Russell Martin Jr. The Backstop Of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce

Boosted by a Dodgers campaign, Martin led NL catchers in All-Star votes -- and he could become a perennial pick.

By Michael Farber

TheLos Angeles Dodgers orchestrated a campaign to getRussell Martin elected as the National League's starting All-Star catcher. The push included a rally at Dodger Stadium, promotional T-shirts and bilingual stickers emblazoned with VOTE FOR RUSSELL! and VOIX POUR LE RUSSELL!, a gimmick that might have helped lift Martin pastPaul Lo Duca of theNew York Mets -- Martin led by 120,000 votes as of Sunday -- but certainly cut into the high school French teacher support. Of the four French words on the sticker, two were misused. Not to go all Flaubert on your derrière, but voix, as vote, works only as a noun. And to insert an article before his name and call him Le Russell implies, like the Donald, there is something pompous about a player who does not have an ounce of pretension on his 5' 10", 210-pound frame. Martin is the good-natured son of a Franco-Manitoban mother and an Anglophone Quebecer father, a bilingual 24-year-old who learned his baseball in the middle-class district of Montreal called Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. When he first heard of the clunky translation during the Dodgers' three-game series in Toronto last week, he
groaned, chuckled and bolted from the dugout in search of a team official.

Martin was going -- what are les mots justes? -- to break some Balzac.

If the campaign stickers were lost in translation (the Dodgers later corrected their French), the All-Star balloting nonetheless made clear that the baseball world has identified a new cornerstone catcher. Maybe manager Grady Little's analogy of Martin as Seabiscuit, a West Coast thoroughbred who didn't get much initial attention, was valid three weeks ago, but the presumptive All-Star turned into Northern Dancer when he was greeted by seven Canadian television outlets at a press conference before theBlue Jays' series opener.

The encomiums pour in. "The guy is an offensive player, a defensive player, a runner,"Arizona Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin says. "He's very aware at a young age of how the game is played. He'll be a multiple All-Star, in my opinion. He does everything." Colorado Rockies bench coach Jamie Quirk, a former major league catcher, says he would take Martin as the first player, even ahead of New York Mets
shortstopJose Reyes, if he were starting a team. "I'd been trying to convince the Dodgers for two years that they had a little Pudge Rodriguez on their hands," saysTexas Rangers reliever Eric Gagné, the former Los Angeles closer who attended the same sport-and-study Montreal high school as Martin. "I don't know if he'll win 10 Gold Gloves, but he has a chance to become that [good]. He's got a perfect body, sets a perfect target and is really, really quiet back there. Already he's one of the best at calling games." In Martin's 192 games since joining the team in May 2006, manager Grady Little and pitching coach Rick Honeycutt have found reason to carp about pitch selection perhaps five times. "That," Little says, "speaks volumes." Martin also is a formidable offensive presence, at least by the scaled-down expectations of his grinding position. Through Sunday he had eight home runs. He also led National League catchers in hits (72), runs (42), RBIs (47), stolen bases (13), walks (28), slugging percentage (.454), on-base percentage (.359), games (71) and, presumably, names. He has five. He is, formally, Russell Nathan Coltrane Jeanson Martin.

"Is that a name," Dodgers pitcher Randy Wolf muses, "or a novel?"

The ambling story of Martin's still-young life has many devices of a novel. There's a journey: Martin was born in Toronto, moved to Winnipeg, split the rest of his boyhood between his mother's home across the Quebec border from Ottawa and his father's in Montreal, except for those two years (grades 3 and 4) with his mother and stepfather in Paris, a city he didn't much like at first because France didn't have the right kind of Game Boy.

There are issues of race, language, culture: His mother, an exuberant woman who works for the Canadian heritage department, is white; his father, a contemplative musician, is black.

There is an epiphany: the incident in Double A Jacksonville in 2005 when he and a teammate were robbed at gunpoint. (We will get to that episode later in the novel.)

There is a quirky backstory that includes a suitable amount of sax, which takes us back to Martin's evocative name.

Martin's father, who is also named Russell, is a tenor saxophonist of enough pedigree that he played the national anthem at Dodger Stadium last season; Coltrane was added to the boy's name in honor of one of the elder Martin's muses, sax legend John Coltrane. Gagné, who remains close to the catcher, describes his friend's father as "a down-to-earth guy." In fact, when he had Little Russell with him during summers in the early 1990s -- Martin and Susanne Jeanson separated when their son was about a year old -- Big Russell was a below-the-earth guy. At the time he earned his living principally as a busker in the Montreal subway. He would awaken early, nab a prime location, and then play his saxophone during rush hour in either the Snowdon or Villa-Maria métro stations, hurrying home to give Little Russell his breakfast by nine o'clock. Father and son would spend the rest of the day in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce parks playing games that sprung from Big Russell's fertile mind, including a modified version of pepper designed to improve bat control. (Martin would credit that game for his opposite-field, run-scoring single on a 1-and-2 slider in the 10-1 Los Angeles win against Toronto on June 19.) His father would leave the boy with friends while he serenaded commuters on their way home.

