Pedro Page 2

  My dad, who used to work as a landscaper and had strong, brawny arms and a thick neck that I inherited, worked mainly as a janitor in a nearby school. My mom held another job when I was young, helping out with the laundry at the school and other local businesses.

  We were not so poor that I ever remember skipping a meal, but we did not have enough to afford a chicken or fresh meat every day. When we were kids, we’d roam around the neighborhood. If we got hungry, lunch would be a mango or a papaya or an avocado we’d pluck off a tree.

  At home we did not have a refrigerator. We stored a modest supply of canned foods and rice in the kitchen, and each day one of us would be sent down the street to purchase the yams or yucca, whatever Mama was cooking or was needed. We ate fresh fruits and vegetables, all grown organically, with rice and beans and the occasional protein from meat.

  We didn’t have closets in the house, and we didn’t need them. I didn’t wear much when I wasn’t in school, and when I went to classes, all I needed was a pair of pants, the uniform shirt, and my shoes. I owned one pair, sneakers, although later, when school required it, I wore plain black ones, hand-me-downs from Ramon and Nelson.

  We played baseball everywhere—in our backyard, in the streets—using whatever we could find. A broomstick or a stick, straight or not, broken off from a tree, would suffice for a bat. For a ball, the head from one of my sisters’ dolls worked best, although my sisters would not agree. They stood little chance of winning that argument: four boys, two girls. Their job was to do a better job of hiding their dolls from us.

  When I needed someone to play catch with, Nelson was always on call. He and my cousin Roberto would head over to a baseball field down the hill. The object became to hit a billboard that hung behind left field with a ball thrown from right field. Nelson and Roberto were older and stronger and could tag it, but my throws fell just short. I couldn’t believe I couldn’t hit it like my older brother and cousin could. When Nelson and Roberto urged me to beef up my scrawny frame by doing push-ups in water-filled ditches—the water created drag, making the push-ups more difficult—and going for long runs and long-tossing all the time, I agreed without hesitation.

  I needed to hit that billboard.

  We didn’t have a TV, so we’d walk, sometimes half a mile, through Manoguayabo to find someone who’d let us watch. Sunday was El Mundo de los Deportes day—World of Sports. They’d have MLB highlights, and sometimes they’d broadcast a whole game. I looked up to everyone then, but my favorite was Reggie Jackson. I wanted that swagger, I wanted to hit all those home runs. I also loved Keith Hernandez, Don Mattingly, Tim Raines, and Darryl Strawberry. Pitching-wise, Roger Clemens was a phenom in the DR—drafted in 1983, with the Red Sox by 1984. Everyone wanted to be like Roger. There were Orel Hershiser, Bret Saberhagen, and Dwight Gooden too.

  I had my eye on all of them.

  Ramon said he had to spank me a fair amount to get me to settle down and listen. I tended to get upset when someone teased me and things didn’t go my way. Sometimes Ramon or some of his friends would decide to call me some stupid and mean name, just to piss me off and see how mad I’d get. I had a temper from the start, but I couldn’t stay mad at Ramon for very long. I looked up to him the most, and in my eyes he could do no wrong. He was clearly the leader of the pack of Martinez kids, not in a bullying way but with a quiet dignity he was born with. He was almost five years older than me, though, so I grew very close with Nelson, who had a much quieter and more reserved temperament than any of the four brothers. Nelson was even more sensitive than I was. He felt everything deeply. With me, he would open up and share. Jesus was my little brother and behaved like most do by following me around.

  When I was nine, my parents split up. Up until then, I can’t remember anything other than being a blissful and perfectly content kid. There is no right age for a child to be when his or her parents get divorced. I was still young enough that I was unable to get my head around why this had to happen and sensitive enough that I could not keep it from occupying my thoughts all day and all night.

  Nights could be noisy in the DR, somebody’s radio was always on, a motorcycle would race by, or there’d be one of those raucous rainstorms. None of that would wake me up, but the sound of my parents arguing would split my dreams in half.

