rays who wanted to have a word with him. Jimy marched out of his office and through the double doors of the visiting clubhouse, where three Rays, Gerald Williams, Greg Vaughn, and Bob Smith, stood in the hallway.

  “We want to talk to Pedro.”

  “What are you talking about? You ain’t talking to Pedro. Talk to Pedro tomorrow.”

  “No, we want to talk to him now.”

  “That ain’t happening,” said Jimy, his ire rising with his voice. “Get out of here, go home.”

  Just then Larry Rothschild, Tampa’s manager, came running up, yelling for his players to get back to their own clubhouse. Jimy was furious with Rothschild for having Rays pitchers throw at Red Sox hitters all game long, but rather than confront him, Jimy stormed back into our clubhouse.

  Daubach, who had been driven to a nearby hospital because he hurt his left elbow when he joined the dog-pile, got dropped off at the stadium. As he stepped out of the van the first person he saw was Gerald Williams. Daubach’s elbow still ached, and one look at Williams convinced him not to say a word. Williams didn’t chase him, but when Daubach reached the safe haven of our clubhouse, he said, “Pedro, you’ve got to be careful—they’re out there and they want to fight.”

  That’s when all the Latinos—Ramon, José Offerman, Manny Alexander, Wilton Veras—said, “They want to fight? Let’s fight, let’s go.”

  Shoulder to shoulder, we walked out to the concourse as a unit and marched right past Williams and Gr
eg Vaughn and a couple of others, including Rays first baseman Fred McGriff. Nobody spoke. They met my stare with their own smoldering glares, but the encounter was wordless. We kept our eyes locked on each other as we continued our silent walk to the team bus, but the Devil Rays never moved a muscle. Which was smart on their part. They felt tough, I’m sure, but they sensed, correctly, that if they were going to mess with this pack of Latinos, there would be casualties. We wanted to fight, and all it would have taken was a single challenging word for the fists to start flying. When you deal with Dominicans all united on the same team, you can get into a fight over anything. We had solidarity.

  Before the season ended, the Indians came to town, and before one game Manny Ramirez and I were chatting in right field. Manny was on the verge of becoming a free agent.

  “Pedro, tell your GM I want to play here.”

  That floored me. Even then, one could never be too sure what Manny was thinking, but he wasn’t kidding. He said he wanted to be on a good team and that he also wanted to play with me. I went to find Dan.

  “Dan, you know what Manny told me? He wants you to go after him this winter. He wants to play here.”

  Dan smiled.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He’s serious. I think you should try.”

  Dan didn’t say much.

  At that moment our team was beginning to fall apart.

  Dan’s relationship with Jimy had begun to sour in the second half of 2000. Our mercurial center fielder Carl Everett began to act up, and Dan came to the defense of the player, not the manager, which Jimy did not take well.

  I didn’t realize it, but dysfunction and negativity were beginning to drag the team into a vortex, and I was about to get sucked in.

  19

  The Beginning of the End

  BEFORE THE 2001 season began, both the team and I knew I had a time bomb ticking in my shoulder. Like a bomb squad moving in slow motion, we went to work on it. For the first time, the team sent me home after the 2000 season with this specific instruction: don’t throw a baseball. After giving my shoulder time to rest, I began my strength and conditioning regimen, minus throwing. I didn’t need convincing on the no-throwing command.

  Behind those sparkling numbers from 2000 had been a constant pull and pressure—a nagging ache, sometimes a stab of pain—behind my shoulder. Some days were worse than others, and even though I could not afford to expend the mental energy to think about it or worry about it, I knew that I had a problem. I know now that my heavy workload, beginning with that first full season as a starter with Montreal in 1995, when I went 194⅔ innings, followed by five consecutive seasons when I averaged 224 innings a year, began to catch up to me in 2000.

  In 2001 the bomb exploded.

  Before my 12th start in early June, I had posted a 7-1 record, my ERA was at 1.66, and batters were hitting .186 against me, numbers right in line with my 1999 and 2000 standards. There were no outward signs that trouble was brewing.

  But after three grueling starts in a row against the Yankees beginning in late May, my shoulder began to bark. I made one more start at home on June 9, when I gave up five runs in seven innings, before going on the DL with what the team announced was shoulder tendinitis.

  Eventually, everyone learned that I had a tear in my rotator cuff. I spent the rest of that season trying and ultimately failing to come back and pitch and help the team.

  After June, the year was little more than pure pain and misery for me.

  I fit right in with a team that was not only splitting apart from within because of injuries and a toxic mix of personalities but was also up for sale.

  Big changes were coming to the Red Sox, but first the team and I had to struggle through an 82-win season that was a horror show from start to finish.

  When my new Red Sox teammate, 38-year-old veteran David Cone, walked by a group of reporters in March and muttered, “I thought the Bronx Zoo was something, but this place takes the fucking cake,” he was dead-on.

  2001 was the pits for everyone.

