BASEBALL: JAYS’ BIG CATCH TURNS INTO ICON
Jays shied away from signing him as free agent in 2010 but now he’s a central figure
MONTREAL — If Russell Martin had become a Toronto Blue Jay in the winter of 2010, when they first considered signing him as a free agent, he would not have been ready for this.
Cast as an icon — Canadian star comes home to play for Canada’s team and inspire Canada’s kids — he would have squirmed. The man who wears a mask on the field would have had to wear one off it as well.
“It would’ve been like a facade,” he says.
Back then, Martin was vaguely uncomfortable in his own skin. He had partied hard as a member of the Dodgers, living on The Strip in Los Angeles. He was not taking care of himself. He was still a splendid catcher, but his offence had started to sag. And he was coming off a hip injury that not only scared the daylights out of him for a time but also scared off several teams — the Jays included — who showed fleeting interest in offering him a contract.
He admits he was no role model.
“If we go back in time five years, I don’t feel like I’m where I need to be,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m doing things the right way yet. I’ve evolved tremendously in the past five years.” Now, he says, he is ready. Canadian exemplar for Canadian kids? Bring it on.
They will bring it on in droves this weekend. Back in the city Martin calls home, 90,000 fans will flock over two days to Olympic Stadium, where he watched his first big league games, and they will stand and roar in appreciation when his name is announced before the Blue Jays play their final two exhibition games of the spring against the Cincinnati Reds.
Playing in the Big O will be a dream-come-true homecoming for Martin. The dream started here in Montreal, when he was two years old and his dad put a bat in his hands, and he looked like a natural.
He also never lacked for confidence. When it was time to join a team, he skipped T-ball.
“T-ball would’ve been a joke,” he says. “I would’ve hit a homer every time.”
The Dodgers drafted him in 2002 as a third baseman out of Chipola (Fla.) College, where he and Jose Bautista were teammates for a year. But the Dodgers had slugger Adrian Beltre to play third, and Beltre definitely could pick it with anybody. After Martin’s first pro season in the minors, the Dodgers sent him to the fall instructional league with their other prospects, and one day, remembering that he’d caught occasionally in college, they asked him to don the gear and catch a 6-foot-4, 315-pound right-hander in the bullpen.
“It was like a test: come and try out as a catcher real quick,” he recalls. “We had this guy Jumbo Diaz. They said, ‘He throws 100 miles an hour. See if you can catch him.’ It’s good velocity, but I’d caught guys throwing 96. I’m like, ‘OK, no problem.’ I’m back there — pop, pop, pop — just sticking everything. And they’re like, ‘This kid can really do it.’ ”
The Dodgers asked him to stick with it. They didn’t need a third baseman.
But somebody always needs a catcher.
“They sold me on the idea that it was going to be my quickest way to The Show,” he says.
The Dodgers called him up in May 2006 when their regular catcher suffered a wrist injury. Martin took the job and kept it. The catcher he replaced was Dioner Navarro. When Martin signed a five-year, $82-million US contract with the Jays last November, he deposed Navarro again.
In his first four years with the Dodgers, Martin averaged 143 games, a rare achievement for a catcher of modern vintage. But the catching grind and the L.A. nightlife were taking their toll. And, he admits now, he often drank too much.
“Oh, absolutely,” he says. “It became like a routine. I had a hard time going to sleep and I had a couple drinks and I thought they would help me go to sleep. That’s probably not the truth but that was the routine. Play your butt off in the game and then go have fun.”
But in August 2010, he tore up his hip joint on an awkward play at the plate as he tried to score from third base. Martin was initially told — incorrectly — that he had a “Bo Jackson injury.” He was 27, and he was scared. Jackson’s injury, which happened during an NFL game, led to him having a hip replacement and hastened the end of his playing days in football and baseball.
“When the game gets taken away from you, you don’t feel invincible any more,” he says.
That injury, along with the wariness of the Dodgers and other clubs to risk a payroll bump on him, nudged Martin in a new direction.
Since leaving the Dodgers, first for two years with the Yankees, then two more with the Pirates, he has became meticulous about his nutrition, sleep habits and conditioning.
His research led him to muscle-- activation therapy, which, among other things, has strengthened parts of his body that were skewed by the fallout from his hip injury.
At 32, his body is sculpted and he feels better, both physically and mentally, than he has in almost a decade.
Along the way, Martin has become one of the best — and best- paid — catchers in the game. Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos softened him up by waving the Maple Leaf — “one nation, one team,” as Martin recalls the pitch — and then sealed the deal by adding a fifth year, one more than the Cubs and Dodgers offered.
Martin is a Blue Jay because of the money and the contract terms. “You want to go normally where you’re valued the most,” he says, putting it deftly.
But he admits that he also warmed to the Anthopoulos leitmotif: Come home, help lead your nation’s team to the promised land and be a role model too.
Now, he says, it feels right.