Pedro by Pedro Martinez

Author:Pedro Martinez [Martinez, Pedro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

Art and Craft

AS A PITCHER, a start for me began each time my last one ended.

I would let my body recover for a couple of days—no throwing, just running. On a treadmill tucked into the home clubhouse at Fenway, I’d jog along to my Dominican music and watch, with the sound off, video of a succession of pitchers our video coordinator, Billy Broadbent, had dug up for me. I was more interested in what worked for other pitchers than in what worked for the hitters, so I would look for recent film of pitchers whose style was similar to mine and who also threw hard—Tim Hudson, Johan Santana, Roger Clemens—and see how they had fared against the team I’d be facing next.

It didn’t matter if a hitter was a lefty or a righty, it was simply a question of speed: could he catch up to my fastball? If a hitter was going to be late against the fastballs from any of those three pitchers, he would be late against mine too. I had a better breaking ball than Roger did, but when it was working, he had the devastating splitter. Our fastballs were pretty much the same. I looked to see how Roger beat them. If he beat them with his splitter, I would try to beat them with my breaking ball. The more recent the game pitched the better. This routine allowed me to identify tendencies, such as what kind of pitches a hitter was guessing on, what kind he sat on, what his swing path was like. Into the memory bank it went.

If I was throwing a side session between starts, the main purpose, as I had been taught, was to work on my weaknesses, not to strengthen my strengths. If I’d had trouble commanding my breaking ball in my previous start, then I wanted to tweak my mechanics and get it right. Usually I knew why I missed location the instant after I threw a pitch. Being able to correct and then repeat the proper delivery in my side session became my primary goal.

On game day, first pitch could not come soon enough for me. I turned to flowers, my first love, to keep my mind off the clock. In Montreal, I used to walk from my apartment to Crescent Street for lunch at an outdoor restaurant whose balconies were draped with roses and flower boxes. With the sun on my face, I’d sit and gaze at the flowers. In my townhouse in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, I built a balcony in the back of my unit so I could have space for my garden. When I pitched with the Mets, I had a backyard in Westchester, New York, filled with flowers. On the mornings and early afternoons of my starts, I would dive into my flowerpots and flower beds, clipping off dead leaves, weeding and puttering, until it was time to leave for the ballpark.

When I got to Fenway Park, Jason and I would sit down before the game and go over our attack plan.

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