Now that it’s more or less official that Russell Martin won’t be a Pirate in 2015, I have some mixed feelings. I don’t know how much money the Pirates offered Martin and I suspect that we won’t really know for sure (their negotiations with starting pitchers will be much more difficult if agents know how much they were willing to spend on Martin) for a while, but from my perspective it’s pretty difficult to be upset with the Pirates not matching the Blue Jays’ five-year/$82 million offer to Martin. We can debate for weeks how well framing or blocking or throwing skills age for a catcher, but the reality is that Martin is already 31 and he’s had enough dings and dents that he’s topped 130 games in a season once since 2009. Somewhere out there a long the space/time continuum there’s a universe in which the Pirates could afford to keep a key player like Martin at any cost, but we don’t live that universe, and so it’s only useful to dwell on stuff like this for so long. The Pirates have already put a plan in place to move on, and there’s an entire off-season in front of us. The Pirates will need to take the money they could’ve spent on Martin and put it into the team elsewhere, but if they do that I don’t see any reason that they shouldn’t be competitive in 2015. So it goes for the small market baseball team.
Anyway, let’s just take a moment to appreciate Martin’s brief and wonderful Pirate career. There are fewer more apt illustrations of the old cliche that it’s always darkest right before the dawn than the Pittsburgh Pirates from August of 2012 through March of 2013. The Pirates fell apart completely and spectacularly in 2012, and since it was the second season in a row in which it happened, it was awfully hard to see a way out of the mess for the team. When the Pirates signed Martin, the reaction of most Pirate fans was a groan. I think that I may have compared the decision to deciding to just light a match and set money on fire. It was a knee-jerk reaction and a bad one at that (after doing some reading about pitch-framing and catching defense and the like, I came around a little on the deal within about 72 hours), but I still think that it was a relatively justified one; the Pirates made a spectacularly unsuccessful signing of a Rod Barajas the winter before, and given Martin’s health issues and the way that his offensive numbers had generally stagnated in his last years in LA and his two years in New York, it wasn’t a huge jump to conclusions to think that it was possible he was just going to be a younger version of a player headed to the same bad place Barajas inhabited in 2012.
And yet, I was wrong about Martin. I was so wrong. Martin, along with AJ Burnett and Francisco Liriano, all lent a sort of air of respectability to the 2013 team from the earliest days of the season. All three of those players were good baseball players whose careers could have taken them somewhere other than Pittsburgh and all of them chose to be Pirates (at least to varying degrees). Think about this: last week, AJ Burnett opted out of $12+ million to become a free agent, then basically threw himself at the Pirates. Was that something that was even remotely imaginable even two or three years ago? The Pirates are a real baseball team now and while it’s silly to give Martin all of the credit for that, he’s certainly been a part of it.
On the other hand, it feels weird to give Martin credit for things that are hard to measure like “changing the culture” or leadership or even the effect his defense and pitch framing had on the pitching staff. The reason that it feels weird is because two of the most legitimately electric moments in recent Pittsburgh Pirate history were Russell Martin home runs. In the 2013 Wild Card Game, Marlon Byrd broke the ice with his third inning solo home run, but it was Martin that stepped to the plate with the chants of “CUEEEEEEE-TOOOOOOOOO” thundering through PNC Park, and after Cueto dropped the ball, it was Martin that sent the ball into left-center bleachers. I sat on a couch 500 miles away that night and could still feel the PNC crowd after Martin’s home run thundering in my chest.
The second moment wasn’t even two months ago. Much of 2014 was full of the Pirates playing like legitimate contenders just long enough to make their inevitable lapses feel increasingly more ridiculous and crippling. By September 19th, the Bucs had built a 3 1/2 game lead up on the Brewers for the National League’s second Wild Card. The only thing left that they had to do was beat the Brewers once at PNC Park in the season’s final homestand. Given the history of the Pirates and Brewers, that prospect felt more daunting than it should have. When the Brewers took a 2-0 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning of the series’ first game, even the nervous laughter had stopped. Then Starling Marte singled, Neil Walker singled, and Martin sent a Jonathan Broxton fastball up into the Pittsburgh night, hanging in the air for forever before just barely coming down in the right-center grandstand. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the silence of fans holding their collective breath punctuated by the explosion that followed that ball safely landing in the stands. I wrote quite a bit this fall about how some aspects of 2014 felt better than 2013 because of the validation that it brought, and Martin’s home run was the exclamation point to all of it.
It sucks that Martin’s leaving, but there’s one really cool aspect to this. Martin started his career in Los Angeles and probably had his best years with the Dodgers. He moved on to the Yankees, baseball’s flagship franchise. He’s going to make a ton of money with the Blue Jays, and I’m sure as a native Ontarian he’ll be the face of whatever happens over the next few years in Toronto. He might have more baseball in front of him after that, or he might not. But when Russell Martin’s career is said and done, no one will ever forget that he was a Pittsburgh Pirate because of what happened at PNC Park in 2013 and 2014. I wish that Martin had more days in black and gold in front of him, but the two years that he did have in Pittsburgh were awfully special.
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