Pedro Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1971–1989

  More Than a Game

  Heart of a Lion

  1990–1993

  Dodgertown Blues

  Sweet Home Montana

  King of the Jungle

  “It’s Ramon’s Little Brother”

  Off the Bus

  Fragile: Handle with Care

  1993–1997

  Je Ne Parle Pas Français

  Far North of the Border

  Señor Plunk

  Click

  Dan, You Made a Bad Trade

  1998–2001

  Well, I Love That Dirty Water

  Command Performance

  “Petey’s in the House”

  Art and Craft

  Photos

  Alpha Male

  The Beginning of the End

  2002–2004

  An Ugly Chapter

  Body of Work

  A Little Cranky, That’s All

  Blame Game

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

  “Who’s Your Daddy?”

  Top of the World

  Since 2004

  “Take That Computer and Stick It . . .”

  Fresh Start for an Old Goat

  Fading to Black

  Last Pitch

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Career Statistics

  About the Authors

  Copyright © 2015 by Pedro Martinez

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-27933-9

  eISBN 978-0-544-27923-0

  v1.0515

  Jacket design by Brian Moore

  Jacket photograph © AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian

  I dedicate this book to my dad, who passed a few years ago, and to my mom, who still lives, and to Ramon, for being a father figure in my life. Thank you for the foundation you gave to me and my brothers and sisters, for your dedication, hard work, unconditional love, and support. Because of you, I was able to withstand every obstacle and adversity.

  —PEDRO MARTINEZ

  Introduction

  EVERYONE LAUGHED.

  I wasn’t trying to be funny.

  I was in no mood.

  An hour after our Game 2 loss in the 2004 American League Championship Series, I had been led into the Yankee Stadium media dining room, a cramped and stuffy, low-ceilinged, ill-suited space used for postseason press conferences. I had just showered and my slicked-back jheri curls were still wet, dampening my shirt. I settled slowly into my chair behind a table with a single microphone on it, a red-white-and-blue ALCS banner serving as my backdrop.

  I fielded a couple of game-specific questions about my start.

  I waited patiently for the question.

  We were down 0–2 in the series, and the Yankees and their fans were in high spirits. They had us on our heels. It didn’t help that just a few weeks earlier at Fenway Park I had been in the hot seat in a similar postgame press conference after a similar loss in one of my starts.

  That’s when I had blurted out that the “Yankees are my daddy.”

  I should have known better.

  My quote filled a convoy of long-haul trailers with chum, enough to keep a pool of media sharks content for the weeks leading up to this postseason game, this time in enemy territory. The instant I walked out of the visitors’ dugout to warm up, a cascade of rhythmic “Who’s your dad-dy?” chants rolled down from the rafters. The jeers did not let up until I was out of the game. It was loud—impressively loud.

  Now I had to endure the obligatory press conference. Somewhere from the crescent of newspaper and radio reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen who surrounded me, one reporter asked the question, phrasing it in my least favorite way: Talk about . . .

  “Talk about how the crowd affected you, the ‘Who’s your daddy?’ chant that was really going, screaming your name—talk about that, please?”

  I threw them my changeup.

  “You know what, it actually made me feel really, really good,” I said, which sparked the ripple of laughter that spread around the room.

  I took a quick, unsmiling survey of the faces around me. To me, the laughter sounded nervous.

  And ignorant.

  A familiar ignorance.

  “I don’t know why you guys laugh, because I haven’t even answered the question,” I said, pausing a beat until my scolding brought the tittering to a halt. “I actually realized that I was somebody important, because I caught the attention of 60,000 people, plus you guys, plus the whole world watching a guy that if you reverse the time back 15 years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree without 50 cents to actually pay for a bus. And today I was the center of attention of the whole city of New York. I thank God for that.

  “I don’t like to brag about myself, I don’t like to talk about myself, but they did make me feel important. I’ve seen a lot of teams pass by and play against this team, the Yankees, and maybe because I’m with the Red Sox, but I feel so thankful that I got their attention and they got my attention.”

  From where I’m sitting today, on a white wicker rocking chair on a flagstone patio across the path from my cottage at la finca, I can look up the gentle rise of the hill and see the tips of the shiny, dark green leaves from that same mango tree.

  Its branches hang over a scuffed gray-and-white slab of concrete, a 15-by-20-foot rectangle that is the foundation, all that’s left, of the shack where I grew up with my two sisters, three brothers, and parents. A sleeping area divided by a sheet hung from the ceiling, a couch and small kitchen on the other side of the sheet—that was it. One room, four walls, a front door, and a roof covered with corrugated zinc sheets. Outside the front door was a ditch-lined dirt street, no different from every other dirt street in Manoguayabo, a village that sprawls over the steep hills eight miles due west of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.

  Step out the front door of the shack, take three more steps to your right, and there stands the mango tree.

