A Simple Solution: Give Ramon the Ball

Baseball has a name for a guy like him. He’s “the Stopper.” The guy who applies a tourniquet to the bleeding in the nick of time. He’s Horatio at the bridge. The Sheriff. Part John Wayne, part Dr. Kildare. The team’s lifeboat in a wreck. The difference.

On the Dodgers, that’s Ramon Martinez. Time and again this year when a rout seemed imminent, the staff seemed galleyed, the hitters in retreat, Ramon took the mound and stopped it. Rallied them around him. Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run. The Rock.

Ramon is 17-7 this season. He’s 9-1 since the All-Star break. Every time the Dodgers looked as if they were in panic, trying to look over both shoulders at once, Martinez calmed them down. Threw oil on troubled waters.

Meanwhile, of course, the cameras were all trained on the Japanese import, the most famous one since the Toyota. The headlines were all about Nomomania, not Ramonomania.

But when the Dodgers absolutely needed a win, when the center was not holding, they gave the ball to Ramon. He is their anchor. He plugs the leak.

His numbers are not gaudy--an earned-run average of 3.66, four complete games out of 30 started, 138 strikeouts (vs. Nomo’s 225). But as of the final weekend, he was third in the National League in victories and innings pitched.

He threw a no-hitter, he held the opposition to a measly .231 batting average. And he kept the Dodgers dodging--disaster, that is.

Sound like a Cy Young year to you? Don’t hold your breath. Greg Maddux gets that so regularly, they should change it to the Greg Maddux Award.

And Martinez is used to being overlooked. He has been a workhorse for the Dodgers all his career. In another era, the sports scribes might start calling him “the Meal Ticket,” but meal tickets have gone the way of open trolleys. The designation belongs to another time.

He has never been the glamour pitcher of the staff. There was even some doubt he was the best in his own family. The word on Ramon when he first came up to the Dodgers, was “Great arm, no clue.”

At first, the arm was enough. When Martinez made the big club full time in 1990, he was one of those “Here, hit this!” pitchers. The batters knew what was coming. The fastball. They still couldn’t hit it. Ramon won 20 games his first full season. He led the league in pitches thrown, 3,802, he had an ERA of 2.92 and he struck out 18 Atlanta Braves one night.

He thought he could keep blowing the ball by big league hitters indefinitely. He couldn’t. No one can. Even Nolan Ryan needed a curveball.

Ramon had one. He just didn’t trust it. He worked on something his current pitching coach, Dave Wallace, calls a “slurve.” The slider. What Fresco Thompson used to call “the nickel curve. “

He won 17 games his second year. But the hitters were closing in.

He spanned the eras between Fernando Valenzuela and Hideo Nomo. The club kept dealing for the Mike Morgans and Tim Belchers and Bob Ojedas. Orel Hershiser was the ace.

Martinez persevered. A perpetually cheerful, uncomplicated man who enjoys his work and has no real need for the spotlight, he had the ideal temperament for the staff stopper. An imposing physical specimen at 6 feet 4 and 186 pounds, he was not a reassuring sight for opposing hitters.

But the art of pitching is not the art of domination. It is the art of the shell game. Give the batter what he’s looking for, and the next sound you hear will be breaking seats in center-field bleachers. Give him what he hates to see, and the next sound you hear will be the ump shouting “Yer out!”

Martinez found he needed something more than a new pitch. He needed cunning.

“Location is everything,” Ramon said as he sat in the dugout at Dodger Stadium the other evening. “It’s not how you throw it, it’s where you throw it.”

Location is a new buzzword in the grand old game. It used to be called control . Except that the new definition means more than simply not walking anybody. It means that every batter has a blind spot, and it’s up to you to find it. Then, hit it. “You pitch to where the batter has his least balance,” explains Martinez.

Baseball explains it as the difference between a thrower and a pitcher. Some guys never get the hang of it. Others pitch successfully for years without the 90-m.p.h. fastball or the forkball or even visible stuff.

The Dodgers have always had stoppers like Ramon. Don Drysdale. Don Sutton. Tall, wily, hard-throwing, dependable.

“He’s the veteran on this team. He’s been with me longer than anyone in the lineup. He’s the grand old man--and he’s only 27!” says his manager, Tom Lasorda. “He’s the hardest-working pitcher you’ll find. He never gives you a minute’s disrespect. I’ve never heard anybody ever say a bad word about Ramon. He has the confidence of his teammates and their goodwill. They hate not to help him.”

As the season winds down and uncertainties abound, the playoffs are up in the air. But if it comes down to the last game or last inning or last batter and Ramon has to make one more stop--well, he’s been there before. All year.