  Ramon was gone, having re-signed with the Dodgers, a move that I did not agree with. “If I were Ramon, I would much rather go to Montreal and play for 10 cents than go to the Dodgers and play for a million,” I told USA Baseball Weekly. (The Dodgers released Ramon before the end of spring training. He signed with the Pirates, started in four games, and then retired at the age of 33.) At the baseball writers’ dinner in January, I presented my third Cy Young Award to Ramon, much as I’d done when I gave it to Juan Marichal the preceding year at the same dinner. This time around, the relentless media was all over me because word had trickled north that I wanted a contract extension. I didn’t, but the misunderstanding had grown because of the Boston media’s inability to look carefully at my quotes or at least bother to have them translated. My record contract had long since been left in the dust, with Kevin Brown signing a seven-year deal worth $105 million—$15 million a year—with the Dodgers before the 1999 season. In the winter before the 2001 season, Alex Rodriguez signed his epic 10-year deal with the Rangers for $252 million, and Dan had gone out and signed Manny Ramirez to the Red Sox for eight years and $160 million.

  At $12.5 million a year, I was a bargain. The Dominican press asked me about the vast difference in dollars between Manny’s and Alex’s deals and mine. I said only that if I were in charge of the Red Sox, I’d negotiate a new deal with myself before my current one expired.

  “That’s all I said—I didn’t say I wanted to renegotiate or that I wanted more money,” I told reporters. “When I am a free agent or close to being a free agent, then the Duke can come talk to me about it. I have three years to go, three long years.

  “I’m already rich. I don’t care. I’m not playing for money. When I go up there, it’s my heart, it’s my name, it’s my country, it’s my pride, it’s my team.”

  I had made a call to Manny over the winter to explain to him what Boston was like and encourage him to sign. Before he signed Manny, Dan had tried to sign free agent Mike Mussina, but Mussina wound up with the Yankees, a very smart signing by them. Dan went for offense, and I don’t blame him, but I always wanted another ace with me in the rotation. I had to wait a couple more years for that to happen.

  One of my sons was born in February 2001, so that delayed my arrival at spring training. That was nothing new. I was never one of the early arrivals, but by 2001 some in the media had started to call attention to it. I never came early, but I was never late by the rules of the team and MLB, so I never saw an issue. Neither did Jimy Williams, which I appreciated. As a minor leaguer in 1968, Jimy had seen a young Pete Rose show up at the Reds’ camp with two weeks to go and be ready to go by the beginning of the season. As long as I showed up at the right weight, in good shape, and ready to pitch, which was always the case, he never had a problem with when I appeared in Fort Myers.

  Carl Everett and Jimy held peace talks at the winter meetings in Dallas, but they began to butt heads once spring training games began in March. Carl was late—one minute late—for one road trip, and Jimy ordered the bus to leave without him, just one of a couple of run-ins they had. Manny, immature to begin with, withdrew into his shell in his new surroundings and created a stir when he temporarily backed out of an agreement to move from his position in right field, where he’d played with Cleveland, to play left field for the Red Sox.

  Soon after he appeared shirtless and buffed on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Nomar went down with a wrist injury in early March. At first it appeared minor, but he underwent season-ending surgery before Opening Day.

  Then, in early June, Jason went down for the season with a broken elbow.

  We had veterans on the team, like Dante Bichette, José Offerman, and Mike Lansing, who wanted more playing time than Jimy wanted to give them. Mainly because of injuries, the lineup kept changing, almost on a daily basis, and the regulars began bitching about the inconsistencies. Once, Lansing walked into the clubhouse and after seeing his name missing from t
he lineup pinned to the bulletin board, gave the piece of paper a two-fisted double-fingered salute. The atmosphere turned nasty, and Jimy became the focal point.

  The poisonous atmosphere seeped into my bubble as well.

  My numbers were good those first two months, but my shoulder did not feel right. I sensed my body was headed into a danger zone, and that left me in an uneasy frame of mind.

  It did not help that I hit Edgar Martinez on the helmet with a breaking ball on May 1 in Seattle. As with Gerald Williams, there was absolutely no intent with the pitch, plus it was an off-speed pitch. The game was scoreless, it was the first game of a series, so there was no lingering score to settle: it was just a ball that got away. But no, because of a new zero-tolerance policy for hit batsmen that baseball instituted before the season, my hitting Edgar meant I recived a warning from the umpire, another opportunity for baseball to teach me a lesson.

  The next day I blew my top to reporters.

  “Thank God I’m going to go away from baseball soon, sooner than they think, so they can just take their baseball and stick it up whatever they want. I’m going to go back to my country and be happy.”

  I felt targeted, just like I had before spring training, when MLB went to the trouble to tell the Red Sox that I could no longer slit my uniform sleeves to create the freedom I wanted to feel when I went through my delivery. I got around that by sewing an extra triangular panel of jersey material into the sleeve to make it baggy enough, but I had also received complaints from the league about my glove having red laces on it, another distraction for hitters. And of course, back in 1999, the hitters couldn’t handle my pitches because they were blinded by the TIA MARIA I wrote on my baseball cap.