  I would lie awake and wrestle with what was happening. How could two people fall in love, have a family, and then pull apart, a separation that threatened to break our family bond? I vowed to myself never to get divorced.

  That was the most stressful time that we ever faced as a family. All of a sudden, we weren’t all pulling in the same direction. Among the siblings it felt as if we had to pick sides. My mom and dad both still wanted what was best for the family, but as a couple, they couldn’t figure out a way to work toward that together. There were economic stresses as well, details I was too young to understand. In reality, there was nobody to blame, but then, nothing could prevent an empty feeling gnawing away at me like an acid. When my mom moved to Santo Domingo to take a job, my stress level peaked. My dad stayed in Manoguayabo, where he had his extended family right next door to help him deal with all the domestic details previously handled by my mother.

  I had to live in Santo Domingo with my mom and switch schools. I became extremely quiet in school, primarily because I was holding so much anger inside. I didn’t feel comfortable being in the city at all. There weren’t as many trees, and there was hardly any room to wander and play baseball. I wanted to be back in Manoguayabo with the friends I had left behind. I became sullen, the kid who was quickly singled out as being from the countryside and different from everyone else. I became a target for bullies. I was a little shorter than my classmates, and some of the tougher guys seized on that one day and began taunting me. That was a mistake on their part, and then I made my mistake.

  I snapped.

  I could not take anything from anybody. You want to bully me? No, you’re going to fight me. So we fought. (I had taken some boxing lessons in the city, maybe the one enjoyable activity I’d had there, but that had to stop when my nose kept bleeding and the doctors told me they would have to break it on purpose in order to prevent future nosebleeds. I was up for that, but my mom was not and she stopped the boxing lessons.) I got off some good punches on the bully. I really pummeled him. I got blamed for the fight, however, and was sent home with instructions for my mom to come in the next day for a conference. I told her what happened but said she didn’t have to bother going in—I wasn’t going back there. I didn’t get my way right away, but it wasn’t long before I went back to Manoguayabo, where my dad managed to get me back into my old school.

  When I came back, I didn’t always have perfect attendance, mainly because there were some baseball games I wanted to play in that conflicted with my class time. One teacher decided to nip my hooky habit in the bud. I had a really short haircut then, almost completely shaved off, except for a little tuft in the front of my head. My teacher grabbed that tuft one day and shook my head back and forth.

  “Pedro, you cannot miss any more school. From now on, no more cutting classes.”

  Ow. That hurt. But he made his point. I was relieved to be back home, and I started to pay more attention to my classes and make up for lost time from being distracted by my parents’ split. I still played baseball, but I would wait until school was over to play.

  School never felt effortless for me, but I did the work I needed to do with pretty good success. Math was easy for me until the eighth grade, when algebra began to slow me down. Chemistry and science also got a lot more difficult as I got older. History was my favorite subject. I really enjoyed learning about our country and how it was settled and all the clashes between the European conquerors and the native people. English lessons did not start until the eighth grade, but I did well with them.

  My mom eventually came back to Manoguayabo, moving to a house not too far from where my dad still was.

  The family began to settle down again. My mother
and father could be civil with each other, and they never shied away from celebrating family events together. Among the siblings, we were able to stay tight, even as we schemed to find ways to get the two of them back together again.

  I began to play baseball with more focus. I was good enough to play in what was called the “military circle”—the little league teams sponsored by all the military forces in the DR to play in different tournaments. I was selected for the team that was going to play in Puerto Rico, but the cost of participating was 420 pesos, about $8 back then.

  “Pedro, you’re one of six kids, and I make 600 pesos a month,” my mom told me.

  I swallowed it. There was nothing left to be said.

  I stayed behind.

  Around the time our family was reunited in Manoguayabo, we all began to focus on Ramon’s obvious talent for pitching. He had grown tall early, past six feet by the age of 16. He started playing around town, getting placed on better and better teams, until a Dodgers scout saw him and signed him.

