Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  McCarver’s reaction was: “Terrible. Awful. That’s absolutely awful. You have got to be kidding me.”

  Later, Zimmer told me all he was thinking was that it was “horseshit” the way I was behaving. Zimmer had been hit in the head once, and he thought I had “torn Karim’s head off and then looked over at Posada like ‘you’re next.’ I’ve been watching this for three years,” he said. “The guy’s too great a pitcher for that kind of shit. All hell broke loose, and I was the only one left in the dugout. You can’t be a coward, so I came out of the dugout and the only guy I looked for was Pedro. And he wasn’t out there. Then here he comes out of the dugout, and I try to go after him. And my legs wouldn’t carry me. He didn’t do nothing bad to me. If I come at you like a bulldog, you’re going to do something to pull me down—do something, and that’s just what he did. I would have done the same thing if somebody came after me like that.”

  The entire Zimmer episode that day saddened Joe Torre. He remembered that he was about to tell Zimmer to stay in the dugout during the bedlam but realized Zimmer would not have listened to him at that point. Reflecting later, Torre thought that I “was put in a very difficult situation because [he] had somebody coming at [him].”

  Our ALCS went from “Arm-ageddon” to “Mayhem” in the New York Post, and I was the “Fenway Punk.” The tabloid showed me on page 1 standing over Zimmer, his face planted in the grass, my arms to the side, like a matador who has just twirled his cape and killed a bull.

  Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who grew up near Boston and was running for reelection, depicted me as a criminal. “If that happened in New York, we would have arrested the perpetrator,” he said. “Nobody should throw a 70-year-old man to the ground, period. You start doing that, pretty soon you’re going to throw a 61-year-old man to the ground, and I have a big vested interest in that.

  “You just cannot assault people, even if it’s on a baseball field.”

  My friend Tom Menino, the longtime mayor of Boston, jumped to my defense, which I appreciated, but I was sad to hear Bloomberg rip me and decide I was guilty until proven innocent. When somebody finally told him that Zimmer had charged me, he tried to apologize. I wasn’t surprised he took it back: there were a lot of Dominican voters in New York.

  Bloomberg set the tone for what followed.

  Shortly after Game 3, I began to receive the first in a series of death threats that worried me unlike any other time in my Red Sox days. I had gotten hate mail when I first showed up in 1998. They were all variations of “you fucking Dominican, you fucking Latin, you can’t come to America to earn all the money that we make, you don’t belong here, go back to your country”—stuff like that. I showed them to the front office, which said that it would investigate the handwriting, but I never heard any follow-up. I asked Mo Vaughn and Nomar Garciaparra if letters like those were normal. Mo said he got the same kind, but he told me that people were jealous of us. Nomar told me, “That’s okay, dude, don’t pay attention to that.”

  But this time it was very different. There were specific threats, against both me and my family, saying that if I came to New York they would be killed. When the police saw these threats, they thought they were credible enough to advise me to keep my family out of New York and keep them under surveillance while I was gone.

  I didn’t get tossed in jail like Bloomberg would have liked when I got to New York, but I was more or less a prisoner at our midtown hotel. Instead of heading up to Morningside Heights like I occasionally did when we were in New York, I holed up in my room. We had extra security in the hotel and on our floor, and I didn’t go out once. Nothing but room service, and I had to be careful that the food was okay before I ate any of it.

  When we boarded the bus to go to the stadium, the police and our security presence was unprecedented.

  At the old Yankee Stadium, the team bus dropped us off outside the Yankees players’ parking lot and players had to walk a 10-yard gauntlet to get inside the stadium. This time a lynch mob awaited me.

  “Fuck you, Pedro—Zimmer’s not over. I’ll fight you.”

  One man was beyond help.

  “Come over here, you son of bitch—I hate you, you fucking punk. Get the hell out of New York, we don’t want you here.”

  Nobody threw anything at me at least. When I reached our clubhouse, I felt I had stepped into the only safe haven in New York besides my hotel room.

