Martinez Has Fought Own Battle, Won

There is a memorable scene in the movie, “Under Fire,” in which Nick Nolte, who plays a cameraman on assignment in war-torn Nicaragua, comes across a Sandinista soldier wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap.

The soldier hands Nolte a baseball, then picks up a grenade. He pulls the pin, winds up and throws a high, hard one into a building occupied by President Somoza’s troops. It’s a strike.

“You see Dennis Martinez, you tell him my curveball is better than his,” he tells Nolte. “I like the Sandinistas, and I like the Baltimore Orioles.”

Dennis Martinez has seen the movie, and he enjoyed the scene. He also has seen and heard about the strife in his native Nicaragua, and he is ambivalent about the situation. But Martinez, the first Nicaraguan to play in the major leagues, has focused more on a personal battle with alcoholism, which threatened to end a career that made him a national hero in the days when Oliver North was just another upwardly mobile Marine officer.

After a change of life styles, from a hard liver to merely a hard thrower, and a change of teams, from the Orioles to the Montreal Expos, Martinez has regained the pitching form he hasn’t had since Somoza’s salad days.

Martinez is 7-2 for the Expos who are struggling to stay in the National League East race going into tonight’s series opener against the Dodgers.

Getting back to this point has not been easy for the 32-year-old Martinez, who admitted to having serious doubts early last year that he would pitch again in the major leagues. He left Granada, Nicaragua, as a cocky 19-year-old with a hard fastball, good curve and a penchant for wildness.

He made it to the majors by 1976, at 21, and was perhaps the Orioles’ most reliable pitcher over the next six seasons. But for most of the early 1980s, Martinez was losing games and control with regularity.

“Coming to this country from Nicaragua, learning a new language, the different life style, it was a lot of pressure,” Martinez said. “Everything was so easy here. You stay in the best places, eat in best restaurants, make good money. All those things, I wasn’t prepared for.

“Honest, the way I reacted to it wasn’t good. Nobody could tell me what to do. I was the big shot. Those things can destroy you, send you downhill. I was dealing with that life-style thing, and then we had the war back home, then my dad died in ’82.

“I remember when I came back after going home for my dad’s funeral, I beat the Milwaukee Brewers three days later. People said, ‘Don’t you feel anything?’ I said, ‘Hey, he’s gone. Nothing I could do.’ They didn’t know how much I was hurting. That wasn’t me talking. It was the alcohol.”

For a few years, Martinez could handle both pitching and alcohol, seemingly without detrimental effects. He was young and strong and, he thought, immune to outside forces.

In 1978 and ‘79, the hard-throwing right-hander posted 16-11 and 15-16 records for the Orioles. But his reliability and durability were most valued. He pitched 276 innings in 1978 and, in 1979, led the American League with 39 starts, 18 complete games and 292 innings.

But Martinez paid for it the next season with an arm injury. His elbow still bent, though, and Martinez’s problems with alcohol increased. Even after returning with a combined record of 30-17 the next two seasons, Martinez was headed on a slide that he didn’t immediately acknowledge.

Before the 1984 season, Martinez went through an alcohol-dependency program, which he said helped him stop drinking. But the resurrection of his pitching career was more time-consuming and provided no guarantees, either.

It took three years, plus a change of teams, for Martinez to feel that he was pitching as he had in his early years.

“It was a change of mental attitude,” Martinez said. “I am an alcoholic, and it took me a while to come back. Some guys react different than others, because of our systems. You might be affected by the alcohol different than me.

“Like Tim Raines, when he overcame drugs, he came back real strong and real quick. It took Bob Welch some time to come back (from alcohol dependency).

“Me, it took 2 1/2 years. I haven’t had a drink in three years, and I’m putting the pieces together, physically, mentally and spiritually. Concentration-wise, I can see the difference. I’m not losing my temper on the mound like I was, not letting mistakes bother me. I still get mad, because I’m human, but I couldn’t handle it when I was drinking.

“I was blaming everybody else but me for my problems. It got to the point where I was thinking about what I was going to do after the game, instead of the game itself.”

That, perhaps, is when Martinez realized he had a problem. Baseball always has been the most important thing in Martinez’s life. The prospect of leaving Nicaragua for the major leagues was about all Martinez thought about in the early 1970s.