  He signed for $5,000, which at that time was the most money our family had ever seen. By far. The first thing we did was buy a refrigerator, which set us apart from our neighbors immediately.

  And it opened my eyes too to what baseball could mean besides a good time.

  Ramon had been telling my mom for years, since he was five years old, that he was going to be a professional baseball player and that once that happened he would use the money to keep her and my dad from sticking with their trying, low-paying jobs.

  Ramon’s refrigerator lifted from our family a burden we hadn’t even seen. That’s when I set my course to be like him. If I could become a professional baseball player like Ramon, I could help my family like he did.

  What else was there for me to do?

  I didn’t see a better path because I saw no other path. I loved playing baseball, and I was good at it.

  So I told my mother and father exactly what Ramon had told them: I’m going to become a professional baseball player, and when I do, I will send my money home so none of you have to work anymore.

  Ramon got an agent, named Fernando Cuza, who stopped by our shack after Ramon had been with the Dodgers for a little bit. I had no idea what an agent even meant, but when Fernando visited I knew that he must be somebody important and that he was there to help Ramon.

  I was only 12 then, but Fernando remembers me injecting myself in the middle of every conversation when it came to Ramon and the Dodgers. “Hey, Ramon, what are you guys doing, what are you talking about?” I was always talking anyway, and soon every other word out of my mouth was about Ramon and the Dodgers.

  Let me help you carry your equipment bag. What’s the Dodgers’ academy like? Want me to go with you to the academy? Play some catch with me—whatever it was, I asked. And kept asking. Fernando saw an energetic kid, in awe of his brother, who had the utmost confidence that he would follow in his footsteps.

  It wasn’t even a question for me.

  Thank goodness Ramon kept his patience with his pesky little brother.

  Until I made the military circle little league team, Ramon resisted my begging to do anything other than take the bus with him a couple of times to Campo Las Palmas, the Dodgers’ academy located approximately one to one and a half hours from Manoguayabo via the bus—two buses, that is.

  I didn’t care if all I did was carry his bags and sit and watch him throw. As a 14- and 15-year-old, there was no way I would have ever made it inside the academy’s gates in the first place, but because I was with Ramon, I gained entrance to what truly was a rarefied place.

  The Dodgers were the first team to establish an academy in the Dominican Republic, and for that alone they were the favorite of the majority of kids back then. Had any of us known about what the Dodgers did for Jackie Robinson and the integration of the major leagues, it would have been unanimous. But Ramon was not focused on that, nor was I. All Ramon was trying for was to open the eyes of the big-league Dodgers team. He had a breakthrough season in Single A ball in 1987, when I was 15 years old. After that summer, Ramon turned over a new leaf when it came to his preparation and dedication to getting better. Serious to begin with, he became all business, running and training all the time. He stressed to me that if I ever wanted a shot at becoming a baseball player, I had to do everything like he did.

  Train, run, and throw, then train, run, and throw some more.

  “There are no shortcuts,” he told me. “I got you into the academy, but I can’t get you out of here.

  “That part’s up to you.”

  2

  Heart of a Lion

  I WALKED OFF the field at Campo Las Palmas calmly. I had pitched well, I thought, firing in fastballs as hard as I could—pow, pow, pow—and I had put on a good show. I was pitching in front of all the coaches and scouts who had been Ramon’s coaches too. They knew who I was, but unless I was there on the best days—when Ramon asked me to play catch with him because he had nobody else—they hadn’t seen me throw. I was about half a foot shorter than Ramon, a little 16-year-old whippet who would try to throw that ball back to him with perfect mechanics and with as much high cheese as I could muster. I always hoped the other coaches were taking a little peek to see how fast and hard I was throwing.

