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Russell Martin is ready to show Toronto, the Blue Jays and Canada the kind of player — and man — he is
If Russell Martin had become a 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 façade,” 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 bigleague 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 Tball.
“T-ball would’ve been a joke,” he says. “I would’ve hit a homer every time.” Martin is a man who likes to talk in tales, and when he is asked about his earliest memory, he tells the story of the training wheels. He was not yet three years old. His parents had separated and moved to the Montreal area from the Toronto borough of East York where he was born.
He remembers the photo of the boy and the bike with the training wheels, and how he hated them.
“I remember throwing a fit,” he says with a smile. “I just knew that I could do it. I had the training wheels on for maybe 10 minutes, and then I got angry and had them take them off, and I just took off without the training wheels. That was my attitude. I always had some kind of stubbornness. ‘If you don’t think I can do something, I’m going to show you I can do it.’ ”
The attitude persists. (Look who’s catching R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball now.) His father, Russell Sr., the subway saxophonist, encouraged it. His dad coached him, nicknamed him Tiger, threw badminton birds for him to hit with a broomstick to build handeye co-ordination and coaxed coaches to let his seven-yearold play on a team of 11- and 12-year-olds.
He remembers the very first game he played on that team. Especially ‘The Throw.’ He tells the story with gusto, as if it happened yesterday in a major-league stadium instead of a Montreal sandlot.
“They put me out in right field where all the little kids go,” he says. “First ball, a guy crushes one, and there’s no fence, so the ball goes all the way into a kids’ park with swings and stuff. I’m not quitting on the ball. I run and I grab it, and the kid’s running around the bases, and I throw a bullet. It doesn’t make it on the fly or anything, but I throw it hard and firm, and the catcher’s just standing at home plate. He kind of quit on the play because he sees a little kid in right field and figures the play’s over. I throw it and it hits around first base, and it rolls hard, and it goes in between the catcher’s legs and the guy slides in safely. So if the catcher was paying attention, we would’ve had an out. And that’s when everybody went, ‘What the heck just happened?’ ”
He was swinging a bat at as a toddler, and his strong throwing arm became evident not long after that. Eventually it was one of the reasons he became a catcher, which happened after he was convinced he was born to be a shortstop, and then a third baseman.
“When they made me a catcher, I felt like I was taking a step back,” he says. “I was gifted at third. I felt like I could pick it with anybody. Seriously.” 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 fiveyear, US$82-million 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.
He missed the last two months of the season. For eight weeks, he could not put weight on his right leg. He hated crutches, so he bought a Segway. Training wheels.
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.
“I just started taking pride in taking care of myself,” he says.
“I’m more conscious about routine, more understanding about what the grind is, and my mentality is that I’m going to dominate the grind. I’m not going to let it wear on me. I’m going to be ready. And last year was my best year. I did everything right: nutrition, my program, my workout. I understand everything I need to do now to be consistent all the way through the year.” 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.
Let’s not get carried away by sentiment; Martin is a Blue Jay because of the money and the contract term. “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. “Now I feel like I can be a role model because I feel like I do things the right way,” he says. “I’m confident in that. Five years ago? You can talk about being a role model, but you don’t really feel like you’re a role model when you don’t believe it yourself. If you don’t feel like you’re doing things right, it’s hard to take on that role.”
In their due diligence, the Jays knew about the arc of Martin’s career, on and off the field. They also saw a player who had gone to the playoffs in seven of his nine seasons, who helped transform the forlorn Pirates into winners, who is one of the game’s best defensive catchers and brings out the best in pitchers, be they veterans or kids. Given the pressure to win now, and the team’s blend of old reliables and fresh new faces, they saw in Martin a potential tipping point toward October.
All of that, and Canadian too.