Pedro

by Pedro Martinez

  The Rangers were very interested. I told the scout, who was talking with the Rangers’ then-president Nolan Ryan, “Tell Nolan I will pitch for him for two longhorns.” I am still one of Nolan’s biggest fans. I spent a long time talking with the Rangers, but they never pulled the trigger.

  Philadelphia did not have a scout at Quisqueya, but they asked if I would come out to their academy in La Vega and have a private tryout. I sensed they were pretty serious, since they asked me to keep quiet about the tryout. I faced some of their summer league batters, and I looked sharp. My fastball was between 92 and 95, and my special shoes I’d had made with the Mets protected my toe.

  Not long after that tryout, Philadelphia’s general manager, Ruben Amaro, called. I had faced Ruben three times when he was a Phillie (0-for-2 with a walk), plus he was also the answer to a trivia question: who replaced Gregg Jefferies at third base after I hit him in the same game that I charged Mike Williams in 1996?

  I could tell immediately that Ruben was trying to get a handle on what was motivating me to make this comeback. The death of my father had not been kept secret, and Ruben kept asking if I really had a desire to pitch again. I explained everything that had happened, the course of my dad’s illness, my own injuries, and how I hadn’t wanted anything but for my dad to be healthy. Ruben’s dad was a former big leaguer, and I know he related to what I was saying. He could tell I was serious. He explained that he had looked elsewhere and come up empty for a midseason pitching boost. The Phillies team that season had a businesslike and professional clubhouse, he said, and he wanted to make sure that I was serious about the team’s goal and not interested in personal glory. We were on the same page, and I signed a $5 million deal for half the season.

  The only downside was that I did have to agree to tune up in the minor leagues. There was no way around it.

  By the end of July, I had made it to Single A, starting for the Clearwater Threshers. After a start in Double A and then Triple A later, I told them I was ready to come up. They didn’t think I was quite ready, but I made a convincing case that I didn’t need to waste any more bullets in the minor leagues. They wanted me for the major leagues—get me up there!

  On August 12, I was at Wrigley Field, pitching well enough to snag the win in my first game since the previous September.

  The only angle to my return that could remotely qualify as negative was that my arrival bounced veteran Jamie Moyer out of the rotation and into the bullpen. Jamie was not thrilled about that development. I don’t think that I would have taken it as well as he did. At least Jamie got to pick up two wins in my starts where a rain delay kept me from going back out there.

  Jamie, Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee, Joe Blanton, Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, Jayson Werth, the pitching coach Rich Dubee—they treated me like I had been around the team from the start. And Charlie Manuel became one of my favorite managers of all time. So honest, so humble. He had that thick Southern accent, and his head rolled around on top of his shoulders when he spoke.

  “Oh Petey, I’m going to leave you in there, I like what you’re doing, keep on doing what you’re doing, we’re going to use Jamie, don’t worry”—stuff like that, just so up-front and genuine. I loved playing for him as much as listening to him.

  My health was fine, except for the time I swung so hard I popped a rib out of place. That came in the middle of September, when I threw 130 pitches against the Mets and held them scoreless for eight innings, my best start that season. A chiropractor was able to pop the rib back in, and I made the rest of my starts.

  Carlos Ruiz was my catcher, and we developed a strong bond. As soon as I got there I told Chooch that when we got ahead in the count, I wanted him to set up low and away—if he wanted to, he could open his leg for his stance, but just keep it low enough where a hitter couldn’t see him when I was going away. Once he started doing that—getting ahead, getting his leg out, giving me a nice low target for a fastball away—he was like “wow,” and he started doing that with everybody.

  It was just roses playing for the Phillies, and we entered the playoffs in a good place. Ruben’s bet on me and my bet on his Phillies were both paying off, and I couldn’t wait to make my first postseason appearance since the 2004 World Series.

  The problem was, I had to wait—16 days. From my last start on September 30 until Game 2 of the National League Championship Series against the Dodgers, a snowstorm in Denver for the Division Series scrambled our rotation, and I wound up being the one given the extra rest. I knew that was the fate of old goats like me, and I was fine with it, but that’s a lot of rest before a big game.

  There wasn’t much rust, though.

  I shut down the Dodgers, including Manny Ramirez, for seven scoreless innings in which I allowed just two hits and no walks. We lost the game, but I’d put it up right next to my game against Roger in the 1999 ALCS as my best postseason start.

  We made it to the World Series against the Yankees, and I got the ball for Game 2 at Yankee Stadium.

  In the Bronx, nobody had forgotten about Pedro Martinez. Even though I was coming back as a Phillie this time, all everyone in the media wanted to bring up when we spoke were stories from the past: Zimmer, Garcia, and mango trees. Both my games—Game 2 (six innings, six hits, three runs, eight strikeouts) and Game 6 (four innings, three hits, four runs)—were losses, and both were pitched at Yankee Stadium. I had no sure way of knowing at the time, but in Game 6, when I threw my last pitch—on a 1-1 count to Billy Gardner, who lined out to second base—it was the last pitch of my career.

  Yes, my career ended at Yankee Stadium.

