There’s Still No Place Like Home : Ramon Martinez Helps Family, Keeps His Roots in Dominican

The street outside Ramon Martinez’s new house is really just an unpaved alley dotted with gravel, craters, rubble and the occasional steaming mound of dirt.

The street is unmarked and isolated, separated from the main road by several cluttered blocks lined with men playing dominoes and loud stereos. The music is salsa, the atmosphere is chaos.

Yet none of it stops the children.

Every afternoon, with their thin sticks, rubber balls and dreams, they gather outside Martinez’s wrought-iron gate. Some of them have no shoes and many have no shirts, but all have voices.

On afternoons when Martinez is sitting in his living room--the front door is always open--he hears them.

“They are always shouting, ‘Ramon, Ramon, come out and play!’ ” a smiling Martinez recalls while sitting on a shiny wicker chair in that living room. “They always want me to pitch.”

The request is natural, considering that Martinez pitched so well for the Dodgers last year that he made the All-Star team and finished second in the Cy Young Award voting.

Perhaps what is not so natural is that Martinez often obliges.

“Sometimes I just go out to watch, maybe to bring them some batting gloves or something,” Martinez says. “But then when I get out there, sometimes I just have to play.

“I mean, those kids, I used to be them.”

In many ways, as fans saw last year, Martinez still is.

It was visible in his wide-eyed excitement the night he struck out 18 Atlanta Braves. It was visible in his youthful bravado at the All-Star game, when he retired Oakland’s Jose Canseco by throwing nothing but fastballs.

More than any other time, though, the child in Martinez emerged after a complete-game victory, when he would toss the game ball to a child in the stands.

Some wondered if it was all an act. A visit to his hometown confirms that it was not.

This is where Martinez grew up in a shack without a flush toilet.

This is where he grew up incredibly thin, not because of his genes, but because there wasn’t enough money for proper food.

This is where the son of school maintenance workers showed up for his Dodger tryout with no socks. And a torn cap.

This is where Martinez grew up dreaming only that a major leaguer would one day toss him a game ball. Actually, he would have taken any sort of baseball, from anybody.

“I don’t want to get too far away from those days,” said Martinez, 22, who last year became the youngest Dodger to win 20 games since Ralph Branca in 1947. “I want to stay close to where I’m from. If you see me here, you know that I am not that different from then.”

In fact, on a recent day at a park he had once frequented near his childhood home in the poor suburb of Mano Guayabo, there was still no baseball.

A dozen children searched the outfield weeds for a ball so they could begin their game. They did not dare search the infield, a swamp reeking of garbage and surrounded by mosquitoes almost as big as their bare feet.

After hacking fruitlessly through the high grass like farmers with sickles, they finally gave up the hunt and rushed toward some visitors in hopes that they had brought a ball.

This being a potentially historic place, it seemed appropriate for a history lesson, so the children were questioned.

Had they heard of Babe Ruth?

Silence.

Had they heard of Mickey Mantle?

Silence.

Had they heard of Ramon Martinez?

“Si! Si! Si!”

One brave lad then spoke up, saying: “Ramon Martinez played here 10 years ago. If he pitched for the Dodgers, then we can also pitch for the Dodgers.”

Up the bumpy road, in a collection of shacks on an adjoining dirt path, impressions of Martinez are even stronger. The shack where he grew up is the one just beyond the wild-eyed woman who is complaining about her husband, down near a flock of roaming chickens.

Appropriately, it is painted blue. But there is nothing else about the faded, ramshackle structure even remotely suggesting the Dodgers, Los Angeles or even much of the Western World.

The smaller shack nestled in the trees in the back yard is the outhouse. The women standing over the big tubs in the side yard are doing the laundry.

There are holes where the windows should be, and the roof appears barely high enough to have accommodated Martinez, who has since grown to 6 feet 4.

“We are so proud of Ramon, mostly because he is still a good boy, a nice boy,” says Maria del Pozo, a cousin who lives in the adjacent shack.

Agueda Herrero Jaime, another cousin, adds, “He is our hero because he is the same person he has been in other years.”

Well, not quite.

For one thing, when he left the shack for the Dodgers’ Campo Las Palmas academy at age 15, he weighed only 135 pounds. And you thought he looked thin last year!

A lifetime of poor nutrition had left his body years behind those of his peers. He could not throw a ball faster than 80 m.p.h. He had poor endurance. The Dodgers had no competition for his services.

“Physically, he looked so bad, nobody wanted him,” recalled Ralph Avila, the Dodgers’ Dominican Republic coordinator who invited Martinez to Campo Las Palmas after seeing him at a tryout camp. “The only thing I liked about him was his face. In that face, I could see determination.”

Around Martinez’s neck, Avila also saw a wooden cross fastened to an old shoelace.

“This sounds crazy, but at that tryout I told him, ‘One day, you will pitch in the big leagues and buy a solid gold cross. When you do, I want you to give me that shoelace cross,’ ” Avila recalled. “It was just something I said. But now, I will never forget that moment.”

Soon, Martinez will be able to buy not just a cross but an entire church. He surely will make more than $500,000 this season after being paid $149,5000 last year.

He already has used his money to buy new clothes, mounds of jewelry, a new black Pontiac Firebird and his most prized possession--a new home for himself and his family. This includes his parents, who have been able to retire, and two brothers who are both pitchers in the lower levels of the Dodger organization.

