Russell Martin endures long road to become catcher

Revue de presse

By Everett Cook, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, le 8 août 2013

Russell Martin's professional catching career began with a man named Jumbo and almost ended on a slider to the groin.

It was 2002 in the Los Angeles Dodgers' instructional fall league. Martin was a man without a major league position, seen as not quick enough for shortstop, not powerful enough for third base. Off of a tip from Martin's college coach, the Dodgers decided to try him out at catcher.

Photo ci-dessus : Russell Martin: "I love Pittsburgh. The people are down to earth, hard-working. It reminds me of Montreal. This reminds me more of where I come from ..." (Peter Diana/Post-Gazette)

The first bullpen session went about as perfectly as Martin could have imagined. He was catching a man named Jumbo Diaz, who weighed more than 300 pounds and threw close to triple digits without much command. For 20 minutes in a squat, Martin caught almost everything with a resounding pop from his mitt. He felt good. The Dodgers felt good.

Next up was Mike Keirstead, who threw in the mid-90s with movement. On the fifth pitch, Keirstead gave Martin a sign he didn't understand. A slider was coming in his way, unbeknownst to the new catcher.

The pitch came in fast and hard, clipping the Montreal native's thumb and hitting him in a spot not ideal for a man to be hit by a baseball. For 20 seconds, writhing on the ground, Martin said to himself, "I'm done. I'm never catching ever again. I'm retiring right now."

He laughs about it now, mainly because the switch worked out. Eight years into an All-Star career, moving to catcher might have been the best thing to happen to this first-year Pirates player.

It was a long, tough journey, one that started with a baby, a tennis ball, and a dad with the perfect work schedule.

John Coltrane
Russell Martin Sr. and his brothers were watching TV while his 11/2-year-old son, Russell Martin Jr., sat on the floor in front of him. A tennis ball the brothers were playing with got away and began bouncing in front of the baby. Bounce ... bounce ...

Before the ball hit the floor a third time, the infant grabbed it out of the air.

After that, it was just a matter of honing that natural hand-eye coordination. Martin had a bat in his hands at 2 and spent much of his childhood on the baseball diamond with his dad, whose life and schedule worked perfectly for the tutelage.

Martin Sr. is a sax player, and a good one. He would wake up early and go to the Montreal subways, playing for crowds of people on their way to work before hurrying back to go to the field with his son. Almost 20 years later, Martin still remembers the point values of the games that the two used to play. Five points for hitting the ball, three points for hitting the tee.

After working on the diamond, Martin Sr. would go back to the subways for people returning home from work. He played the saxophone during rush hours, with baseball in between, devoting his free time to his child with the middle name of his hero, John Coltrane. The saxophone is a hard instrument to master, but as Martin says, "it comes from the soul."

In third and fourth grade, Martin moved from Montreal to live in Paris with his mom and step-dad, which had some unintended side effects.

"I gained about 20 pounds from eating pastries and stuff every morning stopping at the corner bakery," Martin said, laughing. "I'd crush two to three croissants in the morning and then on the way back home I'd crush one or two more. My dad was so heated when he saw me in the summer."

There was no baseball in Paris, no games with his dad. His beacon became the summer and those lessons with his dad turned coach.

"I definitely missed him a whole bunch but I knew that once summer came I was going to go back and play baseball and hang out with my dad," he said. "If I had baseball taken away from me completely for two years, I would have been miserable. Just knowing that baseball was right around the corner helped me get through it."

Weathering storms
After graduating from Polyvalente Edouard-Montpetit -- an athletics-based high school in Montreal -- Martin wanted to attend a two-year university in the United States. He didn't know much about the American school system, so his main requirement was that it was somewhere warm so he could play baseball year-round.

Along with two other Canadian teammates, Martin discovered Chipola College in Marianna, Fla., one of the best junior college programs in the nation.

