Basically, Martinez Is a First-Class Pitcher

It is ascertained, in his first experience as an All-Star performer, that Ramon Martinez, of Mano Guayabo, Dominican Republic, flies to the game first class.

A visitor asks Ramon, who serves the Dodgers, if this is an improvement over the buses he rode in his early years in baseball.

He responds: “I didn’t ride buses. The team I played for traveled by truck.”

He is talking about Los Bravos, the formidable nine representing Mano Guayabo in the inter-city competition for which Dominican baseball is known. The teams play 51 weeks, skipping only Christmas.

“Did the truck have a roof?” Martinez is asked.

“Our hats were the roof,” he answers. “Some players traveled privately. They had friends who owned motorcycles.”

Since Ramon is only 22, he isn’t, in the new stratum to which he has ascended, that far away from life in Mano Guayabo, a village of 2,000 about 15 miles from Santo Domingo.

Now retired, Martinez’s father worked as a custodian of sorts for the school system. Also retired, the mother worked in an office, the two providing for their brood of six a living standard of which Ramon is pardonably proud.

“We had indoor plumbing, hot water and electricity,” he testifies.

This was the Ritz compared to accommodations reported by Pedro Guerrero, Pascual Perez, Joaquin Andujar, George Bell and others making their way from the Dominican outback to the major leagues.

“Mario Soto was my idol,” recalls Martinez. “All I wanted in life was to pitch like Mario.”

No longer in baseball, Soto dropped out when his arm went bad. This was bum luck, considering that all his other parts functioned flawlessly.

Pitching in his last year for Los Bravos, Martinez made 51 starts, a modest undertaking in his view. Down there, he says, no one knows from rotator cuffs. If one doesn’t know about them, one goes on pitching and is happy.

Inspected by a Dodger scout working the Dominican territory, Martinez was offered residence in the local Dodger camp where, provided room and board but no pay, he would spend eight months learning this line of work.

At that point, roughly for a bowl of black beans, he would be signed to a minor league contract and dispatched to a Dodger farm unit in Florida.

And, at 17, he would leave school in the 10th grade--more educated than many of his colleagues--and hook up with a circus that offered $615 a month and a dream of joining, atop Olympus, Mario Soto.

The next thing society knows, Ramon is striking out 18 in a game, tying the best effort of Sandy Koufax, and is named to the National League All-Stars.

From the back of the truck, you can say, Ramon has come to the front of the class, and his manager, Tom Lasorda, can tell you why.

“He throws fastballs,” says Tom. “Show me a pitcher who throws fastballs, and I’ll show you a guy who has promise. I am sick of trick pitches. Did you ever see Koufax throw a split-finger?”

“But the split-finger is the pitch of the generation,” Lasorda is reminded.

“It also is the pitch that has everyone mixed up,” he replies. “Split-fingers, forkballs, palmballs--these are things guys should turn to after they lose their speed. If a young pitcher with a good arm throws a fastball and a curve, that’s all he needs.”

“Then why are they teaching kids the split-finger? They are throwing it in high school.”

Lasorda bottles some strong emotions.

“Look,” he says, “coaches go to clinics where they listen to lectures on the split-finger and other off-beat pitches. Then they take these ideas back to the schools where they teach. And rather than start off their kids with basic stuff, they have them trying things they shouldn’t at that age.”

Martinez leads the National League in complete games and strikeouts. The Dodgers contend that if he can control his second pitch, the curve, we are looking at a very important entertainer.

Of course, it also could happen with Martinez, as it has with other young pitchers exploding onto the scene from the bush, that he vanishes as quickly as he came.

In that case, Ramon, remembering the truck, can shrug, relating the old story of the guy at the race track who runs a $2 stake into $900,000, bets it all on the last race and loses.

That night, his wife asks: “How did you do?”

He answers: “I lost $2.”