NEW YORK — When Dave Martinez was a child and his family left Manhattan, packing up their cramped apartment on the Upper East Side, placing the framed photos of Roberto Clemente on the top of a box, he thought Long Island was the countryside. There was so much space. Car horns no longer kept him up at night. But when Martinez returned there in the early 2000s, he barely recognized where he spent most of his childhood, the place he grew up before heading to chase big baseball dreams in Florida.
People are counting on Dave Martinez. He knows it.
Updated May 14, 2023 at 7:34 p.m. EDT|Published May 13, 2023 at 8:58 a.m. EDT
The house his dad helped build, the one Martinez considered a mansion? Much smaller than he remembered.
The woods he used as a playground, weaving his dirt bike through the trees? Chopped down to make room for apartment buildings.
“There’s a reason I haven’t been back since,” Martinez said over breakfast at a Madison Avenue diner in late April. “It was sad. But, you know, things change. Everything changes. Isn’t that what you wanted to sit here and talk about?”
Martinez then laughed and patted himself on the back, proud of the way he swerved at the end of a quote to complete the metaphor. For almost two full years now, managing the Washington Nationals has meant managing constant, jarring change. Ryan Zimmerman, Juan Soto, Trea Turner and Max Scherzer are gone, not to mention most other members of the 2019 title team. Stephen Strasburg remains away from the club because of ongoing health complications. From better times — from the literal best of times — the only front-facing holdovers are Patrick Corbin, Victor Robles and … Martinez, who has been at the center of a drastic shift in short-term priorities.
And on top of so much roster churn, the team has been dangled for sale since April 2022 and Martinez is in the final season of his contract. There’s no guarantee he or his staff will see this rebuild through. The Nationals started the year 1-6 but are 16-17 since after splitting two games against the New York Mets on Sunday. They’re growing — really, tangibly growing — but are still a ways from turning the proverbial corner.
So, yeah, in another contract year for him and his coaches, there’s a lot on Martinez’s mind.
“I don’t necessarily think everybody is looking at me,” he said. “But the way I feel about them —”
He trailed off and looked down at the wooden table. Martinez is a crier and has never been shy about it. When he pauses mid-sentence like this, it’s safe to assume he is blinking away tears, not dealing with the sting of seasonal allergies. Though Martinez does also have really bad seasonal allergies.
“There are so many people behind the scenes that don’t get any credit, and their lives could be blown up if they hire a new manager and they bring a whole new group in?” he continued. “I mean, we need to win and get better so people can keep doing their jobs, right? I try to do the right thing for everybody, for all of them. That’s training staff, clubhouse, security guys. That’s on me. I need to take care of them and their families and their well-being.”
‘An expert in people’
For Martinez, that feeling, the need to protect everyone around him, originated in two places: his family’s Brentwood kitchen and a baseball field in Mesa, Ariz., circa 1984.
As a kid, maybe 10 years old, Martinez would tell his dad good morning and get a grumble in response. How could it be a good morning, Ernie Martinez asked his oldest, when he had to rush off to another job so Martinez could eat three meals a day and play baseball every weekend?
Martinez laughed at the memory, saying Ernie was his own mix of kind and gruff, hard on his son but in a loving way. Ernie always held at least two jobs to provide for Martinez, his three siblings and their mom. He drove a delivery truck, worked for the school district and did some construction with Martinez’s uncle, often sleeping a few hours after one shift before heading to the next. And in turn, he expected a lot of Martinez on and off the field. If Martinez slapped three hits in a Little League game, Ernie wanted a fourth. When Martinez slumped in the minors, Ernie met him on the road and turned Martinez’s hotel room into a batting cage, using balled-up socks as their baseballs.
Ernie has had four shoulder surgeries because of how much batting practice he threw Martinez and his brothers. Quietly, daily, he set the course of Martinez’s entire playing and coaching career.
“Make sure everyone around you feels like they are the most important person in the world,” Martinez said of what his dad taught him most. “And work to make them feel that way every day.”
Then a few years later, Joe Maddon was a 30-year-old manager in the California Angels’ minor league system, throwing batting practice during instructional league in Mesa. And that’s when Gene Mauch, the longtime manager, raised his finger to subtly call Maddon over.
What Mauch told Maddon — “You’ve created a great atmosphere around here” — was the start and end of the conversation. But when Martinez agreed to be a spring training instructor for Maddon in 2006, he noticed how Maddon focused on each person who played and worked for what were then the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Maddon’s superpower, Martinez recalled, was knowing what motivated every single one of them.
“I asked Davey to come on for one reason, honestly: The Devil Rays had no culture and did not play very good baseball, and I had watched him play for years and loved every second of it,” Maddon said in a recent phone interview. “I needed him with me to show the players how it’s done. And when he became my bench coach, he handled problems that I didn’t hear about until weeks, months later. He is an expert in people.”
