Pedro Martinez’s impact in Boston goes far beyond just the Red Sox.
I went looking for Pedro Martinez in Jamaica Plain.
This neighborhood in the geographic heart of Boston is and always has been a battlefield. It’s a place that redefines itself from one block to the next, from one year to the next. In the east, it’s a post-industrial jumble of warehouses, body shops, and empty lots waiting to be turned into six-story condos with rooftop patios. There’s a river buried under ground here; I’ve heard that it once powered more breweries-per-square-mile than anywhere else on Earth, but that sounds like the type of statistic no one’s ever actually calculated.
In the north, you’ll find triple-deckers, public housing projects, and foreign money transfer services. This is the historic heart of Caribbean Boston, where the city’s first Dominican community arose before stretching all over the region to become one of the largest immigrant blocs in the greater metro area. Locals began referring to the neighborhood as Jamaica Spain; City Hall went with the more urbane Latin Quarter.
Head west and you’ll find yourself in a leafy oasis filled with single-family homes that could rightly be called mansions. Stand at just the right spot where church steeples peek over stately Victorians and you can convince yourself that you’re in the Berkshires. There’s an honest-to-goodness working farm here, and a bucolic pond where yuppies gather for sunset yoga. Wealthy Bostonians built summer homes along the lake at the turn of the century; one of them was James Michael Curley, the combative political boss who once had a mayoral term interrupted by a stay in a federal jail cell. When Curley built his lake house (free of charge, courtesy of builders who were hoping to land lucrative city contracts) he made sure to prominently display shamrocks on the shutters in order to let the old guard of Boston know that the Irish were here to stay.
All of these different and ever-changing versions of JP converge at Centre Street, the buzzing commercial strip that winds through the heart of the neighborhood. Empanada shops sit next to pubs named after Irish poets, which sit next to farm-to-table bistros and dog groomers. This is where the battle of the neighborhood is fought, with the various communities vying for space and a right to call this place home. It’s fought mostly by people with good intentions, but the fact that the old Hi-Lo Foods in Hyde Square (once the biggest Latin grocery store in the city) is now a Whole Foods tells you who’s winning.
Photo by Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
This is Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood that explains modern Boston. And when he came to this city in 1998, this is where the man we still call The Right Arm of God chose to live.
I remember the flags as much as I remember anything else.
Fenway Park is a dynamic, living place. Like the city it has anchored for over 100 years, it’s constantly in a state of change, never any one thing for more than a few years at a time. Over the decades it has cycled through phases as a dump, singles bar, overpriced tourist trap, museum, and more. It’s been the site of riots, vaccination clinics, and the final campaign speech ever delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Frank Sinatra opened the proceedings that day with a rendition of America the Beautiful). It’s been burned to the ground and rebuilt, and then rebuilt again. It’s been both loved and loathed, both family friendly and dangerous.
In the ‘90s, Fenway was a dump. The bathrooms still had urinal troughs. Games were interrupted by power outages. The grounds crew had experience shoveling dead fish out of the dugouts after hard rains.
Fenway was a grumpy and cynical place back then, with similar vibes as you’d find in a half-empty bar at two in the afternoon. The Red Sox were closing in on their eighth consecutive decade without a World Series championship. The best infielder in team history skipped town to join the team’s blood rivals in New York. The best pitcher in team history slid into petulance before reviving his career in another country (and then joining the team’s blood rivals in New York). Offseason news cycles were dominated by the MVP first baseman’s drunk driving trial. We went to Fenway to gripe and complain as much as we did to watch baseball, filling the ballpark and loving the Sox, but doing so without any real hope.
But then came Pedro. And then came the flags.
Photo by Joe McNally/Getty Images
The Dominican flags were sprinkled throughout the ballpark, though in my memory I always picture them up the first base line, waving frantically as Pedro marches back to the dugout after a strikeout to end the inning. “I think it’s great,” said Mo Vaughn, the all-star, New England native, and de facto captain of the 1998 Red Sox. “[Pedro] brings people into the stands from other places, and Boston isn’t known for that.”
We didn’t know much about Pedro Martinez in November 1997, when the Sox, coming off a fourth-place finish and four years of sub-.500 ball out of six, acquired him in a trade. This was before interleague, before MLB.TV, before we had access to every play in our pockets. We knew him primarily as a name printed in black and white at the top of the National League pitching leaders in the Sunday paper: P. Martinez, MON.
His first two games in a Sox uniform were played on the West Coast; it fell to the bleary-eyed among us to spread the word that, hey, we really have something here. Eleven strikeouts and no earned runs against the A’s in Oakland; another nine Ks and only one earned against the Angels. The team came back east a week later and Pedro introduced himself with a complete game shutout against the Mariners. Then, as if to make sure we were paying attention, he threw another complete game a few days later against Cleveland (no shutout this time, but he did strikeout 12).
