“Pedro was just trying to be honest when he answered questions. He was speaking in his second language, and he made some faux pas,” said Steve Krasner of the Providence Journal. “This is a shame, but his honesty led him to becoming misunderstood. And when that happened, he turned on the media.”
The hit batters, the fights, the quotes, the diva act—to me, that was all negativity, and the media, especially in Boston, were far more likely to latch on to a negative story than a positive one.
Pedro pitched another shutout and had double-digit strikeouts again?
Wow, that’s great.
Pedro sounded ungrateful about his $17.5 million option being picked up? Pedro flew back to the Dominican again? Pedro missed a team picture?
Oh man, now we’re talking.
Overlook the good, overemphasize the bad—that was the tenor of how the Boston media viewed me in my final two seasons there.
I had been warned by Mo Vaughn when I first came in 1998 not to read the papers. I quickly understood why. One day I walked into the clubhouse, and Mo and Dan Shaughnessy were in this intense conversation in front of Mo’s locker. Mo had a bat in his hand and was waving it around, banging it on the locker, but I thought Mo was just messing with Shaughnessy. “Go get him, Mo!” I cackled, but when I walked over to the two to have some fun, I saw the fury in Mo’s eyes. That sobered me up right away. The Red Sox media relations staff hustled over to get Shaughnessy out of there before anybody got hurt. That’s when I realized how much power the Boston media had and how easily they could get under players’ skin.
A year later, after Jimy kept me from starting, I saw enemies in the media everywhere I looked. That helped me let off steam. If I yelled at Dan Duquette in the clubhouse for not sticking up for me, then I didn’t see how it was a worthy story for the media.
“Whatever happens in the clubhouse, you’re not allowed to say,” I said. “The clubhouse is my house. If you sneak into my house and I don’t know you, I will shoot you.”
I calmed down after that, but Shaughnessy couldn’t let it go. He wrote that “it was as if the Sox had drilled a tranquilizer dart into his tiny butt.”
I didn’t appreciate the comment. I didn’t want Shaughnessy talking about my ass. I thought he meant something else by it, but he explained that it was just an expression. I wasn’t so sure.
In Boston, and also in New York a little, things got out of hand a few times too many with the media, and I simply got tired of it. The game wasn’t enough anymore. The media latched on to any slip of the tongue, any hint of divisiveness, any scent of dissent. I felt like I would have been fair game if I’d gotten in trouble for how I was behaving off the field, like getting in fights or being pulled over for a DUI or some other irresponsible act. But that never happened. I was a role model in that sense, yet the media found a way to make me look nasty and spoiled.
If I had a bad day, I would say, “I just got lit up, bro! That’s it.”
“But why, Pedro? Why, why, why?”
“C’mon, I just got lit up, pure and simple—I stunk today.”
Or if I had a good day, I sensed reporters wanted me to say “Oh, I owned them, I killed those guys,” so they could run with the negative quote.
With the Red Sox, there were too many reporters for such a small town, and they had too much space and time to fill.
There were plenty of reporters I liked, and those were the ones who would usually stick to baseball questions, smart baseball questions.
“Where do you think the game got away from you? What was the turning point?” or “Why did you use a certain sequence and then a fastball away to get Matsui for the third out with the bases loaded?” Those kinds of questions made sense to me, and I could answer them at length. What used to really get my goat were stupid, nonsensical questions that were irrelevant to my pitching or the team. Any question that began “Talk about . . .” was like a fork scratching a plate—I hated it. I could tell that some reporters came over to me just so they could say they had asked me a question. I hated that too. This was the case in Boston and New York and with the Dominican media as well. I wanted someone knowledgeable to ask me questions, someone making sense, not someone who just wanted to hear me talk. I had no time for that.
The media was so powerful. If they decided to mount a campaign for someone, they could make him look like a king. But if they had it out for you, it didn’t matter if you were an angel, they would draw the horns and tail on you. I couldn’t control any of that, and I tried, hard, to just be honest and let it go at that.