‘We can still do that’
Martinez called his dad “the MVP of my life.” He called Maddon his “big brother.” From both of them, he learned to understand motivation, how it comes in different shapes, how it is critical to reaching his players, especially in another rebuilding season. When Martinez had Zimmerman and Scherzer to run the clubhouse, he was more hands-off, letting his veterans deliver the message, should one need to be delivered. But in his sixth year managing the Nationals, his catcher is 24, his middle infielders are both 22 and his two brightest starters are 24 and 25.
The blanket goal for players, managers and coaches is to win the game in front of them. For the Nationals, though, the immediate goal is another thing that has changed.
“Back in spring training, we were in his office one day, and I asked him: ‘Your whole thing in 2019 was let’s go 1-0, right?’ ” recalled longtime friend Tim Bogar, Martinez’s bench coach since 2020. “That’s how we won the World Series, stacking each day on top of the one before it. We can still do that, I told him, it just has to be in a slightly different way for now. Maybe it’s Luis García covering second base the right way after screwing it up twice in a row. Maybe it’s Josiah Gray getting out of a jam in the sixth.
“Then eventually we’re going to start winning a lot of games again. It’s not always easy when you’ve won and want to keep winning but have to stay patient with the process with a young group. But one of Davey’s biggest strengths is that he really, really believes it will happen.”
Through six weeks, Martinez has often walked a tightrope between the present and future. Chasing wins, perhaps more wins than the staff ever expected this early, has led to some peculiar bullpen decisions, such as when he taxed Hunter Harvey, Kyle Finnegan and Mason Thompson and went against the plan of carefully managing their innings in a season that probably is not destined for the playoffs. But before welcoming the Mets, the Nationals had won four of their past six series. That’s a step in the right direction, however minor, even if it almost certainly will be balanced by less encouraging results. When Martinez sat down for breakfast in midtown Manhattan in late April, he felt his players were starting to see the potential he does. Naturally, this made him teary, too.
He leaned forward in his chair and told a story from earlier in the month. CJ Abrams, his 22-year-old shortstop, and Dominic Smith, his 27-year-old first baseman, were fighting themselves at the plate. So before the team left for a trip to Minneapolis and New York, Martinez called them into his office for a chat.
Martinez hit .139 as a rookie with the Chicago Cubs in 1986. He often recites that stat, knowing firsthand the pressure Abrams must feel. For that reason, he centered the conversation on Abrams, telling him to break down his season into 10 at-bats at a time. In 10 at-bats, Martinez asked Abrams, could he work one walk? In the remaining nine, could he slap three hits? For one of them, let’s say when facing a tough lefty, could he drop down a bunt and use his speed to reach first? In one or two of the others, could he advance a runner with a grounder to the right side or a sacrifice fly?
Over and over, Abrams nodded. Smith sat and listened. Martinez thought Abrams would be motivated in two ways: distilling his numbers into a more manageable sample and having the chance to impress Smith, a veteran he respects, because he heard the advice. As for Smith, Martinez felt he would be motivated by being tapped to be a mentor. He knocked out two meetings in one. About a week later, Smith referenced the 10-at-bats strategy in a postgame interview.
“Against the Twins, I think CJ was 3 for 10 with a walk … hit a bomb, had three RBI,” Martinez recalled. “So I said, ‘Hey, how do you think you did in 10 at-bats?’ He was like, ‘Good, Skip.’ I said: ‘Nah, man. Damn f---ing good.’ ”
‘I just love the game’
Martinez comes to this diner because it’s familiar, because unlike everything else around him, it hasn’t changed a bit. The employees know him well, meaning they know not to talk too much about baseball. After taking his usual order of eggs over medium, hash browns and bacon, extra crispy, the waiter drops his voice to say, “Yes, coach.” In the nearly three hours Martinez spent by the front window, a black hat pulled down near his eyes, one person stopped to thank him for representing their city.
“I am obsessed with the game. That’s what has always motivated me. I had people tell me I was too small and never going to make it. I mean, I interviewed for five or six manager jobs. The skinny kid from New York and Florida turned into a bench coach who wasn’t fit to be a manager, you know? Different times, different jobs, same story. …
“But I just love the game. My Zen is the field. It’s the white lines. It’s the dugout, the grass. Like, I think I could draw two white lines on the grass at my farm in Tennessee and feel right at home.”
After motivation, he is asked about legacy, about how his overall record — now 338-410, not counting the postseason — might reflect on him because it includes much more losing than winning. He dropped his eyes again and chewed on it. His answer came out as a request to stick around.
“I don’t know when this is going to be over, but I want it to last as long as it possibly can,” Martinez said of managing the Nationals. “If something doesn’t work out here beyond this season, which in my heart I still believe it will, there will be other opportunities in some capacity. But they’ll have to strip the uniform away from me because I love this job. I didn’t even want to get into this, then all of a sudden Joe calls me up, and, man —”
The diner door flung open and a crush of people walked in. A waiter asked whether Martinez wanted more coffee, and he declined.
“And then all of a sudden I’m here, I guess. It feels like I just blinked.”