The home was the first purchase after he began making big league money. It cost $20,000. It is far from grandiose--there are four bedrooms for seven people, and there is no telling when the government will fix up the road outside.

But surrounded by his family, and within minutes of Mano Guayabo, it is just the way Martinez likes it.

“I think about buying myself a car or an apartment first, but then I realize that is not right,” Martinez said. “I first have to keep the family together. I like the home because it is close to where I am from and because it keeps me close with everybody. My family is where I have my good times.

“In Los Angeles, it is nice, but I get lonely,” he said, noting that his average monthly phone bill during the season runs higher than $400. “There is something missing for me in Los Angeles. I find that thing here.”

After spending a year at the Dodgers’ academy--this was before the government ruled that the Dodgers could keep an unsigned player for only 30 days--Martinez emerged in 1984 to pitch for the Dominican Republic baseball team in the Olympics at Dodger Stadium.

About the best anybody could say for him was, few Olympians were thinner.

“He wanted so badly to gain weight,” Avila said. “I remember walking in his hotel room and seeing ice cream bars fall out of his refrigerator. In one day, he ate 52 ice cream bars.”

Yet, once he took the Dodger Stadium mound, he was all determination.

“I went out to see him on the mound, and he told me, ‘Give me three years, I’ll be back here,’ ” Avila said. “I just looked at him.”

In Martinez’s early years after signing with the Dodgers, Avila found it more difficult to look.

After two pro seasons, Martinez was 8-9 with a 3.98 earned-run average and nearly as many walks, 86, as strikeouts, 120. And he was losing weight.

Martinez was embarrassed, and Avila was frustrated.

“I used to hate to look at myself in the clubhouse,” Martinez said. “I would look at other people and see how skinny I was, and I felt real bad.”

Said Avila, “I finally said, ‘Enough!’ When Martinez came home after that second year, I knew something had to be done.”

So, in the winter after the 1986 season, in an effort to ensure that he ate better meals, Avila ordered Martinez to spend more time in the Dodgers’ academy or at the homes of coaches. He put him on a supplementary diet of vitamins and milkshakes. And he ordered him not to touch a ball.

“That was the hardest part, not pitching,” Martinez said. “Each winter, I want to pitch, but they say no. I understand, because I want to gain weight.”

In the spring of 1987, shortly after Martinez had ended his winter regimen and reported to Dodgertown, Avila got a phone call.

“One of the coaches told me that he was throwing 90 m.p.h.,” Avila recalled. “I could not believe it.”

The truth was confirmed that season when Martinez went 16-5 with a 2.17 ERA for Vero Beach. He was protected on the Dodgers’ roster and was pitching in Los Angeles at the end of 1988.

After that he had one more hurdle to overcome. He had to figure out a way to break into the Dodger pitching rotation.

He thought he had accomplished that on June 4, 1989, when he was recalled from triple-A Albuquerque. In keeping with his boyish enthusiasm, he brought six suitcases, figuring he had made the team.

The next day, he shut out the Atlanta Braves, winning the first game of a doubleheader, 7-0. Hours later, the Dodgers sent him back to Albuquerque.

Turns out, they had recalled him only because they needed an arm for the doubleheader after having played a 22-inning game in Houston two days earlier, followed by a 13-inning game. But he did not understand.

“I go back to my hotel that night, and I wonder, ‘Why me?’ ” Martinez said. “I was so upset, I cried. I wondered what it would take for me to make it here.”

That is the thing that has impressed many about Martinez.

He is not reluctant to cry. He is not reluctant to marvel at his own accomplishments, which last season included a league-leading 12 complete games and 223 strikeouts, second in the league behind David Cone’s 233.

He is certainly not reluctant to pitch. He tried to play for an all-star team in Japan after the season. The 234 1/3 innings he had pitched during the season, however, had taxed his arm, and he developed a sore shoulder.

“I didn’t pitch for two months, and now I feel fine,” Martinez said.

And, oh yes, the kid from Mano Guayabo is also not reluctant to stare down Jose Canseco.

It is this trait, perhaps born of naivete, that has most endeared him to the Dodgers and made him this year’s probable opening-day starter in Atlanta April 9.

“For whatever reason, the guy just isn’t scared of anything,” teammate Tim Belcher marveled.

And so it went on July 9 in the All-Star game in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. With runners on first and second and two out in the third inning of a scoreless game, Martinez found himself facing Canseco.

On one pitch he brushed Canseco back. On another, he fooled the American League’s most dangerous hitter into a lunging miss. Then, after running the count to 3-2, he threw several fastballs that Canseco barely fouled off before enticing him to hit a weak grounder that ended the inning.

“I threw Canseco my best stuff--it was like, ‘Here, hit it if you can,’ ” Martinez said. “Bam, bam, bam . . . I just kept putting it in there. So what if he gets me? I was going after him.”

His eyes lit up. He was talking loud now, louder than most in Los Angeles have ever heard him.

“It was great, really great,” he said. “My best stuff against his best stuff. I think it was the most fun I’ve ever had.”

He was standing outside his new house. He had picked up some of the gravel from the street, and he was throwing it, bam, bam, bam, bouncing it off his outer wall in time to the salsa music.