Pedro rips ‘bad teammate’ Fiers for whistle-blowing

Pedro Martinez is on Jessica Mendoza’s side.

The Hall of Fame hurler said recently that Mike Fiers was in the wrong for the way he exposed the Astros’ signstealing scandal, which came via a story that ran in The Athletic after this past season.

“If he was to do it when he was playing for the Houston Astros, I would say Mike Fiers has guts,” Martinez told

WEEI Radio in Boston. “But to go and do it after you leave the Houston Astros because they don’t have you anymore, that doesn’t show me anything. You’re just a bad teammate.”

Fiers pitched three seasons with the Astros, the last of which was 2017. Fiers detailed the team’s sign-stealing plan from that World Series season, which led to an MLB investigation that ended with Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch being suspended for a year by the league, then being fired by the team. The Red Sox, for whom Martinez played from 1998-2004 and with whom he is a special assistant, are now being investigated for any misdeeds they may have committed during their 2018 championship season. Boston fired manager Alex Cora for his role in the Astros scandal as Houston’s bench coach in 2017.

Most have applauded Fiers, a starting pitcher who has been on the Tigers and Athletics since leaving Houston, for speaking out on the issue. However, Mendoza, an ESPN analyst and Mets adviser, questioned whether Fiers was breaking the clubhouse code.

“Whatever happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse, and Fiers broke the rules,” Martinez said. “I agree with cleaning up the game. I agree that the fact that the commissioner is taking a hard hand on this, but at the same time players should not be the one dropping the whistle-blower.

“If you have integrity, you find ways to tell everybody in the clubhouse, ‘Hey, we might get in trouble for this. I don’t want to be part of this.’ You call your GM. You tell him. Or you call anybody you can or MLB or someone and say, ‘I don’t want to be part of this.’ Or you tell the team, ‘Get me out of here, I don’t want to be part of this.’ Then you show me something. But if you leave Houston, and most likely you didn’t agree with Houston when you left, and then you go and drop the entire team under the bus, I don’t trust you. I won’t trust you because we did have that rule.”