I understand how my refusal to play along with the worst instincts and habits of the media fueled the creation of the diva persona. I built a fortress between my personal and professional lives, refusing to allow more than a glimpse to the outside world of my family and how I spent my private time. This required a good deal of energy on my part, because the media is constantly trying to peel back the layers that encase a famous person. When they can’t, they are left to obsess over what they can see and hear.
I wanted the public to be inspired by what I did on the baseball field. That’s why I became a celebrity: by my performance as an athlete. When I’m outside the game, I’m still a regular human being. That’s something I repeated over and over once fame hit me with the Red Sox: “I’m just a man, a tiny man.”
Few really understood what I meant, which is one reason why I wanted to write this book. I kept my private life shielded when I was a ballplayer, so I understand why few people ever got a good handle on what I was like as a human being. They just saw me throwing shutouts or getting in brawls or giving provocative answers to nosy questions.
Away from the game, I tried to always keep it simple, keep my support group in the family, and keep coming back to my finca.
At a couple of points I got taken advantage of by someone, but eventually I’d find out and throw them out of the inner circle. The real ones stayed, and the fake ones went.
I didn’t become a recluse when I got rich and famous, although it was much easier to be anonymous in Montreal than it was in Boston, where I had to put on disguises sometimes just to take a walk outside.
But I wasn’t lonely. To me, it was simple. There were few benefits to being a celebrity, and it was too easy to find trouble. Sure, when you become famous you can’t fail to notice that better-looking women start popping up and demands on your time increase for both commercial and social reasons. I could usually pick out who was sincere and who wasn’t, but once I became well known, it was easier for me just to stay at home. When I went out, it was usually with my family and with people who had been close to me since I was a baby. I didn’t hang out with strangers. There are not many people I will allow into my finca or my other homes to listen to music, share a meal, or hang out with me until two, three o’clock in the morning. My sisters used to always cook for me, and I’d be surrounded by my mom and my dad, my brothers and my cousins, when I wasn’t at the ballpark.
I didn’t want to make my private life part of my career. My family’s support mattered most to me, and I felt strongly then and to this day that nobody needs to have an opinion about my family. I don’t have anything to hide, plus I don’t find my private life all that interesting. Anybody could go on the Internet and find out a few items about my kids or my wife or past girlfriends, but that’s all you’re going to get.
Another reason to shield my family was that I was always worried about their safety and that somebody would be kidnapped. I didn’t just concoct out of nowhere that image from the minor leagues of my mother being kidnapped and tortured.
When I signed that first big contract with the Red Sox after winning my first Cy Young, I became an icon in my country, but I was told that now my family was actually at real risk and that I needed to protect them. Once I heard that, I could never put it out of my mind. Kidnapping is still a problem in Venezuela and Mexico, and though the risk is lower in the DR, it is still real and present. It’s why the guard at the rolling gate at
my finca carries a gun, and why, when I travel around the country with family members, we keep a firearm nearby. It’s normal. You walk a block in the Dominican and you would find 50 guns. We keep them around to protect my family.
The dangers of exposing my family to curiosity-seekers outweigh the benefits of indulging them. I don’t want anyone kidnapping my children. No kid, especially mine, has a reason to be harmed or held accountable for anything I ever did. I want my kids to be normal human beings. They can be baseball players, or they can be doctors or lawyers, whatever they want.
By the time I got that contract from the Red Sox, I had sorted out how to deal with the money.
Dealing with the fame was a much bigger challenge, and by 2003 I was struggling to come out on top of that battle in the media.
Every superstar in every sport gets special treatment, and every superstar usually has his tics that can rub people the wrong way.
“Pedro would get upset about things, but that’s why he was who he was—he was like a racecar driver, fearless and flamboyant,” said Peter Gammons, formerly of ESPN. “Look at baseball history: Ted Williams, Nolan Ryan, Barry Bonds. They all had reputations for being difficult at times, but they all shared this burning desire to be great.”
