Martinez Finds Happiness Starts Right at Home

Here he comes, he and that smile. It’s a big smile that would show plenty of teeth except every tooth was removed a couple of years ago because relatives were afraid he’d bite his tongue out.

Here he comes, walking the same street he has walked for as long as anybody can remember. He’ll get to the end, turn around, and walk back again, this being the only long street in this crazy little town.

“Here he comes,” Carmelo Martinez says from his spot on a road-side bench. “Crazy cousin Raoul.”

“Que pasa?” says Raoul.

“Que pasa?” says Martinez.

Cousin Raoul leaps into a Spanish monologue about friendship and the weather and life. Martinez looks up and listens as if Cousin Raoul were Jack McKeon.

Martinez finally sticks out the palm of his left hand. Cousin Raoul clasps it with his right hand, and then Cousin Raoul is gone. Smiling, looking again for the end of the road, walking as if he hopes he never finds it.

“Nice guy, my cousin,” Martinez says. “They say he was fine until he spent a little time in the United States.”

Martinez leans back, lets out a big laugh and wiggles his toes. It is 3 p.m., and the Padres’ outfielder is bare-footed. If today is like most others he has spent among a couple hundred people in the middle of farmlands, he will remain bare-footed until somebody gently points out his shoes.

“My cousin, he means well,” Martinez says, seriously now. “All he wants is for people to be happy.”

Still staring out at the street, Martinez sips on a plastic cup filled with coconut water and a splash of whiskey. He chews on some fried and buttered bananas he coerced out of a neighbor lady--he caught her stirring a black boiling pot in her garage, she had no choice. Then he licks a finger.

“My crazy cousin,” he announces finally, with satisfaction. “He’s the kind of guy, everybody likes him.”

Most island baseball players fly west across the Atlantic Ocean each spring in search of fame and fortune and acid-washed jeans. In Carmelo Martinez’s 5 years with the Padres--during which he has silently and smilingly struggled through a variety of benchings and trade rumors before finally becoming a regular late last year--he has always seemed different.

After spending a day with him in his rural hometown of tiny houses and open arms, it is obvious that he is different.

At 28, Carmelo Martinez wants most to make people happy and be liked. Truth be told, he thinks Cousin Raoul is not so crazy.

“What is wrong with going through life just wanting to be happy?” Martinez asks. “I feel no pressure, because there is no pressure. I not complain, because there is nothing to complain about.”

Last season, for the first time, that feeling was noticed, and appreciated and rewarded. Given a full-time starting left-field job in August in one of Manager McKeon’s lineup switches, Martinez hit 11 homers with 34 RBIs in the season’s final 38 games. He won several games with big late-inning hits, turning him into a big hit, earning him standing ovations that he still hears this winter.

“It was one of the greatest things to see, after all that kid has put up with,” McKeon said. “Intentionally or not, he has been snubbed over the years and has always put up with it, and now it is paying off. And it’s all his attitude. That’s what we admire most about him, that way he looks at things.”

Martinez grins as he begins the 4-minute tour of his hometown. “Life is not all baseball,” he said. “Life is here.”

Here is Maguayo, on Puerto Rico’s north shore, 10 minutes and 10,000 years from the closest city, the resort area of Dorado. We offer these directions because “here” is not on any map. According to Martinez, the village is inhabited by three families, with the last names of Montanez, Salgado and Rivera. The years have turned the three families into one, if not in blood then in heart, a group of friends living on 1 mile of thin roads that also hold four bars and a couple of shops, an elementary school and baseball field.

Martinez’s mother was a Salgado. She and his grandmother raised him in a small 3-bedroom house on the main road, with one bedroom always vacant because the women slept together after Martinez’s father left home when Carmelo was 4. The house is still there, with its tiny yard and the white bars on the window, simply because his mother won’t leave.

“Everybody talk about, when they become a star, buying their mother a house,” Martinez said. “Well, I try, I try. She won’t move.”

When his grandmother got sick this winter, she wouldn’t move either. For 3 consecutive days, while his mother worked as a laundry supervisor at one of the Dorado hotels, Martinez tried to convince his grandmother to leave her bedroom and go to a hospital. She wouldn’t. The next day she had a stroke and died.

“You see what it is like here?” Martinez asks softly. “Different things are important here.”

So now Martinez won’t move either. The tour begins with his house, a one-level stone structure that could belong to anyone. Located several blocks from his mother’s place, it sits amid a small group of older houses abutting a farm where they are said to grow some of the greenest grass in the world. Not that this is rural, but neither his street nor the streets around him have names.

