Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (19 page)

Godlike in the eyes of Red Sox fans, Pedro Martinez used
an astonishing mastery of four pitches and a ferocious
will to fuel Boston’s fever for a World Series title

O
N A BASEBALL DIAMOND SO SCRAGGLY THAT AN
impoverished goat would find it unappetizing, a schoolboy and the master cross paths while running sprints in centerfield. They are just two of a hundred or so professional and amateur ballplayers who have come to a rubble-strewn public park smack in the midst of the heat, grime and grit of Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. The park, Centro Olimpico, is ground zero of the last place in the free world where baseball is the unchallenged national pastime. They are here to train.

The boy catches the master’s eye and bows his head respectfully, dipping the bill of his threadbare cap. He speaks in the worshipful manner of a peasant addressing a king.
El Duro
is all the boy dares say.

Pedro Martinez returns a nod and a smile.
El Duro
is the loose equivalent of that obsequious Americanism, the Man. Its literal translation is more apt.
El Duro
means “the Hard One.” When a baseball flies from the long, grotesquely concave fingers of the Red Sox righthander, Martinez seems to possess the properties of misch metal, an alloy of iron and rare earth elements. Scratch it, as happens in a cigarette lighter, and sparks fly.

“Look at this,” says Martinez to a visitor. He offers up his right hand, the very hand of God, as it were, if you happen to be among an extremist sect of Web-based Red Sox zealots, such as those who commune on www.redsoxdiehard.com. (The rest of the faithful, including Dan Duquette, the otherwise reserved Boston general manager, place him merely between sainthood and Providence. “He is a gift from God,” Duquette gushes.)

Martinez points to the tips of the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Each one is calloused, even now, in January, three months removed from his last pitch of ’99. But the calluses are not where you expect them to be, on the lower part of the fingertip, the contact points of a pitcher’s grip. No, the slivers of hardened skin are at the very top of the fingers, almost beneath the edge of the fingernails. But … how could this be? “The longer the ball stays on your fingers, the more spin you get,” Martinez says. Spin is the DNA of a fastball, its very code of life. Martinez’s heater is a 97-mph double helix of hell for a hitter.

His fingers curve backward so easily that the baseball stays on his fingers longer than on most pitchers’. The last part of his fingers to touch the ball is not the part you would use to dribble a basketball, but the part you would use to push a doorbell. As a few of the baseball’s furiously spinning 108 stitches of waxed red thread scratch the skin of his fingertips … sparks fly. “I can feel a burning sensation from the seams,” he says. “That’s what it feels like—a burn.”

That’s El Duro, the pyrophoric pitcher. Human flint. The effort to imbue each pitch with fire and brimstone contorts his face so harshly that even he cannot stand the sight of it. “I hate signing action pictures,” he tells autograph-seeking fans. “That is one ugly face.”

Martinez possesses the power of Randy Johnson, the precision of Greg Maddux, the mound intellect of Mike Mussina and, at 5′11″, 175 pounds, the body of Bud Selig. Baseball has never seen anything quite like him. In 1997 he became the shortest and lightest pitcher ever to strike out 300 batters in a season. Last year Martinez became the greatest combination of power and control in the history of the game.

Until last year Curt Schilling and Sandy Koufax had been the only pitchers in history to whiff 300 batters in a season while striking out more than five times as many batters as they walked. Schilling’s strikeout-to-walk ratio was 5.5:1 in 1997; Koufax’s was 5.38:1 in ’65 and 5.28:1 in ’63. In ’99 Martinez went where no man had ever gone before—8.46:1. His totals of 313 strikeouts and 37 walks seem implausible by any manner of achievement other than by joystick. “I’m not afraid of hitting anyone,” he says, “because I can put the ball where I want to. I only hit nine guys last year. When I do hit them, it’s usually just a nibble. I can nibble their jersey with the ball. That’s how much I can control the ball.”

Martinez already has two Cy Young Awards (the National League’s, in 1997 with the Expos, and the American League’s last year), and he doesn’t turn 29 until October. He put up more impressive figures in ’99 than a Miss America pageant. He went 23–4 with a 2.07 ERA, won the pitching triple crown (wins, ERA and strikeouts), set a major league record with 13.2 strikeouts per nine innings, did not allow a home run in any of the 293 at bats against him with a runner on, permitted only three leadoff walks to score (he walked the first batter only six times in 213
¹
/
₃
innings) and struck out 37% of all batters he faced. That was not enough.

