Swing for the Fences 
Diamond In The Rough
Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez is a big league baseball star and the most popular Texas Ranger. But if he’s loyal to his team, his heart and soul still lie in his hometown of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.
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The contract talks had led Rodriguez to lose his focus on the field, at one point sinking into a three-for-twenty slump. “He was definitely distracted,” says his wife. “He wasn’t playing like himself,” agrees his teammate Rusty Greer. Luis Mayoral, a Rangers broadcaster on Spanish radio and the team’s Latin American liaison, says, “You could see it in his eyes before games—completely spaced out.” “The more I tried not to think about it,” remembers Rodriguez, “the more I thought about it. It kept coming into my mind.”
On that fateful morning, Rodriguez came quickly to the point. (He would later admit that he was as nervous and as scared as he’d ever been in his life.) “I can’t sleep,” he told Schieffer. “I’m really worried about this. I don’t want to be traded. I love playing here, and I want to stay here. I want to work out a deal.”
Schieffer says, “He was very sincere. It was obvious to me that it really meant something to him to be a Texas Ranger.”
They spoke for an hour together, until Schieffer finally scribbled down a dollar amount on a slip of paper and passed it across his desk, saying, “If you could live with this . . .” To which Rodriguez replied quickly that he could but would still need to go over it with Moorad. Schieffer agreed.
Moorad arrived later and negotiated with Schieffer for two hours by phone, and by two that afternoon the deal was finalized: $6 million in 1998, $8 million for each season from 1999 to 2001, $9 million in 2002, a $1 million signing bonus, and $2 million in severance pay whenever he leaves the club, whether by trade, free agency, or retirement. “We went further on the money than we really wanted,” Schieffer admits.
Rodriguez wound up the season with career highs in homers (20) and batting average (.313, tenth in the league overall and the best by an American League catcher since Carlton Fisk in 1977) and led all major league catchers in cutting down runners trying to steal (40 caught stealing out of 77 attempts for 52 percent). He was also one of only a handful of reliably productive Rangers last season, as the club, which won the division title for the first time ever in 1996, fell to a disappointing 77—85 and third place in the A.L. West—done in by a lethal combination of atrocious fielding, an aceless starting rotation, and a slew of major injuries.
This year Rodriguez is the Rangers’ hottest (batting over .400 in April) and most popular player (loved as much for his old-fashioned loyalty as his catching and hitting prowess). The team got off to a great start too, going 20—13 through early May. Former Rangers general manager Tom Grieve, now the team’s TV color analyst, says, “That’s what the Rodriguez signing means most of all. It’s an investment in the future of winning.”
BORN ON NOVEMBER 30, 1971, the second of two sons, Rodriguez was raised in a wood-and-cinderblock house in tiny Vega Baja, nicknamed Molasses-Molasses for once being the leading source of sugarcane in Puerto Rico. His parents—mother Eva, a second-grade schoolteacher, and father Jose, who has worked for an international construction company for more than a quarter century—divorced when he was twelve.
At first little Ivan played the poor boy’s game of hitting bottle caps with a broomstick, but at seven, after entering Little League, “it was baseball, baseball, baseball,” says Eva. “You could hardly get him to do anything else, including go to school.” He watched every game he could on TV, practiced for hours daily with his father, and would often fall asleep dressed in his Little League uniform. “When we were teenagers,” recalls his 28-year-old brother, Jose Junior, once a shortstop prospect but now a nose guard—shaped factory worker for Playtex, “I’d sometimes come home from a party at five in the morning, and he’d be there in the living room swinging a bat in front of a mirror with all the furniture moved around.”
Rodriguez developed swiftly. Signing with the Rangers at sixteen, he played two and a half years on class A and AA teams in the organization’s minor league system (he was the Florida State League’s all-star catcher in 1990) and was called up to the big leagues on June 20, 1991, his wedding day. He was nineteen, and in his second game he caught for Nolan Ryan. In 88 games that first year, he batted .264 with eight homers. Always known less for his skills at the plate than for those behind it, he worked hard on his hitting and has averaged .300 or better in each of his past three seasons. His home run production has also climbed steadily. “Which is a total surprise,” says Tom Grieve. “When we drafted him, we knew he’d be a force defensively, but he was much harder to predict offensively.” Last year, on September 11 against the Twins, Rodriguez hit three homers in a single game for the first time in his career. And in 1996 he set a record for doubles by a catcher with 44, breaking Mickey Cochrane’s mark of 42 set in 1930; his 116 runs scored tied for the second most ever by a catcher in a single season.
