Teeing Off

A Career on the Upswing
YEARS	G	R	H	HR	RBI	AVG.
1990-94	402	158	350	57	201	.254
1995-97*	351	214	394	76	285	.295
*Through Sunday

A hole is blown out of a chain-link fence in the backyard of a house in Tampa. A criminologist would call the hole evidence, the kind of evidence that tells a silent story. How did New York Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez chase away the ghost of his predecessor, Don Mattingly, by the end of his first year in New York? How did Martinez drive in more runs than any other player ever has in April and establish himself as one of the elite run producers in the American League? The answer is as obvious as the hole in the fence.

As a teenager Constantino Martinez, who grew up with his grandfathers' name and his father's diligence, blew open the fence by hitting a baseball into it off a tee. He did this not with one blast but, in the way that water carves out canyons from rock, with repeated blasts. Tino pounded away every day from the time he was 13, flattening his swing into a quick, level stroke.

"Every day, year round," says his older brother, Rene Jr. (pronounced REE-nee), 30, a bank vice president. "When the hole opened up in the fence, he covered it with a net and kept going. If he was bored and had nothing to do, he'd go back to the tee and hit."

Now 29, Martinez, the second of Sylvia and Rene Sr.'s three sons, hasn't changed. He still hits off a tee, though he does so before batting practice in major league ballparks. He also lifts weights four times a week, fields hundreds of practice ground balls daily, routinely takes extra batting practice and generally exhibits a work ethic that would shame a Sherpa. And he is still busting fences.

Martinez reached week's end hitting .306 with more RBIs (57) than every player in baseball except the Seattle Mariners' Ken Griffey Jr., and tied for second in homers (20) with the Oakland A's Mark McGwire, four back of Griffey. In the last three seasons the lefthanded-hitting Martinez has driven in more runs (285 through Sunday) than anyone in the American League except Albert Belle (321) of the Chicago White Sox, Mo Vaughn (301) of the Boston Red Sox, Jay Buhner (297) of the Mariners and Frank Thomas (292) of the White Sox. Perhaps more startling, he has made Mattingly as quaintly archaic in Gotham as the Automat. At week's end Martinez had already hit as many home runs this year as Mattingly did in any of his last six seasons, and he had more RBIs than Mattingly did in 1994 or in '95, his final year.

"He is one of the best teammates I've ever had," Yankees pitcher David Cone says. "I've played with some real gamers who were kind of wacko. But Tino is the most even-tempered gamer I've ever been around. He has a very intelligent approach to the game while being such an intense competitor."

"I've always believed," Martinez says, "that the answer to your problems is working harder. In the end, even if the numbers aren't there, at least I'll know I worked hard. It's a lesson I learned from my father. No one worked harder than he did."

The telephone would ring at 6:30 in the morning, and Tino would know who it was. His father would be calling from the Villazon Cigar Company, Inc., factory, one block away from the family's house on Kathleen Street, with news that another shipment of tobacco had arrived from Honduras. "Send the boys over," he would tell Sylvia, a schoolteacher. Rene Sr. was a strong man—6'2", 240 pounds and a former parole officer and high school football star in Tampa—who took great pride in never missing a day of work. He was the factory's general manager, and he had already been at work three hours when he would call for his sons. Rene Sr.'s father-in-law, once an employee at Villazon, owned the place.

Tino was only 10 at the time. During summer vacations and Christmas breaks he and Rene Jr.—and in later years their younger brother, Tony, now 27 and a teacher—would report for a shift of work. They helped unload 100-pound crates of tobacco. They lent a hand in the fumigation chambers. They helped arrange the tobacco in the stifling heat of the sorting room, which made the steamy Florida air outside seem inviting. They came home reeking of perspiration and tobacco with their father's words ringing in their ears: "Hard work never hurt anybody."

"It was Dad's way of telling me what hard work is all about," Tino says. "He never came right out and said it, but his message was, Stay in school, work hard and do something with yourself or else you could be unloading tobacco your whole life. Working in the factory wasn't exactly something that my brothers and I looked forward to, but we learned from it. It taught me to work hard as a player."