  It wasn’t so much that I was scared, it was just a scary time.

  On days I started, I could always spin a protective cocoon around myself in the hours leading up to my first pitch. I would neatly hang up my shirt and pants, get my back and shoulder massaged, and meticulously put on my uniform.

  On October 20, 2003, I felt vulnerable. My cocoon was threadbare and flimsy. I had never pitched a game under more pressure. I’ve always said that pressure is a lack of confidence in the things that you can do, but on that day forces that had nothing to do with baseball closed in on me. I felt physically threatened, to a degree above and beyond Game 5 of the Division Series in Cleveland in 1999. The threats that night had begun only when I started to warm up. Four years later, once I threw down Zimmer, the vise began to squeeze. When I got to New York, I had a couple of days in my hotel room to stew about it, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  Just before I took the long, exposed walk out to the outfield to begin my long toss and then my bullpen, I asked Eddie Dominguez, our resident security agent, to walk beside me. Pitchers do not get police escorts on a baseball field. That night I did, for the first and last time. The reaction from the fans in the half-filled stands was instantaneously hostile and fierce. When I stepped onto the mound to begin warming up before the bottom of the first, I glanced around the stadium. Before I could think about facing Alfonso Soriano, I had to stop thinking, literally, about meeting the same fate as John F. Kennedy.

  I started pitching. I struck out Soriano, and the game was on. My worries began to lift. We were one win away from going to the World Series, and after four innings we were up, 4–0, just 15 outs from beating the Yankees. I had four strikeouts and allowed one walk and two hits. Meanwhile, Roger was all done after three innings, allowing the four runs on six hits.

  I gave up a solo home run to Jason Giambi in the fifth, but in the sixth inning I needed just 11 pitches to collect my three outs against three Yankees. I had been averaging 13 pitches an inning to that point, quite pitch-efficient, and we had a three-run lead. There was no question I would go out for the seventh inning at 79 pitches. But in the seventh, the Yankees started to get to me. I actually got two quick outs on just seven pitches when I began to fade. Giambi got me again on another home run to make it 4–2. Enrique Wilson and Karim Garcia got two singles, and Yankee Stadium started to wake up. It smelled blood, but I shut them up with another strikeout of Soriano on my 21st pitch of the inning, the 100th of the game.

  I was all done.

  I patted my chest and raised both hands in the air to point to God and thank him for keeping me healthy and allowing me to pitch. Everyone in the stadium knew what that meant. Tim Wakefield out in the bullpen knew, and on the bench everyone knew too. Chris Correnti had already walked over to Grady Little and told him, “He’s done, he’s exhausted.”

  I knocked the clods of dirt out of my cleats at the top of the steps and shook hands with and high-fived my smiling teammates before plopping myself down on the far end of the dugout. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled. All the pressure and bullshit from the past week began to slip away—the death threats, Zimmer, Garcia, the travel from the Oakland series, and my 130 pitches from Game 1 of that Division Series escaping from me like air from a balloon.

  I opened my eyes and saw Grady standing in front of me.

  “Petey, can you go out there and get one more hitter, Nick Johnson? Embree’s never gotten him out. So far, you’ve handled him pretty well.”

  Well, this was a surprise. But I said yes. What else could I say? I had to strap it on for o
ne more hitter. It wasn’t the first time that I had been asked to go back in after I had shut it down. It didn’t happen often, but here we were. We had a two-run lead, six outs to go, and my manager said he had the whole bullpen behind me, ready to go, and he needed me for another batter and then I was coming out.

  While I began to restart my engines, David Ortiz clobbered a home run in the eighth inning to give us the 5–2 lead, an extra cushion that I hoped I wouldn’t need but I was very happy to have.

  When I went back out there for the eighth, Lou Merloni was sitting with Doug Mirabelli and Chris Correnti on the bench, and Lou said, “Fuck, what are we doing? Is he going back out there?” Mirabelli said, “Hopefully, it’s one hitter at a time.”

  “Here we go,” said Lou.