  Before my father was born in Manoguayabo in 1929, and before The House That Ruth Built went up in the Bronx in 1923, that mango tree was there. The infamous 1930 Dominican Republic hurricane, San Zenon, one of the hurricanes that too regularly spin furiously across our island of Hispaniola, flattening shacks and small buildings, flooding villages and towns, and ripping up sugar cane fields and orange groves, toppled our mango tree.

  Its deep roots held, though.

  The tree did not die, but its main trunk grew parallel to the ground for a few years before it began to bend upward and resume its skyward reach. The setback created a crook in the trunk, a perfect-sized bench for a small boy like me to climb onto with a book or just to lie back and watch shards of blue sky and puffy white clouds flicker in and out of view between the rustling leaves. I would climb high some days, searching for a ripe mango, or higher still to break off a branch to use for a baseball bat or just to whip around.

  For me, to travel in time and space from a pitcher’s mound, even the one located in baseball’s most sacred and historic diamond, back to a single tree in my homeland was more than a comfortable and familiar routine.

  It was a survival skill.

  Ever since I began playing baseball professionally with the Dodgers as a 16-year-old in their Dominican academy in Campo Las Palmas, and as I rose quickly through the Dodgers’
minor league system and then on to big-league rosters in Los Angeles, Montreal, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, I stood on the mound with the instincts of a survivor.

  I had the essentials, beginning with the heart of a lion.

  Behind every pitch lay the determination and will to win: to kill rather than be killed.

  In between pitches, my mind, my wandering mind, would race everywhere.

  Early on, when I was in the minor leagues and measuring up the opposing batter, I would conjure up a scene straight out of the most gruesome Hollywood blood-and-gore slasher flick: my mother, strapped tightly by ropes to a chair, her mouth gagged, her eyes clenched shut, too terrified to look down at the tip of a knife held to her throat by the leader of a gang of kidnappers.

  Your move, Pedro.

  Her life, in my hands.

  If I could not get this batter out—and the next one, then the one after him, and then the leadoff batter in my next start five days later—then the kidnappers would carry out their threat and my mother’s throat would be slashed.

  Later, after I had proven I could get batters out as well as anyone else in the game, I switched to subtler forms of motivation.

  Skeptics who doubted that my slender body could withstand the rigors of starting; coaches who belittled, berated, or fed off of me like leeches; jealous teammates who wanted to fight me; batters who charged me because they mistook my need to pitch inside for a desire to knock their heads off; a baseball establishment that tried to slow my entry into the rarefied air as one of the elite pitchers of all time; rude media members who probed where they shouldn’t have and harped on the negative—my God, baseball was a noisy, teeming jungle.

  I had more than enough prey to feed upon.

  When my dad finally died in 2008—the same year the old Yankee Stadium hosted its final game—those motivational sojourns became too taxing, too much effort for too little in return, especially as my body began to wear down—the early warning signs that my career was drawing to a close.

  But on October 13, 2004, people thought that a few jeers at a baseball game had got under my skin?

  They had no idea who that man was standing on the mound.

  That I heard boos as cheers and brought up my mango tree made people laugh.

  A few of them thought I was a little loco.

  I had never felt that enough people appreciated my honesty. The Boston writers would frequently tell me I spoke better English than Roger Clemens, but I still felt that the meaning behind my English words was too blunt or too deep to be grasped.

  Far too often after I set foot in the United States in 1990, I had felt like a strange man in a strange land. If people didn’t have a problem with my accented English or status as a foreigner, then they doubted—often to my face—my worth or my dignity.

  For me, a flashback to my mango tree was nothing new. It was one more mind trick to play, another weapon to shield me from the doubters and the haters and connect me with my strength: my home and my family.

  As comfortable as I felt on a mound and as confident as I felt with how I could baffle a batter, none of that transcended the comfort and trust I derived from my roots in Manoguayabo.

  Millions of people watched and listened on TV and radio to thousands of Yankee Stadium fans yell and scream at me that night. The commotion did not come close to rattling me.

  Instead, I used it.

  I soaked in all of that energy like a tree absorbs sunlight in its leaves and rain from its roots. The awe I felt over my journey from my perch on the mango tree to the spotlight on center stage was genuine.

  I bore some responsibility if people didn’t understand where I was coming from. I had never opened the door into my past wide enough to let anyone take more than a peek.

  By then, after all my tears, all my fears, all my fights, all my money, all my honors and awards, I was used to leaving bewilderment, confusion, and anger in my wake, as well as some wonder and awe.

  That had been the story of my life.

  And that story began, just as it will end, here at la finca.

  PART I

  1971–1989

  1

  More Than a Game

  IF YOU’RE LOOKING for me, chances are good to excellent you’ll find me at la finca, my ranch.

  Even though my wife, Carolina, and I have another house a few miles away, and I have a home in Miami that I use as a base while I’m in the United States, I still spend many of my days and nights at la finca.