An elderly lady, arms full of sheets just pulled from the line, stalks from her house to check out Martinez’s guest. She stares at him. She sticks her face to the window of his rental car and stares into the back seat. She makes a Spanish pronouncement and walks away.

“Said she liked the car,” Martinez said, shrugging. “These people, they watch out for me.”

Just as he does for them. He is not known as Carmelo here, but as “Bitu,” which, loosely translated, refers to the tar they spread on streets. They say his father gave him the name as a boy, but it is most appropriate now; Bitu has spread himself thick across the lives of his hometown friends.

“It’s amazing,” he says while walking through his house, “that there isn’t anybody in here right now. Usually all kinds of kids come over and just hang around. They want to watch me work out, help me work out. I end up stepping on a couple of them, and then finally I yell, ‘Out, out.’ And the next day they are back. I guess they know I don’t mean it.”

You can hardly blame them. There is a nifty weight room in his garage, and his back yard is taken up with a batting cage and pitching machine, complete with an old mattress for a backstop. All of it is surrounded with sound from a stereo system that can light up the village.

And then there is the air-conditioning. In a bit of Martinez’s special wisdom, instead of using central air to cool the house, he has three separate wall units.

“So if one breaks down, I can move the other ones around and still say cool,” Martinez said. “If I have central air, and it breaks down, I burn.”

After working daily in his home, he and friends drive the two blocks to his boyhood ballpark to take ground balls. On this day the drive takes him past the wave of a teen-aged girl who is entering a tiny shack. He frowns.

“Beautiful girl, just 15 years old, all the young guys in town were after her,” he says. “But now she’s pregnant, and nobody wants her.

“But you wait. They will find the father. He will pay. You don’t do that sort of thing to us.”

Martinez fairly jumps out of the car when it stops at moderate, dirt-infield ballpark wedged between several houses and a church. No name, no bases, but his park. Martinez’s eyes immediately focus on a spot beyond left field, a back yard covered with an awning. During his professional tryout here 10 years ago, using strange wooden bats for the first time, he broke three on the first three pitches. Given his old aluminum bat, he immediately hit the ball so hard it carried into that back yard and broke through the awning.

Beyond right field is the huge sign for Carmelina’s Place Bar. It is underneath this sign many years ago that Martinez would spot his mother, screaming at him to come home for dinner.

On this cloudless day, he climbs into the empty third-base bleachers, leans back under a weeping willow tree and closes his eyes.

“Sometimes I come here and close my eyes and fall asleep,” he says, looking over to the first-base bleachers, where three snoozing citizens have beaten him to it. “I could sleep all day here.”

An old man with a Dodger cap shouts to Martinez from the street. Martinez shouts back.

“I gave the guy his hat,” Martinez said. “Anybody you see around with a big league cap or something, chances are I brought it back to them. What, they can buy them here?”

Turning back to the field, Martinez talks about something else he has helped give Maguayo. It’s called “Juegos del Pavo,” the Turkey Game.

At 7 a.m. Thanksgiving, a time when many in the states are beginning to put their turkeys in the oven, Martinez and friends are putting bats in the racks, bases on the field, and a calf on a spit. It’s an all-day, slow-pitch baseball festival, with as many games and teams and laughs as they fit in until midnight. Participants are required to donate one case of beer, $10 and their favorite food. Last Thanksgiving, Martinez, who is so involved in organizing that he rarely plays in more than two of the 5-inning games, collected 67 cases of beer and used the money to buy a 157-pound calf.

“You think you people in the states have fun on Thanksgiving?” Martinez asks. “You should come here.”

Martinez did something else at last year’s fourth annual event that raised eyebrows. He sold T-shirts with pictures of himself. But not for himself.

“My cousin’s little girl has gone blind,” he explained. “She needed a trip to Chicago for another operation. The T-shirts gave her that trip.”

Martinez already had paid for the girl’s first operation. Friends say he pays for much more here than he will admit. Just look at the Juvenile League uniforms in nearby Dorado, they say. On the backs of many of them are the names Neggie or Natalie. Those are the names of Martinez’s wife and daughter. He bought the uniforms.

Look even closer. An entire Juvenile League is named after him.

“Family, man,” Martinez said. “It’s all family.”

The cousin. The cousin’s daughter. The old lady. The old man. The pregnant girl. The Padres.

“Tell everybody back there that I am ready for a great year,” Martinez tells his visitor. “Tell them it’s been a great winter.”

Saturday: Family ties run deep for the Alomars of Salinas.