Chasing Pedro

Nearly two decades ago, the pursuit of an exclusive with the Dominican ace pitcher finally paid off

Franklin welcomed me and Corey at the Oz gates near the main road in Manoguayabo.

Almost three years earlier, in late 2004, I had waited outside these same Dominican compound doors with a freelance photographer, hoping that Pedro Martinez would appear. The Red Sox ace, fresh off of slaying the Yankees and ending Boston’s 86-year title drought, was a free agent then, and the intel the Daily News and everyone else in the media was getting pointed to a Pedro landing in Queens with the Mets.

But the hours-long stakeout ended with nada. No Petey sightings. The only consolation of that Dominican trip – my first – was finding a random advertisement in one of the local newspapers that announced a David Ortiz scheduled appearance in a Santo Domingo hotel conference room to celebrate the Sox 2004 World Series title. I went to the hotel the evening of the event, and despite a two-hour delay, Big Papi showed up to an SRO crowd. “Mi gente, mi gente (My people),” he said in Spanish, while the local Dominican media and fans erupted over and over. Ortiz even gave me a few choice quotes at the end, in English, about Pedro and the Yankees. Oddly, the New York desk didn’t end up using that nugget.

A couple months later, after he was officially a Met, I was back in Santo Domingo for a Pedro appearance at the club’s Dominican academy. I didn’t schedule a photographer before the trip — and was lambasted for the flub — so when I got to Santo Domingo, the New York photo editors set me up with a stringer based in the D.R. The day of the Pedro event, that photographer was a half hour late meeting me, and once we were at the academy, he missed the money photo of Pedro pulling up in a yellow Ferrari. It was me from the Daily News and Chris Smith from New York magazine, and we both got a combined 10 minutes with Pedro before the Mets cut off access. Fabulous.

Over the next two years, I interviewed Martinez dozens of times, and even did a story from his D.R. hometown the day he pitched in one of the Subway Series games back in New York.

But after he missed the Mets’ 2006 postseason run due to rotator cuff surgery, I made it a mission to try and get an exclusive sit-down with him during his recovery, and preferably in his home country. It was a revolving door of requests, one that would bounce from Pedro’s agent to Pedro’s cousin to the Mets’ PR chief Jay Horwitz and back to Pedro’s agent. At the end of 2006, I started to make some headway, and by then was dealing directly with Franklin, the cousin. “We should be able to make it work,” was his choice phrase. A month later, in January 2007, the details started to fall into place. Corey and I would meet at the Pedro compound on set day in early February, and an interview would follow.

Like any arrangement with VIPs, athletes or otherwise, I would believe it when it was actually happening, but until then, there was plenty of time for the other shoe to drop. Before I left for the D.R., there was a PR event with David Wright at a Hickey Freeman clothing store in midtown Manhattan. After talking with Wright about spring training and the end of the 2006 season, I slipped in that I was going to interview Pedro in the next couple of days. “Really?” said Wright. “How’d you swing that?”

The morning of the interview, I was stressing in the hotel room, certain there would be a last-minute cancellation. Corey and I took off in our rental toward Manoguayabo on the early side. It’s about a 45-minute drive from the center of Santo Domingo to Manoguayabo without traffic. Then again, in the D.R., there is rarely no traffic.

Driving in the Dominican is not for the faint of heart. Whether it’s dodging Mopeds carrying an entire family, avoiding window-washing gangs, or confronting traffic clusters the size of a small town at major intersections, there is no shortage of stressful conditions. Navigating an intersection is like a real-life version of “Frogger.”

We arrived at the Pedro compound a little early, and with a few more gray hairs on our heads, and parked on the side of the road. We waited. And waited. After about an hour past our scheduled meet time, I began to stress again. Then the giant gates magically opened, and out popped Franklin with a grin on his face. “Pedro’s not quite ready,” he said. Instead, Franklin took us on a walking tour of the compound, including a stop at what looked like a waste disposal site. Franklin indicated that this was his burgeoning side business in renewable energy. Didn’t have that on the bingo card.

Eventually we followed him back toward Santo Domingo in our car, and were led to the home of Ramón Martinez, Pedro’s elder brother and former teammate on the Dodgers and Red Sox. We sat in a gym affixed to Ramon’s home.

“What’s up Chris?” Pedro said as he strolled in a few moments later.

(Carolina (l.) and Pedro Martinez, and me, in Santo Domingo in 2007. Photo courtesy Corey Sipkin)

Pedro, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless Nike T-shirt, switched on some salsa music after the handshakes, and for the next couple hours, he hit the stationary bike and lifted weights, dished on his training regimen and rehab, the Mets and how much longer he wanted to pitch. “I’m not going to go over 40,” he said. His wife Carolina stopped by for a visit and chat, and Pedro’s agent, Fern Cuza, also made a cameo, and got in a quick workout himself.

No 10-minute conversation limits this time around.

At one point, we got to talking about Martinez’s near perfecto in 1995, when he was with the Expos, and how San Diego’s Bip Roberts broke up the perfect game in the 10th inning. Another moment, Pedro gushed about Albert Belle, a renowned ogre in media circles, and how at one All-Star Game, the fearsome slugger bought Martinez a beer one night and said, “You’re alright little man.”

The conversation probably would have drifted to Don Zimmer and the two heated ALCS (2003-04) with the Yankees had Martinez kept talking, but we wanted to honor his time and our agreement. There was one of those surreal moments where I stepped outside the gym at one point to call New York, and thought to myself: Is this really happening?

By the time the story ran (five pages in a weekday edition, unheard of back in the era when print still ruled), on Wednesday Feb. 7, I was already back in New York. I remember walking around SoHo that morning, checking a newsstand (when that was still a thing) and seeing the back page exclusive. There was a buzz at the office later that day – the New York Times sports editor had called my News sports editor Leon Carter to ask how we had scored Pedro one-on-one. And Sandy Padwe, a professor at my alma mater, the Columbia J-School, called to invite me to speak at his class.

When I called Jay Horwitz later that week to thank him for his help, he stopped me mid-sentence. “Thank you, Christian, you did all my work for me.”

Martinez would pitch in five games total that season, but his return was not enough to help the club in its late-season choke, which resulted in no playoff berth. The following season, 2008, was Martinez’s last with the Mets. He made 20 starts and had new teammate and fellow ace, Johan Santana, but the Mets missed the playoffs again.

He played in the 2009 World Baseball Classic, and then signed with the Phillies mid-season, helping them to a second straight World Series appearance. It was Pedro’s swan song in the majors, but this time, he didn’t get the brass ring. He was 37 by then, and had a promise to keep.