Everyone makes a few demands here and there, gets special accommodation for their needs. Very few choirboys make it to the top in their sport. What matters most is performance. Anyone who performs can “get away” with their behavior. Does anyone think the stuff Manny Ramirez pulled would have been tolerated if he had not been cranking 35 ding-dong johnsons and 120 RBI every year? Teammates like Derek Lowe and Bronson Arroyo knew they couldn’t get on their own workout and training regimen and as a result of it show up late like I did and “get away” with it. They didn’t have my track record. That’s the way baseball operates, and I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon. Some managers have an easier time dealing with an assortment of strong-headed personalities than others—Grady Little excelled in this department—but the best are able to keep everyone in line.
Once Red Sox owner John Henry had a moment alone with me in the clubhouse in 2003. He saw how ticked off I was over what the yahoos on the radio were saying about me.
“You’re the best pitcher in the world, pitching every start at home in sellouts, in the middle of great pennant races, in the most magical ballpark . . . this won’t last,” said John. “You can’t let the media dictate your feelings about being here.”
25
“Who’s Your Daddy?”
FOR YEARS I had been asking the Red Sox for a little help, please.
In 2004 the Red Sox came through.
They got Curt Schilling.
The talk behind that trade at the time was that Curt was part of a two-for-one deal, one that brought Tito Francona in as our new manager in order to help get Curt to agree to waive his no-trade clause and sign a contract extension with the Red Sox. That wasn’t exactly the case, but everybody understood that the two came in with a shared past.
I didn’t know much about Tito, and the last time I had spent much time with Curt he had been trying to choke me to death in the bottom of the Mike Williams dog-pile in 1996. We had each gone through plenty since then, so that was the ancient past.
I thought the idea of him joining our rotation was a big deal—I was very happy with that trade. We had another arm, a high-quality arm, to add to a rotation that included Derek Lowe and Bronson Arroyo and Wakey. That was what I thought we needed. Our offense was already stacked, we didn’t need much help there, but our pitching staff could use whatever it could get. When we signed Keith Foulke as our closer in January, I thought that deal was just as important. Our bullpen, especially that bullpen-by-committee experiment that had crashed and burned the year before, needed a bona fide closer, and Foulkie had had 43 saves the season before for the A’s.
The media had not let it go, but in the clubhouse we had all turned the page from 2003’s terrible end by the time we gathered in Fort Myers for spring training. I did my best to make Tito feel welcome at our first meeting with another Dominican salute. I got up on the chair—naked, of course—and said, “Hey, Tito.”
“What the fuck, Petey!”
A little wiggle of the johnson, then, “Welcome to the Red Sox!”
Everybody laughed. We kept laughing the whole year. That was a tight team in 2004. Even with Grady gone, the whole “Cowboy Up” spirit of togetherness carried over to the following year. Tito understood players and was good about letting guys do their own thing. Besides Schilling and myself, we had several veterans on that team: Johnny Damon, Kevin Millar, Manny, Bill Mueller, Wakey, Nomar. The carryovers from 2003 were all convinced that its ending, as sad as it was, did not reflect how good that team was. This team, with the addition of Schilling and Foulke, would be just as good, they felt, and probably better.
In 2004 the five starting pitchers—Schilling, Lowe, Arroyo, Wakefield, and me—did not miss a single turn in the rotation that season, which is one of those once-every-1,000-years comet phenomena. Professionally, the five of us were close. We would watch each other’s bullpen sessions, offer tips on what we were seeing in each other’s mechanics, and chime in when needed to talk about how to attack hitters.
Quite a few people thought differently, but Curt and I got along fine as teammates. Personally, we had hardly anything in common, and we never became good friends, but that’s not unusual in baseball. I never played on a team where 25 guys were all good friends. He and Wakey, Varitek, Timlin, and Mirabelli spent a lot of time together, while I hung by myself or with Manny and David or Jack McCormick, our traveling secretary, or Pookie Jackson, a clubbie—it didn’t matter. I knew everyone. It was my seventh year in Boston. I was home. I wasn’t looking for a new friend—I was looking for a way to get us into the World Series.