  “Because of you guys in some ways, I might be at times the most influential player that ever stepped in Yankee Stadium, I can honestly say that,” I said to the media. “For some reason, with all the hype and different players that have passed by, maybe because I played for the Red Sox is probably why you guys made it such a big deal every time I came in, but you know, I have a good bond with the people. After playing in New York, I went to realize something: New York fans are very passionate and very aggressive.

  “I have all the respect in the world for the way they enjoy being fans. Sometimes they might be giving you the middle finger, just like they will be cursing you and telling you what color underwear you’re wearing. All those things you can hear when you’re a fan. But at the end of the day, they’re just great fans that want to see the team win.”

  I reminded them not to confuse my influence as insight into who I really was.

  Never mind who Karim Garcia was.

  Nobody in New York even knew who my daddy was—how could they possibly know who I was?

  “I remember quotes in the paper, ‘Here comes the man that New York loves to hate.’ Man? None of you have probably ever eaten steak with me, or rice and beans with me, to understand what the man is about. You might say the player, the competitor, but the man? You guys have abused my name. You guys have said so many things, have written so many things.

  “There was one time I remember when I was a free agent, there was talk that I might meet with Steinbrenner. One of your colleagues had me in the papers with horns and a tail, red horns and a tail. That’s a sign of the devil. I’m a Christian man. I don’t like those things. I take those things very serious.

  “Those are the kind of things that the fans actually get used to seeing and actually sometimes influence those people to believe that you are a bad person, that you are like an ogre.”

  I didn’t know that Game 6 would be my final game and that five years later I would be knocking on the door of the Hall of Fame.

  I was looking ahead.

  “Yes, just like Babe Ruth is such a legendary name, I hope that my name is mentioned, but not only as a player,” I said. “I hope that you guys realize that I’m a human being that really likes to help, that really likes to do things in the community, that’s a fun human being and a great competitor. That’s probably my legacy. I don’t want to just leave a legacy in baseball and be a shitt
y human being. I’m sorry about the word. I hope I can be remembered more as a human being to take his clothes off to probably give it to a man down the street. I don’t mind doing that anytime.”

  While the Yankees celebrated their 27th world championship down the hall from the visitors’ clubhouse after my game, I quietly took off my Phillies baseball uniform.

  And I headed home.

  Epilogue

  I’M ONE OF the lucky former ballplayers.

  My ears popped once or twice, and there was some minor turbulence, but my glide into retirement went gently and smoothly. When I watch a game now on TV or in person, I still have moments when I can plainly see where the batter is vulnerable and I would personally like to march to the mound and complete the job myself.

  More quickly now than before, I come to my senses.

  I thought I was going to get another half-season contract from the Phillies for the 2010 season, but after Ruben and I met in Miami, nothing happened. “We’re going to get back to you in a week” turned into two weeks, and that became a month, which was around the time it began to dawn on me that this would not be as easy as I thought. As the spring wore on I stayed in shape, throwing enough so that if we did get a nibble, I could ramp up my throwing. Besides the Phillies, the only two other teams I wanted to hear from were the Marlins and the Red Sox.

  I could afford to be choosy. I wanted the Marlins because I had a home in Miami, as did many of my close family members and friends. The Red Sox were an easy pick. They were still my team. I still had a home there too, plus some of my closest friends were in the area. But the Red Sox never called. The Marlins did call. They sounded interested at first, but then decided that they couldn’t afford me because they knew they weren’t going anywhere. Their loss. I would have been a perfect fit there, a Spanish-speaking old goat to help out with all those young players.

  The 2010 All-Star break came and went and nobody else called. I was 38 years old. I didn’t feel washed up, but unwanted? Yes. That was a funny feeling. Odd. Unpleasantly odd. I felt out of sorts, unsure how to process it. For more than 20 years, I had been on the baseball player’s merry-go-round: go home for the winter, get ready all spring, pitch all summer . . . and repeat. I was at a stoplight and the light was stuck on red. I was just idling, getting impatient, when one day my son asked me, in complete innocence, if I was going to be around for his birthday that summer. It falls on August 30.

  “Can you take me to Disney World on my birthday, Papa?”

  That stopped me even more.

  If I had pressed hard on my agent to land me on a team, we might have come up with something—Texas did make a late call—but that would have meant a commitment from the end of July through September and maybe October as well. August 30 would be spent, again, with me wishing Pedro Jr. “Happy Birthday” over the phone.

  I didn’t need long to think about it.

  A couple of Splash Mountain rides later, my 2010 season vanished, taking my active baseball career with it.

  I was a 38-year-old retiree, still blessed with a healthy body and an active and curious mind, but with no clear idea of what to do next. The rest of that year and for a lot of the next couple, I had a few lazy days, maybe weeks, when puttering around in my garden or my mom’s was my sole occupation. No complaints at first. My boat that I kept in Boca Chica saw a lot of me when I needed a getaway from la finca and la familia. A day spent fishing, sleeping, and eating was a good day, and I had many good days. After a while, though, being too lazy got too old, and I started to get antsy. Carolina didn’t tape me to a pole in the dugout like my Red Sox teammates did when I couldn’t stop yapping, but she came close. I was driving her crazy.