  Johnson gave me a battle, but on my seventh pitch (number 107), he popped up to shortstop.

  I gave a quick look into the dugout.

  Grady was in it, and he wasn’t coming to get me.

  There was no time to think about why, although of course it registered. I didn’t look at the bullpen, but Grady had said they were ready to go, and I knew they had been a force the whole playoffs. No time to worry, though, it was time to face Jeter. Derek launched a double over the head of Trot Nixon in right field. Okay. Bernie Williams was up next, and he lined an RBI single. Our lead was down to two, we had one out, and here came Grady. A little later than I thought he would, but here he came.

  He surprised me again.

  “Pedey, one more hitter, just Matsui—you have more bullets for one more guy?”

  “Yeah, Grady, why not?”

  Before he walked up the steps, Little and pitching coach Dave Wallace had discussed lifting me for Embree in order to face Matsui.

  But Grady changed his mind.

  I gave up a screamer to Matsui, a ground-rule double that put Bernie at third. Two on, one out.

  Jorge Posada was up, and I was still pitching.

  In the stands, Theo Epstein was already starting to get very agitated.

  He’d been able to tell by the end of the seventh, in both my body language and my results, that I was completely done.

  “It was horrifying, like watching a train wreck in slow motion,” said Theo. “He had pitched with so much courage through seven and deserved better. I felt bad for Pedro.”

  Out in the bullpen, Embree and Mike Timlin had been warming up, and Tim Wakefield was out there too.

  Nobody said anything, but they had no idea why the bullpen telephone was not ringing.

  “I’m thinking to myself, What the fuck is going on? Why isn’t one of these guys in the game already?” said Wakefield later. “What is going on? They have to get him out of there.”

  Not yet they didn’t.

  Up to that point, I had had good success against Posada, but he hit a soft double over the head of second baseman Todd Walker. Tie ball game.

  Grady came up to me one last time.

  “Way to battle, Petey, way to battle—goddamn, don’t worry, we’ve got them next inning.”

  Millar was on the mound too.

  “We got you! Next inning, we’ll get them. Let’s go, we’ll score next inning, pow pow pow pow—we’re close as shit.”

  Close, no cigars.

  Aaron Boone’s 11th-inning home run off of Wakey ended the last tragic chapter in the Red Sox’s 85-year World Series drought and sent us into the most somber clubhouse I have ever entered. I wanted to cry, but there’s no crying in baseball, especially after a game. I felt this deep-down “God, I am so frustrated” feeling that left me wanting to snap.

  All of us were stunned, but we felt the worst for Wakey, who was sitting in front of his locker, his head buried in his hands.

  One by one, we walked over to Wake, put an arm around him.

  “Hey, man, it’s not your fault.”

  I can’t say I felt as badly as Tim did, but it was close. I felt like I had let this incredible opportunity slip through my hands. I always felt responsible for the outcome of a game I pitched in, and that weight was crushing me, especially because of how hard it was for Wakefield, who lost what he didn’t start.

  I was in a tough spot.

  I knew that my pitch count was at 100 when I left after the seventh, but more importantly, I knew that I had given it my best at that point and had very little left to give.

  I didn’t know that before the game Theo had met with Grady to check on how everyone was feeling. Grady was aware of all the data Theo and his assistants in baseball operations had given him, about how my OPS against dropped significantly after 100, 105 pitches. Theo had asked, “So, what’s the script for tonight—get six out of Pedro, then Timlin, Embree, and Williamson?” and Grady had told him, “Yeah, I think he’s going to throw a great game, but I don’t think we need to push him. We’ll take six good ones, and our bullpen’s been throwing pretty good.”

  I knew Grady had made a bad decision, but even though I knew I was tired, everybody knew I was tired, everybody knew I was done, and everybody knew what I’d been through, I could not blame my manager for the outcome. Bad decisions do not always lead to bad outcomes. I was still throwing 94 on the last swing Posada took. That meant I could have easily gotten an out if only I had executed. But that didn’t happen. I didn’t get to them, they got to me. And that was my responsibility, which means it was not Grady’s fault. I didn’t execute, and it cost Grady his job—and us a trip to the World Series.

