(Note: I interviewed Dennis in 1999 over lunch at a restaurant in Miami. The place was crowded and there was a lot of competing noise. I’m making our conversation available to all Bird Tapes subscribers, both free and paid, with the up-front understanding that it isn’t always easy to understand Dennis. I originally recorded him on a microcassette player, an audio dinosaur in 2026, and had it remade into a modern audio file for the Bird Tapes. It isn’t a studio-quality podcast interview, but I think it’s discernible enough to publish for public consumption, especially if (my tip) you turn up the sound. I hope you agree. This is a rare chance to hear Dennis tell his amazing story.)
More than a quarter-century ago, when I went around the country collecting interviews for From 33rd Street to Camden Yards, my 2001 book on Orioles history, almost all of the players from the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s were well into their post-playing lives. Some were coaching. Some were broadcasting. Some were in business.
But when I sat down for lunch with Dennis Martinez at a restaurant in Miami in the spring of 1999, he was still slender and strong and radiated the vibe of an active player … and in fact, just the year before, at age 44, he’d made 53 appearances for the Atlanta Braves.
His pro career had started literally decades earlier, in 1973, when the Orioles signed him in his native Nicaragua and smuggled him out. He was 18 and weighed 135 pounds. Nicaragua didn’t have a history of producing major league talent. Still, Martinez wanted to take a shot.
It was impossible to envision how things would turn out. Just weeks before we met for lunch in 1999, he’d announced his retirement, saying there was nothing left for him to accomplish in baseball. Who could argue? Consider:
- He’d won 245 games, the most of any pitcher ever born in Latin America. (Bartolo Colon passed him in 2018.) Hall of Famers such as Juan Marichal, Whitey Ford, Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz don’t have as many career wins.
- He’d become the first Latin-born pitcher and just the 13th from anywhere to toss a perfect game in the major leagues. His came in 1991 when he was pitching for the Montreal Expos against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- He’d won more than 100 games in both the American League and National League, a rare feat. Decades later, just 10 pitchers have done it, including Cy Young, Nolan Ryan, Ferguson Jenkins, Gaylord Perry, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez. Serious company.
His record was even more impressive when you consider the long odds he faced.
“I was a one to a million kid to make it to the major leagues,” Martinez told me.
I couldn’t dispute it, then or now. But with talent, determination and sheer doggedness, he’d made it to the majors and left a legacy matched by few who’ve ever gripped a ball.
Although he only pitched for the Orioles for a decade, winning 108 games, before fashioning a long and superb second act elsewhere, he easily ranks among the most accomplished pitchers ever signed by the Orioles.
Ray Poitevint, the scout who signed Martinez in Nicaragua in 1973, told me the story in an interview for my book.
“A guy named Julio Blanco Herrera had a beer distributorship that [Orioles owner] Jerry Hoffberger used in Miami. Julio was pushing beer in Central America and went down there a lot,” Poitevint told me. “Julio was a baseball buff. Beer was his business; baseball was his hobby. He told Jerry there were a lot of ballplayers down there. Julio couldn’t tell a ballplayer from an elephant, but he told Jerry they played a lot of ball in Nicaragua, and there were no scouts there, so I went.
“One year I went to see a kid named Tony Chavez pitch. He was pretty good, and I signed him. I started going down there four times a year. They had a league and a national team. The national team had a Cuban coach named Tony Castano. The year after I signed Chavez, we’re sitting in the dugout watching the national team work out and Tony Castano says, ‘Ray, there’s a kid out there with a good hook [curveball].’ I’m watching from 250 feet away. I see him. Tony’s right, he has a good hook. His name is Dennis Martinez. He’s the 10th pitcher on the national team. Just a kid. Everyone else on the team is 34 years old.
“Dennis looked like a pencil. But he had natural talent, as much as anyone. And he was hungry, He wanted to be something. The day after I first saw him, he had a chance to pitch three or four innings in a tournament game. I saw him and wanted to sign him. I got Julio to get ahold of the mother, and she came to the hotel, and I signed him. Two days later, there were a dozen scouts in the stands, and the pitcher gets hurt, and they bring in Dennis. He pitched the rest of the game and shut the other team down with about six strikeouts. Here come all the scouts. They’re trying to get his attention. I took him through the first-base dugout and got the hell out of there. It was illegal, actually, because he had signed and you couldn’t pitch as a pro in that tournament. But in those days, you had to do that stuff.”
Martinez was in his first year of studying civil engineering in college when he signed. The Orioles did it mostly as a favor to Tony Castano and Julio Blanco Herrera, Martinez said. His college classmates laughed at his major league aspirations. You’ll be back in two weeks, they said. Martinez was motivated to prove them wrong.
Coming to America, he was assigned to the Orioles’ Class A team in Miami, which played in the Florida State League. His teammates included Eddie Murray and Mike Flanagan, both of whom had been Oriole draft picks the previous year.
“Dennis weighed maybe 135 pounds soaking wet. You could put your thumb and forefinger together into a circle and they’d go around his biceps,” Flanagan told me in our 1999 interview for my book. “But what a wonderful arm. You could see he had it all, loose, limber. His side sessions [between starts] were better than anyone else’s games. He was that good. You could see it.”
Martinez rose quickly through the minors and was in the Orioles’ starting rotation by 1977. He won 14 games at age 23, 16 at age 24. In 1979, on a team that played in the World Series, he pitched 18 complete games.
Oriole-bred, Oriole-trained, the “one to a million kid” should have been an Oriole lifer. But reality intervened. He developed a drinking problem, which made him more erratic on the mound. I know more than a few people who have stories about seeing Martinez at bars in and around Baltimore in the ’70s and early ’80s. A stay in rehab helped him turn his life around, but he wasn’t as effective as a pitcher in the first few years after that, and the Orioles finally just moved on.
He admitted in our 1999 interview that he’d needed a fresh start elsewhere, but in hindsight, his departure was prominent among the factors that contributed to the destabilization of the Orioles’ pitching and the team as a whole in the late ’80s. Earl Weaver once told a reporter that Martinez had as much talent as any of the hundreds of pitchers who threw for him. The Orioles had him and let him get away.
Martinez’s story illustrates the savvy scouting that helped make the Orioles so good in those years. And the hunger and determination that helped Martinez succeed are on full display in our conversation as he chronicles his rise from deep in Central America to the pinnacle of the major leagues.
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