  Myself too.

  I did have some things to keep me busy, especially the work Carolina and I were doing for my foundation, Pedro Martinez and Brothers Foundation. Our goal was, and continues to be, to provide educational opportunities for disadvantaged kids in Manoguayabo, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. The main program is called “Hay Poder en Aprender,” or “There Is Power in Learning.” I spoke to a lot of different groups, mainly kids, and helped with the fund-raising. Friends like David Ortiz held their own fund-raisers for the work they were doing, and I would help them out too.

  I began to spend more time becoming directly involved in a few of the commercial projects that my brothers and I had started. My agents kept me busy with endorsement opportunities and appearances, but I kept those spots to a minimum.

  I did television commentary for TBS for a couple of years during the playoffs as well. Everyone seemed to think I did a pretty good job with something brand-new to me. When I first started off and realized how much preparation was involved—all the pre-show meetings and analysis we had to do—I was like, Oh boy, I’m into something here, but I started to get used to the workload. I felt like I could stay on top and even get ahead of where I needed to be when it came to offering analysis, not only quickly but thoughtfully.

  The deeper I got into my retirement, the more I knew how much I wanted to stay connected, physically, to pitching and baseball. I remembered how much I was able to help a young Derek Lowe get his head straight and harness his physical gifts, and how well Tim Wakefield and I could correct each other’s mechanical flaws. When I was with the Mets, I worked with Oliver Perez, Mike Pelfrey, and Johan Santana, picking their brains and letting them pick mine so we could work together to come up with fixes for whatever was going wrong.

  Once I accepted that I was not getting back on the mound, I realized that the next best thing I could do was to help those who were still on it.

  When Ervin Santana essentially got dumped by the Angels in a trade with the Royals after an uneven 2012 season, I let him know exactly what he was doing wrong with his delivery. We worked together that off-season, and he went on to have one of his best seasons ever for Kansas City the following season.

  In that same off-season I worked with Ervin, I got a call from Theo Epstein’s replacement, Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington. Ben asked if I wanted to help the 2013 team with a few projects throughout the season, mainly working one-on-one with some of their young pitchers. I loved the idea. There was no daily commitment, no full-time coaching job that meant arriving at the ballpark at 11:00 AM every morning—I didn’t see that working out well for me. But working one-on-one with the pitchers suited me, and I believe it helped them as well. I spoke about the mental as well as the physical game with the young left-hander Drake Britton, who had been arrested for a DUI that spring, and I worked on the delivery and mechanics of young starters such as Brandon Workman, Rubby de la Rosa, and Allen Webster. I worked with them in spring training in Fort Myers and in the middle of the season too, in both Portland, Maine (Double A) and Pawtucket, Rhode Island (Triple A). Each of the young guns got called up over the course of the Red Sox’ 2013 championship season, and I felt so gratified to have played a role in their development.

  When I see how my words and my wisdom, gleaned from a 21-year professional career, can translate into positive change in the career of a pitcher, young or old, I understand what I’m supposed to be doing. That’s my personal reward and my legacy to the game. I don’t want to take credit for anyone else’s accomplishment, but if I can help and influence another pitcher, that’s what keeps me going.

  What a waste of the blessings I have been given if I were to take them all to my grave. I want to give back as many as I can before I go and help out not only any Red Sox pitcher who winds up on my assignment list but also any pitcher who comes to me and seeks my advice.

  That’s my purpose, that’s my drive now.

  In January of 2015, the Baseball Writers Association of America elected me into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. The media wanted to know if I was ticked off that 8.9 percent of the voters did not vote for me. Even though I had moments of mild anxiety wondering what would go through the minds of certain voters when they saw my name on the ballot, I was content with the results. E
lated and humbled, actually. A 91.1 percent vote felt like a gold star to me.

  I am a Hall of Famer.

  I would have been happy squeaking in by one vote.

  After a whirlwind of press conferences and appearances that began at Fenway Park and included a spot on The Late Show with David Letterman in New York with fellow inductees Randy “Big Unit” Johnson, John Smoltz, and Craig Biggio, I headed back to the Dominican.

  At the airport, my mother, Ramon, and my family met me and we embarked on a raucous, honking motorcade back home, me sitting on top of a car waving a pair of Dominican Republic flags. We headed west, through the heart of Santo Domingo and along the Malecon, an avenue that parallels the sparkling Caribbean Sea, the caravan weaving and wading through thousands of my countrymen who had lined the route.

  The parade ended with a two-day concert and fiesta in Manoguayabo, not far at all from la finca.

  The election brought a fresh wave of notoriety, but the Pedro that pops up at Cooperstown or in the media or at a ballpark is all too often still only a reflection of a famous ballplayer.

  As I move into middle age I want to open the window on Pedro the human being.

  The clearest views can always be found at la finca.

  From my chair on the patio, I can see that my garden across the path needs weeding.

  Behind the chain-link fence are rows of spicy peppers, tomatoes, green beans, spinach, celery, dill, cilantro, oranges, granadilla, aloe vera, and nispero, which Plao, my gardener, and I have planted. That’s just one small patch of land, barely the size of a pitcher’s mound.