Pedro Martinez was one of the most ferocious pitchers in baseball history, but he has a soft spot for nature.
Martinez, a member of TBS’s excellent MLB studio show, just signed a multi-year contract extension with TNT Sports, and spoke to Front Office Sports about his career in broadcasting—and why he loves gardening.
“I’m a gardener. I can tell you proudly—I’m a gardener,” Martinez said. “I love dealing with my gardens, growing roses, vegetables, and stuff like that. And I also love growing animals like chickens right now in my backyard. There’s a whole bunch of geese because I feed them. I feed them. I shouldn’t do that, but I feed them. I just, I just love to see nature.”
Martinez attributes his love of gardening to his mother, who would invite him to garden with her as a respite from when he was fighting with his older brother, Ramon, who later became an All-Star pitcher with the Dodgers.
“My mom would just pull me aside. ‘Come here, go with me to the garden, clip my roses,’” Martinez recalled, noting that he continued to garden as a way to ease his mind throughout his professional baseball career. “What I used to do before every single game I pitched in Boston, was clip my flowers when I woke up, before I went to the field, and then head over,” said Martinez, who won one World Series with the Red Sox in 2004.
“That was my therapy to start every game, and get myself into the zone that I needed to actually go and pitch. Gardening. You would never guess that one.”
Martinez estimated he has “over 1,000” chickens, and revealed that he lives almost entirely off the food he raises on his land in the Dominican Republic. “I like to eat organic. I produce literally everything I eat in the Dominican,” he said. “My mom is a farmer. I have the land to produce whatever I want and I enjoy it. So I have my uncles, my cousins, everybody that knows how to work it, working with it. When I’m not there, they keep growing whatever I left. And I try to eat organic from the things that I grow.”
The Hall of Famer, who played from 1992 to 2009, also finds peace out on the ocean. “I go deep-sea fishing on the open [water] where nobody can reach me, and not even [by] phone,” he said. “I disconnect every time I feel like I’m stressed out.”
When TBS starts airing the NLDS this Saturday, Martinez will be flanked by host Adam Lefkoe and fellow analysts Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins He admitted that he “never” thought he would work in media, but that he’s kept it up because he’s enamored with the people he’s working with in Atlanta and it gives him a chance to stay connected with the sport he loves.
“The only reason I’m doing it is because they put me in that position where I could feel comfortable. I could express myself, whether it was in English or Spanish,” Martinez said. “I’ve been able to do that, and the fact that they allow me to be me in my own skin and feel so comfortable is probably why I decided to just stay here.”
He praised the people he works with both behind and in front of the camera. “We treat each other like brothers,” Martinez, who joined the TBS crew in 2013, said.
Asked about the toughest hitters he ever faced, Martinez pointed to players like Edgar Martinez, Barry Bonds, and Derek Jeter, who worked long at-bats with foul balls and a keen eye.
“Edgar Martinez—I got him out. By the numbers, I did really well. But man, every at -bat was just, you know, the ability that only guys like him, Barry Bonds, and Jeter, had the ability to foul off pitches. And I hated that because I wanted … to finish what I started.”
Having 10-12-pitch at-bats would cause Martinez to be “worn out” by the seventh inning, he said. “Barry Bonds was that guy that you just go, ‘How am I going to get him out?’” Martinez recalled. “Let me just make pitches all over the place. Never the same speed. Never the same pitch. Never the same location. And hope that he will go after one of them and hit it right at someone.”