This was not a childhood ripped from the Chip Hilton novels of 50 years ago, but it prepared Martin for the big leagues of the 21st century, in which the ability to adapt and to work with teammates from other countries is invaluable. Martin's backup, 12-year veteran Mike Lieberthal, notes that Martin has soft hands, a strong arm and uncommon agility from the waist down -- a trait generally associated with an infielder, which Martin had been until Los Angeles switched him from third base after a season of rookie ball. Martin's handling of pitchers is equally distinctive. "He's really open-minded," Gagné says. "The thing about him is, he adapts not only to the pitcher's stuff but to the pitcher's personality."

Dodgers righthander Derek Lowe compares Martin's innate leadership with that of Jason Varitek, his former catcher in Boston. In one of Martin's first games catching Lowe, Martin jogged to the mound and told Lowe, who was viscerally upset about his command, that he wasn't leaving until the pitcher calmed down. Martin recalls, "I say, 'What's going on, bro?' We're winning at that point and he's throwing the ball well, so I say, 'Just relax, man. I'm not leaving till you calm down.' And he stopped and said, 'O.K., I'm good.' " Martin tells the story with wonder rather than bravado.

Lowe's command wasn't life and death, but this was. Late one night in the summer of 2005 he was sitting on a stoop with minor league teammate Beau Dannemiller, trying to cheer up the struggling reliever, when two thieves approached, one wielding a gun. The pair demanded wallets and car keys. "Beau just started getting angry, like he was going to do something," Martin says. "And I'm like, 'Beau, O.K. man, relax.' You never know how you're going to react in a situation like that, but I was so calm. Gave them my wallet and the keys to my buddy's Escalade. They told us to get behind the bushes, so I did." Once Martin was camouflaged by the shrubs, he sprinted away, en route scaling a six-foot fence, which is why you have to love those catchers who run well. He says the thieves were never caught. "The next day I was like, Wow, you never know what might happen to you at any given time. I was just happy to be alive and playing baseball. This was the turning point of my life. You realize how fragile it is, so why not give a little extra effort and have fun with what you're doing?"

The fun translates into work. Although Randy Hundley's 1968 big league record of catching 160 games in a season seems almost as unassailable as Cy Young's 511 wins, Martin tugs on the tools of affluence nightly. Of the 209 games the Dodgers have played since he arrived, he has caught in an astounding 88% of them. (Los Angeles is 112-69 when he's the starting catcher, 6-21 when he isn't.) His toughness was underscored in June of last year when the Philadelphia Phillies' Chase Utley, trying to break up a play at the plate, wallpapered Martin, who was vulnerable because a poor throw had pulled him up the first base line. The catcher bounced back up with a gash on his chin but without comment or complaint. "He's a great competitor," says Atlanta Braves rightfielder Jeff Francoeur. "In Double A he would catch the day game after a night game. And I'd kid [Braves catcher Brian] McCann and say, 'See, Martin's an animal,' because McCann would get that day game off." Martin played all 15 innings last Aug. 25, a Friday night in Arizona. He homered in the fourth and later singled with two out in the top of the 15th, then attempted to steal second as centerfielder Jason Repko struck out to end the inning. Martin proceeded to catch the entire game on Saturday night, the entire game on Sunday afternoon and the entire game on Monday night at home against Cincinnati before being given the day off on Tuesday, which merely meant he did not enter that game until the ninth. (He caught the rest of the way in a 16-inning Dodgers win.) "If he can play, he's in there," Little says. "What makes him special is he keeps getting better. I always say he's well beyond his years, not only as a catcher and a player but also as a person. Somebody did a good job raising that young man."

The credit goes to Susanne and Russell, who set aside their differences and gave their son toughness (Dad), joy (Mom) and love (both). "Russell's very aware he's a role model," says Jeanson, who with 40 family members and friends made the trip to Toronto to see Martin's first major league appearance in Canada. "Being a baseball celebrity comes with a big responsibility. How you live really matters. You can't make dents in your moral standards. You have to be really straight, really strong, really honest." Shouldn't that be what parents mean when they say their children are grounded?