He played six positions as the super-utility man, including 12 games at catcher toward the end of his final year in Florida. Before the Dodgers drafted Martin in the 17th round of the 2002 draft, Jeff Johnson, his college coach, told Los Angeles scouts that Martin's only path to the major leagues might be at catcher.

Turns out, he was right.

"I just felt like, with his skill set, his competitiveness and his great hands, his gamesmanship and all that, he had a chance to be one of those guys," Johnson said. "Would I tell you that he would be in the big leagues a couple years after I said that? No. I didn't think that would happen."

That doesn't mean the transition was seamless. Martin estimates it took him 21/2 years to truly feel comfortable with the new position, having to work heavily with Dodgers coaches to learn one of the toughest positions in baseball at one of its highest levels. Jon Debus, who was the Dodgers catching coordinator and now works in the New York Mets organization, said the two had to "weather some storms together" while learning arguably the most important position in baseball. If a catcher has a bad day, a lot of people have a bad day. The transition was frustrating at times, but according to Debus, the smartest thing they did was stick with him even when Martin's catching future looked bleak. Not every catching prospect gets that patience.

Martin spent four years in the minors before making the jump to Los Angeles in 2006. He finished in the top 10 of the National League Rookie of the Year voting that year, less than two years after he began to feel fully comfortable in a squat.

"You don't want a guy that isn't going to do his homework and work for his pitching staff and be respected -- that's so hard to teach, you've got to have that," Debus said. "If you don't have that, you aren't going to be catching for very long. That's an important piece of the puzzle. All the good teams have that guy. The Pirates now have that guy."

At home in Pittsburgh
Pirates starter Jeff Locke had lasted just four innings July 31 at PNC Park while giving up four runs and 10 hits against Central Division rival St. Louis Cardinals, but the Pirates had chipped away and tied the score in the fifth inning. The new pitcher was Tony Watson, who gave up a single in the seventh inning. The next batter reached on an error. Tie score, runners on first and second, one out. Martin went to the mound, talked things through and calmed down his pitcher, then retreated back to a squat.

Watson got a groundout and then ended the inning on a strikeout, preserving the tie. In the eighth with a runner on second, Martin took a pitch low in the zone and shot it back through the center of the infield, just out of the reach of the shortstop. His RBI single scored the go-ahead run and was the difference in a 5-4 win.

In 2012, Pirates catchers threw out 19 baserunners. They were the worst in the major leagues in stolen-base percentage and had the lowest non-pitching batting average on the team. By all statistical measures, they were awful.

In the offseason, the Pirates signed Martin away from the Yankees on a two-year, $17 million deal. Signing a player away from New York isn't cheap -- Martin makes up about 11 percent of the Pirates payroll this year and was the biggest free-agent signing in franchise history.

And yet, Martin leads the majors in batters caught stealing with 25. He's sixth in the majors in stolen-base percentage and in the top 10 on the team in batting average, hitting .251 with a .356 on-base percentage.

The Pirates finished 13th in baseball in ERA in 2012 -- they are first this year. Not all of that should be credited to Martin, but his presence and knack for pitch framing certainly has helped calm a pitching staff that has weathered transition, injuries and youth.

Martin has been catching for more than 10 years now but still views shortstop as his natural position. That's what he played growing up in Montreal and what he wanted to play for Team Canada in the World Baseball Classic earlier this year before team officials and the Pirates squashed the idea.

"If I put on a different jersey and took off my mask and went out there right now, I would look like a shortstop if people didn't know who I was," Martin said. "People think that because I play catcher I can't play shortstop, but I don't consider myself a typical catcher."

The signing of the atypical catcher made a lot of sense for the Pirates and for Martin. Los Angeles was too laid back, New York was too frantic, but Pittsburgh is like home, Montreal.

In a city with a blue-collar reputation, Martin is fitting right in.

"I love Pittsburgh," Martin said. "The people are down to earth, hard-working. It reminds me of Montreal. This reminds me more of where I come from, as far as the working class. They grind it out."

Revue de presse publiée par Jacques Lanciault.