By JULIET MACUR
For two hours on the days Pedro Martínez is scheduled to pitch at Shea Stadium, he is alone with his pale yellow daffodils, his purple petunias, his cotton-candy-colored hyacinths, the flowers that make his property look like a botanical garden.
His brain is not calculating which pitch to throw. His right hand is not unleashing a baseball aimed at a batter crowding the plate. His joints, even his pesky right big toe, are not aching.
For those two hours, Martínez, the Mets star known for his intensity and cleverness on the mound and his quirkiness off it, is in the yard outside his six-bedroom Tudor revival home in Greenwich, Conn. He is planting. He is pruning. He is talking to his tulips. "What about you, beauty?" he will ask in language rarely, if ever, heard on a baseball field. "Aren't you going to grow up to be so pretty?"
Martínez is 5-0 this season, leading the Mets to one of the best records in baseball. But after a sudden series of injuries to his fellow pitchers, Martínez will be under increasing pressure to keep his team upright and to win the games he starts, beginning tonight in Philadelphia against a Phillies team that has won eight in a row.
It will be one more instance in which the 34-year-old, 5-foot-11 Martínez will blend ability with guile and attempt to master the batters he faces. No one does that better than Martínez, but being so good at it, he acknowledged, takes a toll.
"Don't ask me to be a pitcher in my next life," Martínez said last week, while sitting among his flowers. "It's too painful."
He said pitching was mentally and physically exhausting. Outsmarting hitter after hitter is psychologically grueling. To accomplish those things, he said, his life must have equilibrium, a contrast to the aggression he feels on the mound. To find that balance, he drives 40 minutes from Shea Stadium to the house he bought last year, after signing with the Mets. It is, in almost every respect, his sanctuary.
"I couldn't sacrifice myself or live the fast life we have to live if I didn't have a place like this to find peace," he said, gesturing toward his eight acres, which are half wooded and half landscaped with flowers and blooming trees like dogwoods and crabapples.
Flying over this area last year, Martínez said, he saw the trees and fell in love. So he bought this house, which seems plucked from the English countryside, with its turret and series of dramatic peaks, for about $4 million. He shares it with his wife, the former Carolina Cruz, his longtime girlfriend and a former reporter for ESPN Deportes, a Spanish language sports network. They met when she was at Boston College. They married in November.
After every game in Queens, he goes home to Cruz, and to a wonderland. A winding paved driveway leads to his house, which is about a quarter of a mile from the road. Two waterfalls trickle down a 20-foot-tall formation of rocks. In the distance is a pond big enough for a rowboat. Chipmunks scurry between the shrubs. Bumblebees bounce from tulip to tulip. The sound of birds chirping is so constant that it seems like a piped-in recording on the property, which a landscaper helps Martínez maintain.
Beneath the porte-cochere sits his white Hummer. In the backyard is a swing set that his two children from a previous relationship can use when they visit. Inside, cathedral ceilings and gigantic windows make the home feel airy. And last week, that air was filled with the aroma of sancocho, the traditional Dominican meat soup. One of Martínez's cousins from the Dominican Republic was in the kitchen stirring a large vat of it.
"I live a very normal life here," said Martínez, who rarely ventures into Manhattan. "I always can't be hard or mean-faced like I am pitching. If you look at me outside the field, I'm a very different pedigree."
He is different, for sure. With the Mets, Martínez can often be the life of the clubhouse. In turn, he has brought the entire franchise to life, making the Mets a credible team again the moment he signed with them two winters ago. He can be silly: He stuck a trash can on his head to congratulate catcher Ramón Castro on a game-winning home run. When the Shea sprinklers went off while he was on the mound during one start last season, he danced like a child alone in his front yard.
But there is a competitive, combative side to Martínez as well. After the sprinkler eruption, he quickly switched from goofy to serious, promptly striking out the batter. He is evolving now, too. As his body ages and he can no longer overpower hitters with his arm, Martínez is relying less on his fastball and more on his wits.
"You can't be one-dimensional to do what he does," said Jeff Wilpon, the Mets' senior executive vice president, who lives near Martínez. "You look at the flowers and how he created his own little world. It's the abstract thinking that makes him so good."
Martínez said his feel for nature came from his upbringing in the Dominican Republic. He grew up with five siblings, living in a one-room house with dirt floors in the village of Manoguayabo, outside Santo Domingo. His father worked odd jobs. His mother washed clothes for wealthier families.
It was there, in the town without a paved road or a baseball field, that Martínez learned to care for the gardener's life. He joined his mother when she gardened and talked to her flowers, so they would grow "so pretty." His favorite flowers, plentiful in the Dominican Republic, are orchids, intriguing him because they are so fragile.
Back then, he said, he noticed his mind emptying itself of worries when he gardened. As he rose in the baseball ranks, and the stresses of the game began to eat at his mind and body, gardening became his salve, a claim that few other major leaguers would be willing to make.
"It has to be in you to work with flowers, but if you grow up with it, you realize how it can make you untouchable," Martínez said. "If something hurts, it disappears when you are in the garden. It's about deep thinking, about letting go. Other players need to do the same thing."
While Martínez is with the flowers, his wife uses her quiet time to read books and the Bible. Cruz, the daughter of a couple in Santo Domingo who ran a Little League, is a self-professed city girl. She drives to Manhattan to shop for food. She plans to join a volleyball league in Central Park. She writes a weekly column called Major League Women that appears in Listín Diario, a newspaper in Santo Domingo. When she first heard that Martínez loved to commune with flowers, she said, it moved her. Martínez insists that she thought he was a wimp.
"His heart is really connected to God and nature brings him closer to that, which is something I'm learning, too," said Cruz, just before sitting down to lunch with Martínez and two preachers visiting from South Africa and Miami. "After he talks to his plants, you can really see them perk up. Really, you do."
In Boston, where he starred for seven seasons with the Red Sox, Martínez still owns a townhouse that has a small garden. He also has a family compound in Manoguayabo, where inside concrete walls topped with barbed wire are two homes, lime trees, hibiscus and mango trees, including one he plans to lay under in a hammock when he retires.
Connecticut is too cold for mango trees. Even so, Martínez said he planned to keep the house once his baseball career was over. He will use it as a winter vacation house for himself and for relatives who, he said, "get a kick out of snow."
Martínez hates cold weather, but has been outdoors a lot lately in the mild temperatures, gardening and playing with his three 3-month-old puppies: a chocolate Labrador retriever, a golden retriever and a cockapoo, a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle. When Martínez walks outside, they bound his way, tongues out, tails wagging.
"Stop eating my tulips!" he yelled last week to Typhoon, the golden retriever, who was gleefully chomping on a red petal.
With the house, the land and even his mischievous puppies that seem to have an appetite for his azaleas, this is his new oasis, Martínez said.
"I always wanted to have a home, finally," said the man in whom the Mets have so much invested. "This is my house, this is my town. I'm going to stay here."
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