“Every day in Boston somebody will tell me, ‘My father—or grandfather—wants to see the Red Sox win the World Series, just once. You are the one who can do it,’” Martinez says. “I tell them I will try, but I cannot do it by myself. It takes a team, and I think the team we have now is as good as any in the big leagues.”

Martinez climbs the crude, cratered mound on one of Centro Olimpico’s diamonds. He peers into the plate and smiles knowingly, even wickedly. He has no ball or glove. But even so, even here, as you watch him on that mound, you sense what it must feel like to know you can play tic-tac-toe with a baseball at 20 paces without ever using the center square … this is what it feels like to hold 5.19 ounces of absolute superiority in your hands … this is what it feels like to be El Duro.

“The plate,” he says. “It looks so close. There are days when I first get out to the mound and it feels like the plate is closer than it’s supposed to be. Then I know right away. It’s over. You are f-----.”

At that moment you can feel his fire, wavelets of passion and supreme confidence radiating from him. “I am a pitcher because I like the challenge of being responsible for the game, of being in charge of the action,” Martinez says. “If the shortstop makes an error, I am responsible. I let the batter hit the ball.”

Yes, standing in the wake of his fire, you understand perfectly that this is a man who can use a baseball to snip the button from a hitter’s shirt, who is the last great hope of geriatric New Englanders and who sent the Indians home for the winter, despite an injured arm he could barely lift above his head and with little more of his usual weaponry than the look of a lion tamer in his eyes.

This also is a man who wears jeans with Linus embroidered on the back pocket. A man who prepares for his starts by tending to flowers in his garden. A man who melts around children. A man who gave his $6,500 signing bonus in 1988 to his big brother, Ramon. A man who has built a church and three houses—with an elementary school, a playground, a ball field and more houses to come—for the impoverished people of Manoguayabo, his hometown in the Dominican.

This is also a man who, as a skinny boy, loved to climb the old mango tree in his backyard. Alone, the boy would study his school lessons high in the branches. Sometimes in that tree he would remember his parents’ yelling and screaming in his house, and it could still make him cry years later. He would explain it—this ache he felt in his heart—many times to many doctors and psychiatrists in Santo Domingo, who told him he had a heart murmur but could do nothing for the sadness he kept inside.

All that is part of the fire, too. That, too, is El Duro.

THE DOCTORS examined the strained muscle running from his right shoulder down his back and said Martinez might be able to throw 40 pitches, absolute max. Jimy Williams, the Boston manager, decided that if his club was tied or had a small lead in the eighth inning, Martinez would pitch that inning and, the good Lord willing, the ninth too. If the Red Sox could beat Cleveland at Jacobs Field in Game 5 of the 1999 Division Series, they would play the Yankees for a spot in the World Series. If the Red Sox lost, they went home.

Williams’s plan blew up early. Boston and Cleveland slugged away at each other with a ferocity that made Ali-Frazier look like a church cotillion. It was 8–8 in the fourth inning when Williams reached for a tourniquet. He needed those one or two innings out of Martinez, and he needed them right now.

“I put my career in jeopardy that game,” Martinez says. “I knew that. Why? We had to win the game.”

With every pitch Martinez felt a stabbing sensation behind his shoulder. His fastball couldn’t break 90 mph. It wasn’t until he saw a video later that he realized he couldn’t raise his arm high enough to throw the ball from his usual three-quarters delivery. None of that mattered, except to burnish a newly minted legend.

“I’ve always said that you could take five, six, seven, eight miles an hour off his fastball, and he’d still be a great pitcher,” Red Sox pitching coach Joe Kerrigan says. “That game proved it.”

Says Martinez, “I can change the way I pitch in 10 seconds—in the middle of a game, in the middle of an at bat. No problem. I know myself. I know my body. If I have to get you out a different way, I will do it.”

The Indians were finished, and they knew it. One at bat in the fifth inning made it official. First baseman Jim Thome, who already had walloped two home runs, foolishly salivated at the opportunity to bat with a 3-and-0 count against Martinez. “I’m looking to hit the ball out of the stadium,” Thome will explain later. “I’m in high-gear mode. Grip it and rip it, basically.”