“Pedro and I never had words,” said Schilling. “We never went out to dinner, we were just very different—we didn’t have the same group. I was obviously the new guy, but we didn’t hang around. So the reason we didn’t have dinner together was we didn’t have dinner together, not because we didn’t want to. We just lived in different circles.
“I didn’t realize it till after, but we interacted very little.”
Curt had a large personality and a lot of opinions on a variety of subjects, but I didn’t spend any time listening or reading up on what he was saying to the media. I cared about him as a pitcher, and I saw that he took his craft seriously, even though I quickly learned how totally different we were when it came to preparing for games and pitching in games.
Just as I followed my own program, so too did Curt: lots of work on the bike, lots of deep-tissue massage and stretching. He and Wakey were not runners like Bronson, D-Lowe, and me. I didn’t know if he hit the weight room or not. I never paid that much attention to what he was doing actually. We didn’t see each other much when we didn’t have a glove and a ball in our hands.
We played catch together sometimes, and I liked that he took it seriously like I did: it was a good time to check in on mechanics, fiddle with some pitches, get a feel for command.
One thing I noticed was that Curt kept a close eye on me and whatever I was doing.
He was trying to throw a cut fastball in 2004, and he asked me a lot about mine, especially on how to use it inside. He scribbled a lot in a notebook, his diary about how to pitch. That diary, right there, summed up our major style difference. The more we talked about pitching, the quicker I figured out that I probably wasn’t going to learn much about attacking hitters from him. I thought he would know more about pitches and pitching and have more ideas about how to attack hitters, but my impression was that he relied a great deal on how he had pitched before—his answers were all right there in his notebook.
I got it. That worked well for him, but I could not relate. If I was struggling or having a bad game, what could I take from that game if I had already written down what I was going to do next time? Maybe I never understood
that notebook. I never asked. Curt was all about going over his notes, studying film, and executing his pitches and hitting the catcher’s mitt. I did a little film work too, but when it came to studying opposing hitters, I kept my track record all upstairs in my head and made adjustments on the fly, with Jason’s help, based on batters’ reactions at the plate, pitch by pitch.
Jason saw exactly what our differences were.
“It seemed like there was a competitive balance between the two of them—two different ways of pitching, two elite pitchers, and they really fueled off of each other’s wins and pitching,” said Varitek. “Pedro had the tougher time in ’04, while Curt was completely dominant when he got there, just the way he started and pitched the entire year. Pedro was at a point where he had some more struggles, wasn’t in the same place he had been a year or two beforehand, but I think you could sit the two of them together and they’d have a huge level of respect for each other and what they do.”
Only once during the regular season do I remember Curt and I ever having an issue, and it was a minor one. We were at Yankee Stadium, and we thought that the Yankees had bugged the visiting clubhouse—I remember Doug Mirabelli pulling a microphone cord out from the ceiling panel. The series was just beginning, so the starters went outside the stadium to get on the bus to have our scouting meeting. Curt said something about how we needed to elevate against Hideki Matsui and Alex Rodriguez, but I disagreed: “No, we need to pitch those guys tight, brush them back.” Neither of us backed down, but we moved on. We were each going to do our own thing anyway.
I did like Curt’s delivery. He had a great release point with his fastball, very consistent, and his arm angle was always perfect, right out in front. His fastball was straight, like an arrow, so he needed his split, but when it was on, he was on. When it was high, though, he got hit.
Before 2004, Schilling had never hooked the rubber like I did. One day early in spring training he was watching me throw, and he asked me why I had my foot half on and half off the rubber like that. I told him about the leverage and stability it gave me, all the things that Sandy Koufax and Dave Wallace and the Dodgers had taught me, and he said, “I have to try that.”
Pedro Page 26