After a shaky start, a seven-game win streak vaulted the Sox to the top of the division. We began circling Pedro’s scheduled starts on our calendars, canceling plans on nights when he was pitching.
Something was starting to change. You felt it every five days, as the ballpark began to sing. The Dominican community in Boston — which had been there for decades, hiding in plain sight in the middle of the city — was stepping up to celebrate one of its own and fundamentally altering the zeitgeist of the fanbase.
Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
“We’ll be here everyday with more and more people,” a Dominican Bostonian named Amaury Arias told the Boston Globe after Pedro’s first start. And they were, creating what people were calling a World Cup atmosphere on Jersey Street.
At Fenway, cynicism was being shoved aside for joy. The old ballpark was entering a new phase in its life cycle.
A city doesn’t always get to define itself. Boston exists in the history books and in Hollywood as much as it does on a map, and so it’s often defined by outsiders, people who watch an SNL skit or an Irish mob movie and think they understand the city. They don’t, but the outsider view, though always distorted, is usually based in hard realities.
What was Boston like when Pedro arrived here in 1998? It was a city that had been governed almost exclusively by Irish mayors for an entire century. It was a city infamous for race riots. It was a city where a suburban police unit trained its guns on a Black NBA star who was sitting quietly in his car, reading his mail.
Pedro didn’t change any of that; that’s not a pitcher’s job. But in foregrounding the Dominican community on the city’s biggest stage, he changed the way we saw the city. Speaking decades later in a documentary on the Latin heritage of the Red Sox, the same Amaury Arias who’d waved flags at Fenway as a teenager said that it was Pedro who made him feel like his community had finally arrived.
Pedro didn’t just live in JP, he was a part of the neighborhood. He was there at the Dominican Festival in Franklin Park. He popped in and out of the restaurants. He drove down the street to sit in the bleachers at Northeastern University baseball games. The team, hardly a powerhouse, was going through a purple patch thanks to a star Dominican first baseman who’d immigrated to Massachusetts as a kid. Years later, after he would go on to hit 286 big league homers, Carlos Pena would say that, in between college baseball games, he set the record for the most times sneaking into Fenway to watch Pedro pitch.
Both Fenway and JP have changed since then.
Fenway, thanks to Pedro as much as anyone, became home to a financial and competitive juggernaut. The Sox surged into the postseason his very first year, losing to a superior Cleveland team, but wining Pedro’s only start. They would return to the postseason in 1999, sign another Dominican superstar in Manny Ramirez in 2001, and then sign a part-time player who would become a Dominican superstar in David Ortiz in 2003.
By the time Pedro left the Sox following the historic World Series championship in 2004, Fenway was two years into a ten-year sellout streak, during which ticket prices skyrocketed as the Sox became a global brand. Premium seating areas were squeezed into every corner of the ballpark. You could get married at Fenway or attend a black tie event with the future king of England.
In JP, it isn’t just the Hi-Lo Foods that’s disappeared. The Blessed Sacrament Church in Hyde Square, for decades a hub of the Latin community, now sits empty with plywood on the doors. The old bowling alley around the corner is now a cannabis dispensary.
But walk into the MVP Barbershop on Centre Street and you’ll get a sense of how things started. This tiny shop offering $20 fades is where Pedro got his hair cut when he lived here. The shop now sits across the street from a restaurant selling small plates of countneck clams with guanciale, but inside you’ll still hear Latin music on the radio and see Red Sox memorabilia on the walls.
I asked Elvis, the owner and master barber, about Pedro and he shrugged. Pedro, to him, is a friend, a neighbor, and a client, not an appendage of the holy spirit. Then he pulled out his phone to show me pictures of Pedro sitting in the very chair I was leaning on. That’s when I looked up and noticed faded #45 barely clinging to the wall above the mirror. It was signed by Pedro, the only autograph I spotted in the joint.
Dan Secatore
The Dominican flags don’t fly at Fenway anymore and JP’s Latin community is shrinking. The Whole Foods will probably outlive the MVP Barbershop. This is what cities — and ballparks — do: they stubbornly refuse to adhere to your idea of what they are.
We usually decry this change as a bad thing, and sometimes it is. But it’s also inevitable. This city and this team will keep changing, redefining themselves amidst larger cultural shifts.
Pedro Martinez was that change, once. Now he’s a memory, literally faded and hanging on the walls. But look closer at Elvis’s autograph and you’ll see a notation underneath Pedro’s flowing signature: “HOF – 2015.” He signed that piece of paper eleven years after he last played for the Red Sox. He doesn’t live here anymore but he keeps coming back to JP. Pedro Martinez is still a part of Boston. He’ll always be a part of Boston — no matter what Boston becomes next.