Furniture, Pete Incaviglia, and the Ohtani Splitter: the Incredible Odyssey of Chris Martin

December 11th, 2017: The MLB backdrop at the ballroom on the second floor of the Swan and Dolphin—hung this morning behind Alan Trammell and Jack Morris—has been taken down. In its place, a Yankees backdrop has been raised. Giancarlo Stanton is receiving his #27 jersey from the Yankees and taking questions from the media.

Meanwhile, quietly, from a suite over a hundred feet above the action, the Rangers are also making an addition—one that seems strangely symbolic, given how the first three major stories of the off-season have played out.

Chris Martin graduated from Arlington (TX) High School in 2004, and was originally drafted by the Tigers in the 18th round that year. He opted to give it a year in hopes of improving his draft fortunes, pitching for McLennan Community College in Waco. The decision didn’t help his prospects: the Rockies took him in the 21st round in 2005. Then he injured his shoulder. Dr. Keith Meister did the surgery—a “cleaned-up labrum, and I think it was a capsule release,” Martin tells us later—but the pain never left. It was here that Chris Martin’s baseball story got stuck in a holding pattern.

December 15th, 2017 – The deal is finally official. Martin is in the Rangers clubhouse, standing in front of his new jersey, and new nameplate, both of which bear the number 31. The next locker over reads “Tony Barnette, 43”. This does not seem like a mistake. Martin is home.

Baseball Reference doesn’t have any statistics from Martin in 2005. Or ’06. That’s because there are no stats, advanced or otherwise from Texas Appliance, UPS, or Lowe’s. That trio of labor is where Martin spent five years. Players drafted after him began making it to the big leagues. Logan Morrison, Jake Arrieta, Sergio Romo. Chris Martin unloaded a washer and dryer from a delivery truck. Chris Davis, Tim Lincecum, Buster Posey. That appliance isn’t going to install itself. “I saw friends and guys that I played with making their MLB debuts,” the tall right-hander says. “I was like ‘man, I was right there with them guys. I know I’m good enough. If I can just get the shoulder healthy…'”

Finally, in 2010, Martin accrued his first statistics as a professional. It was 2010, and Martin was 23 years old. After playing catch, his shoulder, which had hurt for five years, suddenly didn’t. He contacted his friend Luke Prihoda, a pitcher for the Grand Prairie Air Hogs. Prihoda suggested a team in Brownsville. They never got back with Martin. But the next week, Prihoda let Martin know that there was a tryout for the Air Hogs. Homer Bailey, a month younger than Martin, was in his third season in the big leagues. Martin was fifty dollars short of a tryout.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t have $50 in my pocket to pay for it. I told the lady ‘I’m not going to be able to do this, but I know Luke Prihoda'”. She knew the name, and allowed him to try out. The manager pulled him aside and told him he had a uniform on the way.

That manager was former Ranger Pete Incaviglia. Martin showed the time off contributed more to rest than rust: he went 4-0 with an ERA of 1.96. But the native Texan didn’t have any grand designs for the next step: he was just happy to be playing again “I went back to work at Texas Appliances; I was planning on going back to the Air Hogs the next season, but two weeks before Spring Training started, Pete Incaviglia reached out to Jaymie Bane, a scout for the Red Sox.”

Incaviglia told Bane about the kid with good velocity, and Bane agreed to a tryout during Spring Training. It was time to see if the dream had one more life.

“I remember throwing a couple of pitches and they kinda pulled me aside. I thought maybe that was it—they’d seen enough. But they said ‘Hey, we want you to come back in a couple of days and throw again, see how your shoulder recovers.”

It recovered fine.

Martin went 6-2 with a 2.55 ERA in 2011, striking out 55 and walking 13 in 74 innings at three minor league levels, the highest of which was AA Portland.

But he struggled in Portland, posting a 15.88 ERA in three games. So in 2012, he repeated the level, and for awhile it appeared he had found his ceiling: a 4.95 ERA and a 3-6 record while you turn 26 at the AA level is usually the profile of a career minor leaguer. But then came 2013, and after the first twelve games, Martin hadn’t allowed a single run—earned or otherwise. Boston moved him to AAA, where he produced a WHIP of 1.19 in 30 games.

Boston took advantage of Martin’s newfound value. They shipped him to the Rockies with Franklin Morales as part of a trade for Jonathan Herrera. Martin didn’t make the Opening Day roster, but by April 26th 2014, he was standing on the mound at Dodgers stadium, making his big league debut for the team that had drafted him nine years prior. He pitched a scoreless seventh inning. The next day, a scoreless ninth. Two days after that, in Arizona, a scoreless sixth.

On May 7th, just a little over four years after working at a furniture warehouse a stone’s throw away, Martin took the mound at Globe Life Park. groundout, groundout, lineout went Elvis Andrus, Leonys Martin, and Robinson Chirinos.

By June 20th, however, Martin’ ERA was nearing 7.00. The Rockies sent him to AAA, and then in January sent him to the Yankees for cash considerations.

Martin made the Opening Day roster for the Yankees in 2015, and—like he did with Boston—started well, keeping a sparkling 0.00 ERA until his former teammates shoved a couple of runs across in his fourth game of the year. Finally in June, after giving up runs in three consecutive starts, Martin was sent back to AAA until September. After the season, he had an opportunity to pitch in Japan and took it, becoming a teammate of Shohei Ohtani with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.

Martin says the time in Japan helped him mentally, more than anything. Instead of bouncing back and forth from the big leagues to the minors, the time in Japan gave him the stability of pitching in one place, learning to slow down his mind, to pitch in front of big crowds. This time, he didn’t start strong and finish poorly. in fact, it was the other way around. After a brief struggle to start his career, he became dominant.

In fact, by season’s end, the now-29-year-old had pitched in 52 games, striking out 57 in 50⅔ innings, walking just seven batters all season long. His ERA was 1.07 and his WHIP was 0.63. In 2017, Martin again dominated, brandishing a 1.19 ERA at season’s end and walking a mere six batters in 37⅔  innings. This, one must suspect, is what Jon Daniels meant when he said the team was prioritizing “strike-throwers”.

He also developed a new pitch: the splitter. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Ohtani also throws a splitter. “He had a little bit to do with it, actually,” Martin admits. “Guys were sitting on fastballs early in the count, so I was like ‘Hey Ohtani, what’s a top on the slider?'”

“This is how I grip it,” Ohtani offered. “Just try to get on top of it, and throw it as hard as you can.”

Martin tried it out a few times playing catch. Then he tried it in a game.

“The first time I threw it I got a swing-and-a-miss on a first pitch.”

Perhaps it’s the only thing that has worked out immediately for the Arlington High School graduate. Everything else has taken patience.

Drafted by the team that sent Trammell and Morris to the stage, a castoff of the team that followed them with Giancarlo Stanton, and a teammate in Japan of the two-way star that rebuffed Arlington this offseason. The connections to this offseason’s biggest stories are tenuous but multitude, and frankly unimportant. The strength of the story stands alone: the 31-year-old Arlington native whose path led him from Arlington to Waco, through a furniture store, the Red Sox, the Rockies, the Yankees, and all the way to Japan, is finally coming home.