“The Sandinistas weren’t really around when I was growing up,” he said. “In the 1970s, when I went to the University (of Managua), then I started learning about it. The Sandinistas were university guys. Some people got involved. I didn’t.

“I realized the repression the poor people were getting (under Somoza), but it was almost like (the Sandinistas) were brainwashing people, too, to join them. I just kept out of it and played baseball because I wanted to play in the big leagues.”

When Martinez became the first Nicaraguan to play in the major leagues, he became a celebrity. He vividly recalls his first trip back to Granada in 1976, after the Orioles called him up late in the season.

“They gave me a big parade down there,” Martinez said. “Oh, man. It was like the president was coming home. There were hundreds of people at the airport. It was so emotional. That was during the Somoza government.

“Then, I came back after the Sandinistas took power. I came back with a suit, a tie and everything because that was the way the Orioles used to dress up. Everybody started looking at me strange. Like, ‘What’s wrong with this guy, wearing a suit and tie?’

“I found out later that if you wore a suit and tie you’re like a big shot, a millionaire or something. After they explained to me, I kind of agreed with them. I shouldn’t be treated differently because I have money. Everybody should be treated the same. I started to feel like they did. If they want me to think like that, OK, I’ll think like that.”

While former boxer Alexis Arguello has talked about leaving Miami and joining the contra rebels’ battle against the Sandinistas, Martinez remains politically noncommittal.

He is ambivalent about the civil war that reshaped his country. He said he lived well under Somoza and that his mother, who still lives in Granada, lives well under the current government.

Asked to comment on the Iran- contra hearings, Martinez said he only occasionally watched.

“But from what I heard, it made me uncomfortable,” he said. “You don’t know who’s telling the truth.

“The main thing I don’t like is, why would a big power be playing games with a little country? The people suffering are the Nicaraguan people, not the Americans or the Russians.”

Martinez says he has not returned to Nicaragua in five years, roughly the period after the Sandinistas took power. Except for his mother, who chose to stay, his family lives in Miami. For the first month of this season, Martinez was living in Miami, too. But he would rather have been in Montreal or some other major league city.

After being traded from the Orioles to the Expos in June 1986, Martinez, undergoing rehabilitation for an injured left shoulder, set out trying to regain his pitching form. Montreal, needing starters, gave him 15 starts at the end of last season. Martinez posted only a 3-6 record with a 4.59 earned-run average.

But his spirits were buoyed because he was still in the major leagues, and he thought he would soon find his confidence.

“When we brought him up last season, he was only a shell of himself,” Expo Manager Buck Rodgers said. “He came along slowly. He had mechanical problems, dipping his shoulder, not throwing correctly. But by the end of the season, he had become one of our best pitchers.”

That didn’t help Martinez any when it came to negotiating a contract. Like Raines, Martinez didn’t get the offer he was seeking so he sought it elsewhere, but found no takers. Also like Raines, Martinez wound up sitting out the first month of the season before the Expos could re-sign him.

“I can understand some teams being scared off from me because of my alcohol problems,” Martinez said. “But I still think this free-agent (collusion) thing had something to do with it. I mean, look at Tim Raines.”

Knowing that the Expos probably would re-sign him after the May 1 deadline, Martinez wanted to be immediately ready to pitch.

So, he went to a non-affiliated Class A team in Miami and asked to pitch. He started three games, made no money but kept sharp.

“Going to Miami was a big step for me,” Martinez said. “You’ve got to be humble to do that. But I looked at it in the positive way. I know other people won’t do that because of ego and pride, but I had to give up something if I wanted to get back to big leagues. At least, somebody gave me a chance to pitch.”

After eventually signing with the Expos and being given seven preparatory starts in Triple-A, Martinez returned and has posted the best record of any Expo starter. Before losing to San Francisco last weekend, Martinez was 7-1 with an ERA under 3.00.

“Maybe now, in the back of their minds, (the Expos) are thinking that if they had me earlier, they’d be in better shape,” Martinez said. “Or maybe they’d be worse off, who knows? I don’t worry about that. I’m just trying to pitch as good as I can and live day to day.”

Said Rodgers: “You bet I’m happy to have him. I was definitely counting on him as one of my starters. Everybody talks about (Andre) Dawson and Raines, but he was the forgotten man in the free agency.”

But Martinez has not been forgotten. Not in Nicaragua, or Miami or even Canada.