But Thome is momentarily unnerved when he sees Martinez studying him. It’s like getting one of those little pink
WHILE YOU WERE OUT
slips scribbled with “IRS called.” Says Thome, “What makes Pedro so great is that he’s so intelligent. You watch Pedro and it’s like a cat-and-mouse game, and he’s the cat, studying you. He’s watching you, watching your feet to see if they’ve moved, watching your body language. He’s looking at you all around and up and down. He’s trying to figure out what
I’m
trying to figure out about him.”

During the home-run-hitting contest at the All-Star Game, which most players treated as kindergartners would recess, Martinez watched Mark McGwire closely. “I watch and learn,” Martinez says. “I noticed all those balls he hit out were in the same place. Middle [of the plate], up a little. I said, O.K., I’m not stupid. I know where he likes it.”

This is what McGwire saw from Martinez the next night in the All-Star Game at Fenway Park: changeup away for a ball, changeup down for strike one, fastball down for strike two and fastball up—just enough out of McGwire’s happy zone—for strike three swinging. Martinez struck out five of the six batters he faced that night, the home run king and four MVPs: Barry Larkin, Larry Walker, Sammy Sosa and Jeff Bagwell. The bricks and mortar of Boston’s antique ballpark threatened to split wide open from the din of the home crowd. In Martinez’s real backyard proud Dominicans tied any sort of junked metal to their bicycles—pieces of iron fencing, broken washing machines, various car parts—and dragged them through the narrow, darkened, dusty streets of Manoguayabo. Homemade fireworks—what better tribute to El Duro than sparks dancing in the night?

When Martinez went about reading Thome at 3 and 0, he found all the challenge of the Sunday comics. Martinez is adept at exploiting big-swinging sluggers. The eight top home run hitters over the past five years—McGwire, Sosa, Albert Belle, Vinny Castilla, Juan Gonzalez, Ken Griffey Jr., Rafael Palmeiro and Mo Vaughn—have a combined career average of .107 against Martinez, with just one home run (by Gonzalez) in 84 times at bat. Thome is 2 for 14 with seven punchouts.

“I knew he’d be swinging,” Martinez says. “The Indians are aggressive. I told [fellow Boston starter] Bret Saberhagen before the game, ‘Sabes, you’ve got to bounce some changeups to these guys. Bounce ’em.’ He didn’t do it. He has great control. Too good. The Indians swing at everything. It was a bad matchup. So I knew Thome was looking to hit it out.”

Martinez flips a 3-and-0 changeup into the strike zone. Stunned, Thome doesn’t dare swing. “I can’t go up there looking for a 3-and-0 change,” Thome says. “That’s not good hitting.”

Now Martinez spins a backdoor curveball that catches the outside corner. Thome does not—cannot—swing. A 3-and-1 hook? It’s like seeing snow in August.

O.K., Thome thinks, now just try to hit the ball. But what’s coming? He can’t be certain. This predicament is why Yankees manager Joe Torre will say one week later—after Martinez has dealt New York its only loss of the postseason, a 12-strikeout, 13–1 laugher in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series—that trying to hit Martinez is “like trying to hit in a dark room.” (It was the second time in five weeks that Torre had witnessed such frustration at the plate. On Sept. 10 Martinez had one-hit the Yankees, whiffing 12 of the final 15 batters to finish with 17 strikeouts.)

Martinez decides on a fastball. Of course, it is not just any fastball. It is a smart bomb laser-guided to skirt the inside corner of the plate. After the camouflage of a flirtatious changeup and a looping curveball, the fastball has the illusion of traveling faster than it actually is. “Put it this way,” Thome says. “It had some hair on it.”

Thome swings at it. He is too late. The pitch is past him. He’s been eviscerated like a flounder. The Indians are finished. The most prolific scoring team in the second half of the 20th century cannot get a single hit off the wounded Martinez, who winds up chucking 97 pitches over six innings. Heroic? It was Kirk Gibson limping off the bench to hit his home run—and doing it five more times.

THE DODGERS’ Dominican training complex in Campo Las Palmas is a remote, pastoral pleasure of lush green fields, swaying palm trees and fresh paint—that is, once you get past the entrance gate with the guard carrying the semiautomatic assault weapon. The face of baseball is being changed at this academy, at others like it run by other organizations and on just about any available expanse of grass in the Dominican. One out of every five players now under contract to major league organizations was born in the Dominican, a country with the approximate population (7.5 million) of North Carolina. More are coming. The three fields of Centro Olimpico are busy every day with players training on their own. Three pickup teams fill each field on weekends, two playing and one, on the sidelines, that has winners. The basketball courts are virtually abandoned.