  If anyone from the United States were to lay eyes on it, they would laugh at the word “ranch” to describe la finca. I know from my minor league days riding the Dodgers buses across the high plains of Montana and Idaho, through the open ranges around San Antonio, and over the mesas and valleys of New Mexico and southern California, and also from watching a few episodes of Dallas, that to most people a ranch means one of those thousand-acre expanses where the buffalo roam and cowboys puff on Marlboros as they ride their horses into the sunset.

  My finca covers maybe one and a half acres, tops. There are two cottages on it, mine and my brother Ramon’s. His sits just to the right of the rolling security gate where a security guard, with a shotgun nearby, keeps an eye out on our family all night and all day. Two coconut trees down and to the left from the gate is my place, a one-bedroom, one-bath house with a small living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom. On a table in between the couch and a chair in the living room is a picture of Carolina and me on our wedding day, and another of the two of us with comedian Robin Williams taken at a fund-raiser.

  Outside the front door is a porch wide enough for a single chair, with a low railing to rest your feet on. A pine tree that I planted decades ago towers over the other trees, its branches and the branches of the other nearby trees strung with Christmas lights 365 days a year. We don’t always wait for Christmas to turn them on.

  Across the path is a small swimming pool with a slide, and to its left is where I’m sitting, in the shade of a tree.

  Behind me are my chicken coops, full of cocks and roosters who have free range over la finca, cock-a-doodle-doo-ing not only at dawn but for the other 23 hours as well. A couple times a day, a pair of geese stage the same chase scene across the compound, honking and hissing at each other. Our obnoxious but lovable dachshund, Pookie, is the only dog I know of who once a day decides he is a rooster and that it is his destiny to get into a cockfight with a real rooster. They circle each other, pouncing and snapping and clawing, the rooster ruffling and flapping its feathers, Pookie growling and somersaulting after his parries and nips. Eventually, the rooster wanders away, its head bopping like Mick Jagger, while Pookie plops onto his back, falling asleep in seconds.

  Behind me is a covered, open-air bandstand where we hold our parties, or move a spirited game of dominoes when it starts to rain. Behind the bandstand is the back half of la finca, a steeply sloped area where the chickens, geese, and ducks spend most of their time. A friend gave me a wild boar that we were going to barbecue, but after spending a few days with her, I grew too attached, too soft for her. Now we keep her tied up with a vine to a tree at the bottom of the ravine, and every couple of days we saw off a clump of palm tree berries for her to root through and eat. One of these days I’m going to bring in a male so they can mate.

  Except for the slab of concrete, la finca wasn’t our property growing up, but it was where I’d roam with my friends when I wasn’t helping out my mom and dad.

  I’d do chores, plenty of them, but I’d usually do them and everything else while talking—dialogue, monologue, didn’t matter much to me.

  I was the child who “would make the quiet ones laugh with jokes and make everyone happy,” my mom said.

  I could cheer her up too.

  There were some days when I met her at the bus stop, her last stop after a day’s work at the cooking oil factory, when she was quiet herself, a little sad in the eyes. A child of seven or eight does not have the self-awareness to say, I’m going to make my mom
happy, but I knew I could make her laugh. I cherished those walks. We would walk the mile home to Manoguayabo, hand in hand, me doing the talking and telling the jokes, her listening, letting my motormouth run.

  My mom grew up on a farm about an hour north of Santo Domingo, and she knew everything about everything that grew. We had a garden behind the shack, where we grew fruits and vegetables for food and flowers simply for their beauty. I saw how much she loved all her plants, and I fell in love with them too.

  “Flowers teach you something,” she said. “They teach you about how to be, how to live inside. The heart of someone is like a flower—a beautiful thing in a person and is an attraction for someone.

  “When Pedro and I found flowers, we would get lost in them.”

  I was one of six children, the next to youngest: Luz Maria, Ramon, Nelson, Anadelia, me, and Jesus. Luz Maria was nine when Jesus was born. The age gap was not vast, and we were all close. My mom’s sister, Andrea, who had five children, lived next door to us, and the sisters raised the 11 kids like one family. Our shack was located just a few yards from where my father grew up, and his family, including children from his previous marriage, were nearby as well. I didn’t lack for playmates, and the majority of them were family.

  Each day was a repeat of the previous, sunny and hot, but we had rainy periods, sometimes with fierce tropical storms that brought down sheets of rain like a dump truck unloading rocks onto the zinc roof, making conversation difficult. In 1979, when I was almost eight, Hurricane David, a Category 5 storm, roared through. I can remember that all the coconuts I could never reach got knocked down in that storm, along with all the plantains, oranges, mangoes, and avocados I could eat. To me, it felt like a holiday to have all that fresh fruit lying around, but the bounty didn’t last long and I was too young to grasp the devastation. For about six months, our family and most of the families in Manoguayabo went through a lean stretch. We had to clear the land of all the downed trees, replant our backyard crops, and rebuild damaged houses.