  It wasn’t Grady’s fault, and it wasn’t Wakey’s fault.

  The blame was my own.

  24

  “If You Sneak into My House, I Will Shoot You”

  “NO MORE ‘SWEET CAROLINE.’ Only salsa between innings.”

  Dan Shaughnessy was prone to zinging me in his Boston Globe columns, and that was just the latest jab he took in the late summer of 2003, wondering what it would take to keep me happy. He also said that I had “officially morphed into Diana Ross.” He called me “Passport Pedro” and the “Dominican Diva” too. Gerry Callahan of the Boston Herald said that if my “skin were any thinner you could see through him. This is a man with the heart of a lion and the ears of a rabbit.”

  All the extra rest I required, the extra trip I took back to the Dominican in July to be one of the torch holders in the Pan Am Games, and the growing perception that I would flee Boston as soon as I could after the 2004 season—all this was a juicy T-bone steak for the local media. I wasn’t reading the papers or listening to the radio, but like most athletes and managers who say that, I was surrounded by other people who were, and they would pass on what was being said or written.

  I was cranky that summer, no question, but the media’s perception of me was so ridiculously warped, wrong, and negative that I knew it would be futile to try to explain or defend myself.

  I guess I deserved all that scorn: I was 10-3 with a 2.29 ERA in late August, with 166 strikeouts in 149⅔ innings. Pretty bad, I know.

  But hey, like I always said, just like salsa’s from Cuba and not the Dominican Republic, that’s no reason to let the facts get in the way of a good one-liner.

  After the 1999 season, when I got hurt after the All-Star Game and had to miss time, and in 2000 as well, I had to get on a different program from every other pitcher. After my 2001 injury, I was never the same. Still effective, yes, and at times dominant, but dating back to the 2002 season and for the remainder of my career, my body never got better after I got hurt. I never had the upper-90s, lightning-like fastball again. I had to adapt. My training, performance, and recovery became more and more problematic for me. I had a trainer with me all the time, which meant that everything I did was different from the other pitchers.

  Yes, I was on a special program. I had my own way of doing things.

  What I could never talk about while I was pitching was that I was at a disadvantage with many of my peers. I would never say that all of them or even many of them were doing steroids, but some of them were. I wasn’t, so I could not get that extra help that
many others were getting. The other difference was that my body could not handle the stronger anti-inflammatories that nearly all pitchers take in order to get through each start, not to mention a long season. I wish I could have taken the stronger stuff. We tried. I was given medicine, a strong anti-inflammatory, in Philadelphia, and when I took it I felt like I was intoxicated. My lips, my tongue, my hands, and the bottoms of my feet became numb, and I bled internally. That was the first and last time I would ever take the strong stuff. Advil and Aleve, yes, those I could handle, but that was all. My special treatment method became time off. I needed the extra time to heal. If I pulled something, I had to wait 15, sometimes 20 days to heal.

  So when I began to hear that I was being called a diva, I had to swallow it. I knew what I was made of. I never second-guessed my guts.

  If I wanted to skip a start against the Yankees or any team, I couldn’t unless it was one of those times when I couldn’t pitch. I wasn’t going to admit that I was sore, that my velocity was down, and that I couldn’t take any anti-inflammatories. If I had spoken about any of that, or if any of my trainers had let on about what my treatment plan was, the Yankees and every other lineup would have taken advantage of my compromised situation. I had to keep it a secret, and as a result, the chatter about me being a diva and having my own set of rules began to increase.

  It really wasn’t all that different from how the perception of me as a “headhunter” took off without anyone knowing the facts. In my head and heart, all that mattered were the games and my performance in the games. The rest was noise. I accepted responsibility for adding to that noise, because I always gave honest answers to the media’s questions. My answers were so frank and memorable, they got me in trouble. What came out of my mouth became the story when all I cared about was throwing a baseball well enough to fool a hitter.