  No one else thought this, but I knew that I was throwing hard enough, that my stuff was good enough. After all, if Ramon was there, I was supposed to be with him. Where he belonged, I belonged. If he didn’t want me to come with him one day, then it was my job to convince him otherwise. I must have been one pain in the ass.

  Once I turned 16 in October 1987, Ramon helped arrange the tryout. There were others there too that day. I didn’t dwell on the fact that the other 16- and 17-year-olds were much taller, stronger, and more filled out than I was. The standard practice of the Dodgers back then was not to sign a pitcher less than six feet tall, and I was at least three inches shy of that. They could notice the difference if they felt like it, but I didn’t see it. If someone had pointed out the differences to me, I would have only pretended to listen. I didn’t want to hear that I was different or looked different, as if that somehow correlated to not belonging there. I didn’t see any connection. I knew what the deal was and what my deal was.

  I belonged there. I had been coming there for more than four years. Anytime I was on a baseball diamond, I was comfortable. Throwing off the Campo Las Palmas mound felt natural to me. I was not intimidated by my surroundings or my competition. I had made up my mind when I was 12 that I would be the next Martinez to pitch for the Dodgers, so there I was, at a tryout that I considered to be a formality.

  The dirt path from the field became a sidewalk leading to the Campo’s offices and locker rooms. I took off my cleats and walked in my socks to where players scraped the caked-in clay and mud out from the bottom of their shoes. I started clapping my cleats together, knocking out the biggest clods, when, in between the claps, I heard my name.

  I looked around. Nobody was calling for me.

  I heard it again.

  “Pedro.”

  Then, “Little brother.”

  I looked across the sidewalk to where the noises were coming from and saw that the window slats from the coaches’ office were open.

  Now I understood exactly who was talking about me.

  The shock was what they were saying.

  “Ramon is a superb athlete—this one, he’s not going to develop.”

  “He threw fine, not great, not terrible. But really, was he anything special?”

  “Don’t ask me, that’s none of my business—I’m in charge of outfielders, what do I know about pitching?”

  “You saw that he wasn’t throwing that hard. Maybe 82 miles an hour.”

  “I guess he’ll get stronger, he’s just 16, but he’s so skinny, so thin—so was Ramon, but at least he had some height. This one’s not even close to six feet.”

  “To be honest, there’s really nothing I like so much.”

  My best friend, Marino A
lcala, walked by. He saw that I was staring at a window with grates on it.

  “What’s the matter, Pedro?”

  Softly, I said, “The coaches. They’re talking about me. I thought for sure they were going to sign me. But now, I don’t know.”

  As the doubters continued to doubt, I started to feel the ground beneath me giving way. Until that moment, I had never heard anyone tell me I did not have what it took to be a professional pitcher. It had never occurred to me that I would not be allowed to reach my goal.

  Each time I heard one of the coaches find a new phrase to describe how I was a scraggly, no-good, never-amount-to-anything piece of nothing, it felt like a machete took another hack at the branch I was standing on. I could hear the frightening, splintering sound as the branch began to give way under my scrawny legs and send me tumbling down into a black void so deep I couldn’t fathom where I’d land.

  Then I heard a voice, a high-pitched voice, cut through the others and halt my fall.

  “He’s got the heart of a lion.”

  Eleodoro Arias was speaking.

  Unmistakably Eleodoro.

  Ramon’s pitching coach and the pitching coach at the academy, Eleodoro was a soft-spoken man who seldom raised his voice, but when he did, his authority went unchallenged. He was in command at Campo Las Palmas, he knew Ramon the best, and he knew my family the best of anyone there.

  He had been watching my tryout closely, looking where others weren’t.

  Eleodoro had spoken with me before and after the tryout. He knew what I was about. He had locked eyes with me, and I never blinked back at his intense, dark eyes. He did not see an ounce of fear. He sensed that I would show everyone that what they saw on the outside bore no resemblance to what was on the inside.

  Look inside my heart, I was saying. There you’ll find the answer you’re looking for.