But it’s the arm that everyone buzzes about. The cannonlike power of his throws. The blazingly quick release. The artfulness of his balance and footwork throwing from a crouch.
Rangers manager Johnny Oates, a former journeyman catcher of eleven big league seasons, is still stunned by what he saw Rodriguez do on opening day last year. The Rangers were leading the Brewers 4—2 in the top of the fifth inning with two outs. Jose Valentin was the runner on first base. Rodriguez deftly blocked a Ken Hill slider in the dirt; the ball ricocheted off his shin guards and skipped toward the on-deck circle, about 15 feet to his right. Valentin was off and running—against any other catcher he would have coasted into second base standing up. But, leaping to snare the ball, Rodriguez zipped a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball to the bag and nailed Valentin with a split second to spare. “I mean, Ivan threw a pea right on the money!” says the normally sedate Oates, nearly jumping from his chair in the manager’s office. “Valentin had this look on his face like, ‘Something’s wrong here. Who threw that ball? Was that a relay?’”
What Rodriguez does, like no other catcher in recent memory, is all but shut down the opposition’s running game. Rangers first baseman Will Clark calls it the Drop Anchor Effect, as in runners get to base and simply stay put. In fact, in a whopping 76 games in which Rodriguez caught last year, the opposing team didn’t even try to steal a base. “I thought if we kept the pressure on him we could break him,” Brewers manager Phil Garner once said. “But we tried and we couldn’t. It takes a man to admit when you’re wrong, and trying to run against Ivan Rodriguez is just plain wrong. It’s not worth the risk.”
IT’S TUESDAY NIGHT AT ANOTHER BASEBALL diamond in Vega Baja, and gusts of wind are whipping a warm mist around the field and stands. But it would take nothing less than a monsoon to send the locals home: Tuesday night is softball night, and there’s a game about to take place between La Familia, a team made up of mostly blood relatives, and the bakery-sponsored El Mangó. Both rosters are mainly manned by out-of-shape guys holding on to the last shreds of their youth, with flabby bellies rolling over belts worn painfully low. One obvious exception is Rodriguez, who, like his brother and fifty-year-old beer-bellied father, will play for La Familia tonight.
Rodriguez plays the six-inning game every week during the off-season, on a field that would give Rangers management minor coronaries. A horse is grazing unconcernedly in right field; center field is home to a sumidero, or natural hole, which, according to locals, sometimes emits ashy volcanic smoke. And there is a deep pit around home plate that has caused dozens of runners trying to score to break a leg.
Tonight’s contest starts badly for La Familia. By the end of the first inning the team is down 7—0. “It reminds me of the Rangers,” says Rodriguez with a chuckle as he returns to the dugout. He adds quickly, “But you’re going to see. I’ll hit the ball over the left field fence.” The sullen, serious Rodriguez is many miles away; here he is relaxed and playful, a prankster. In the sixth inning he launches a ball over the left field fence, a shot of approximately four hundred feet. Many, on both teams, break into uproarious laughter and bow with outstretched arms.
Rodriguez loves these games, loves calling out homers and then hitting them, loves being with these people he has known all his life. He says that no matter how much money he makes he will never outgrow them and that there will always be a big part of him that stubbornly remains here. He’ll always get his hair cut in Vega Baja. He’ll always practice his hitting in the batting cage at his father’s home. He’ll always visit the elementary school where his mother has taught for more than twelve years. He’ll always go see his old Little League coach, the 78-year-old Julio Pabon.
Yet inevitably, after his team loses 22—11, Rodriguez makes his exit from the field in a way that can’t help but create a stir among the small crowd. He zooms out the gate and through the heart of darkness in his sparkling steel-gray Porsche 911.
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