Preparation always vital for Martinez
SEATTLE — Edgar Martinez trained for every aspect of his baseball career.
As a player, he spent nearly two decades doing daily exercises to overcome strabismus, a condition that prevented his eyes from seeing in tandem. Rather than letting that become an excuse that kept him out of the sport, Martinez became arguably the best right-handed hitter of his generation and the prototype for what a designated hitter can be.
As a coach, he was a meticulous planner, often one of the first in the clubhouse daily. Before taking swings during batting practice — more than a decade after his last game
— Martinez spent a week preparing.
He wasn’t about to be unprepared before putting on a show players and fellow coaches wouldn’t forget.
Why should his training and preparation be any different for his first speech as a Hall of Famer?
“I think it’s like anything — if you want to do it right and do well, you have to practice,” Martinez said. “In a way it’s true, it’s like that. You’re preparing for some performance, whether it’s hitting in a game or a speech.”
Martinez, 56, will go into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday as the first player to spend his entire MLB career with the Seattle Mariners — 18 seasons in all — and find his way to Cooperstown.
His years at the highest level of the sport were preceded by time in the minors that included parts of the 1985 and ’86 seasons with the Chattanooga Lookouts. The Lookouts, still in the Southern League but now
the Class AA affiliate for the Cincinnati Reds, will honor Martinez tonight by giving away a bobblehead of his likeness to the first 1,000 fans through the gates at AT&T Field before their 7:15 game against the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.
With the Mariners, Martinez posted statistics that are staggering yet often overlooked. Most of his career was spent tucked away in the Pacific Northwest on a team that got little notice on the national stage until the magical 1995 season, when the franchise made its first playoff appearance in dramatic fashion. He was also part of the 2001 team that included rookie Ichiro Suzuki and won 116 regular-season games, tying the MLB record and setting the American League mark.
Martinez hit .312 with 309 home runs in 2,055 career games with the Mariners. His numbers would be even more impressive if he had broken into the majors earlier — he never played more than 100 games in a single MLB season until he was 27.
“Day in and day out, he was prepared,” said former Mariners teammate Ken Griffey Jr., a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 2016. “Thirty, 40 years ago, a DH was an older guy who was on his way out but a fan favorite — they wanted to keep him around. Now it’s guys who can flat hit and get a chance to go out and play every day.
“And he made that all possible.”
Whether it’s the pride of joining the fraternity of Puerto Rican players or his affection for the only franchise he’s ever been associated with, Martinez is grateful to those who helped along the way. The fact that “a lot of people” played a role in his success will be central to an induction speech he hopes to keep to the 12 minutes requested by the Hall and ceremony officials.
“I’m close to having it just right,” Martinez said.
Tom Davidson was one of those who helped.
“We told him, ‘Give us 10 days and let’s see what you think of it,’” Davidson recalled.
Nicknamed the “eye guy” by teammates, Martinez started working with Davidson in the late 1990s. For nearly a decade, Martinez had been doing eye exercises after Dr. Douglas Nikaita diagnosed his condition.
Davidson’s technique became another step in the eye training. He developed a system using fast-moving tennis balls to help strengthen and train the eye for recognizing pitches. The training involved watching the balls, which had small numbers written on them, and trying to focus the eyes to read and recognize the numbers as they buzzed by, sometimes as fast as 150 mph.
As Martinez put it, a pitch at 95 mph doesn’t look so fast after seeing tennis balls go flying by at 130 mph or more.
“The eyes set the body up to be successful,” Davidson said. “That’s what Edgar always told me. And the longer you see the ball out of the hand and closest to the bat that you can, gives you all that time to adjust to the ball. That’s what this training was all about.”
Martinez hit .305 over his final seven seasons after first working with Davidson. He twice led the league in on-base percentage during that span and had a career-high 145 RBIs in 2000 at age 37.
Those swings during the back half of his career may not have been as impressive as what he did one day in Texas just a couple of years ago.
Scott Servais had never crossed paths with Martinez until being hired as Seattle’s manager in 2016. Martinez was the hitting coach under the previous regime and remained on staff. Other than knowing Martinez’s reputation as a hitter during the era both played, Servais rarely saw it in action — until one day in Houston during a session of early batting practice.
“We had another 20 minutes or whatever, and I said, ‘Edgar you want some?’” Servais recalled.
What happened when the man in his mid-50s stepped in?
“He threw somebody’s sweaty batting gloves on and grabbed their bat and got in there, and about the third or fourth swing he’s peppering them off the wall out there and up on the train tracks,” Servais said. “You never forget those types of things.”
What Servais may not have known was that Martinez had spent time in the batting cage for about a week, watching pitches and taking a few swings. He wasn’t about to be unprepared.
“I did have some practice,” he said. “It’s excitement about it. In a way, a little bit of adrenaline, too. It was fun. It was fun to do it. I’m not ready to do it again.”