Yankees’ hero is home to regroup
retreated to Montreal to catch some time with family and friends, and to think about his future in baseball
“I used to joke … if we had signed with the Expos, maybe we could have saved baseball in Montreal.”
YANKEES CATCHER RUSSELL MARTIN
Dressed in black, Russell Martin all but sneaked out of the clubhouse at Comerica Park on Oct. 18, the ache of a toosudden, season-ending loss just starting to take hold.
As he walked past an open door in the hallway, manager Joe Girardi’s voice beckoned him inside. Martin slowly changed course and veered into the office.
“Hey, Russ,” Girardi said. “I just wanted to thank you. You gave it everything you had.”
Martin was unsure what to say.
“I’m sorry, Skip,” he managed to mumble. “I’m sorry.”
It was a blanket apology for the loss, and for his own shortage of hits over the previous eight games, the final four of which amounted to a shattering sweep by the Detroit Tigers in the American League Championship Series.
“Don’t say that,” Girardi snapped. “Don’t say it. You did everything you could.”
Martin had done a lot — if not always with his bat, then behind the plate. He had hit a ninth-inning home run in the first game of the postseason off Baltimore Orioles closer Jim Johnson. And he had also caught C.C. Sabathia’s 121-pitch masterpiece in Game 5 of the series against the Orioles.
But he batted only .161 over the course of the postseason.
He caught all but the last two innings of the Yankees’ 88 postseason innings. That included a streak when he caught every inning of five playoff games in five straight days, three of which went at least 12 innings. The 55 innings in five consecutive days established a postseason record.
“And what people didn’t know is how banged up he is,” Girardi said of Martin. “Both of his thumbs were jammed. He could barely hold the bat.”
After their brief meeting, Martin and Girardi hugged quickly, and then Martin resumed his slow march out to the tunnel below the stadium, with the celebrations from the Tigers’ victory still echoing from above, and he boarded the team bus.
The ensuing ride, a 30-minute trek from downtown Detroit north to the suburb of Birmingham, Mich., made no impression on Martin at all. When it was over, he could not remember where he sat, who sat next to him, what he listened to on his headphones, or what he saw out the window.
“It’s a blank,” he said several days later in a coffee shop in his hometown, Montreal. “I don’t remember anything from that ride at all.”
Back in New York, Martin, who had rented an apartment in the same Manhattan building as Andruw Jones, rode home from the airport in the passenger seat of Jones’s car. Jones was the last Yankee teammate he would see.
For the next three days, Martin hibernated, doing little more than sleeping, watching television and playing video games, allowing his mind to not think for a change.
“The next day he began packing his stuff, and on the evening of Oct. 23 he drove north of the border to his hometown. His companion on the drive was Ivan Naccarata, a former New York Mets farmhand with whom he forged a lasting friendship at their Montreal high school.
Six hours later they were home, in Montreal, where Martin goes after each base- ball season to visit family and friends and unwind in one of the world’s more cosmopolitan cities, and an underrated bastion of baseball.
There is a side of Martin that shines in Montreal. It is his town, from Longue-Pointe to St. Laurent Blvd. and Old Montreal, where he owns a condominium that his father, Russell Martin Sr., now lives in. It is the town where he grew up, went to high school and spoke French daily.
It is also the city where he honed his baseball skills and watched Expos games at Olympic Stadium. As a senior in high school in 1999, he tacked a poster on his bedroom wall depicting a pro- posed new downtown baseball stadium, the one that was never built for the team that no longer exists.
“It was my dream to play in that stadium,” Martin said. “I used to joke with Ivan, if we had signed with the Expos, maybe we could have saved baseball in Montreal. Maybe we would be playing here right now.” Martin was joking. Sort of. Martin was drafted by the Expos as a third baseman in the 35th round of the 2000 draft. Naccarata was drafted by Montreal five rounds later. Both were insulted.
“In my mind, I was a firstround draft pick,” Martin said. “I was like, how can these people not see it? I wasn’t going in the 35th round.”
Instead, Martin went on to Chipola Junior College in Florida. But had he signed with Montreal, and soared through its system as he would with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he might have become a local hero in Montreal, perhaps popular enough to draw enough fans to build that stadium, and keep the team where it was born. Or so he thinks, with a wink and a smile.
By the time Martin made it to the big leagues with the Dodgers in 2006, the Expos had been the Washington Nationals for more than a year.
Now, as the sun went down in Old Montreal in late October, Martin might have been the only major-leaguer in town. Dressed in grey slacks and a dark blue pullover sweater, he hopped back into his car and made the mile drive to a trendy Italian restaurant called Buonanotte. There he ran into the father of a close friend, received a hug from a manager who knew him and settled in at the bar to half watch Game 1 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Tigers.
Because of the lockout in the NHL, the Canadiens, Martin’s favourite team, were not playing. Watching baseball was hard.
“No hockey is killing me,” he said.
The next substantive meeting for Martin, other than his brief exchange with Girardi, would be with Matt Colleran, his agent, as they plot and strategize Martin’s future in free agency.
The Yankees would like to have Martin as their catcher. But Martin may interest other teams, too.
From mid-February, when he reported for spring training, until Oct. 18, Martin had been fully engaged both mentally and physically in the most demanding position in baseball. Eight straight months of preparation, execution, concentration, joy, expectation, dejection and exhaustion.
Fighting the fight for 248 days.
“It’s been a grind,” Martin said in the cool night air of Montreal. “I need a vacation.”