He is the only White Sox player made to feel like an uninvited guest at this South Side bash, the one guy on the postseason roster vilified instead of deified, the recipient of the LaTroy Hawkins treatment at U.S. Cellular Field where his familiarity now only breeds contempt.
He is Damaso Marte, the left-handed pitching enigma, a native of the Dominican Republic with a fastball in the mid-90s and a career potentially headed south even faster.
Manager Ozzie Guillen’s decision to keep Marte on the roster for the American League Championship Series beginning Tuesday night left the soft-spoken pitcher relieved Monday but in the awkward position of defending his right to toe the rubber.
“I just have to do my job better,” Marte said, addressing Friday’s Meltdown in Beantown for the first time. Against the Red Sox, Marte relieved starter Freddy Garcia in the sixth inning and promptly loaded the bases.
Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez put out the fire, but if you think any Sox fan has forgotten the way Marte poured on the gasoline, just listen to the crowd’s reaction when he is introduced Tuesday.
To many Sox fans, the notion that good guys wear black does not necessarily apply to Marte’s No. 43.
“Sometimes you miss your spots,” Marte explained. “It was a bad day.”
Ask Marte about his damaged psyche and he will politely shrug his shoulders, arch his eyebrows and shake his head. He does not understand the question. A 30-year-old who has been playing baseball in the U.S. for a decade, Marte still speaks just enough English to communicate in basic baseball lingo.
During an attempt to delve into deeper issues, the ones between the ears that may be preventing Marte from pitching like the Marte of old, his face went blank.
Nasty fan reaction
Until he heard someone mention something about boos. The boos, Marte knows all too well. Disgust seldom needs a translation. The reaction has been so bad that Guillen prefers to use Marte on the road to avoid the rancor.
“A lot of things you can control, but the fans you cannot control, so I don’t think about that,” Marte said. “I would like to show who Damaso Marte is to the fans.”
Hearing how unhappily fans greet him on the mound makes showing them more difficult for Marte. He struggles to block out the booing at the Cell, and it has become part of the baggage he carries on the road.
“Obviously, it gets in your head a little bit, and you try to come back a little harder to make that perfect pitch, and a lot of times that’s when you get hurt,” Mark Buehrle said. “On the road when you get booed, you expect that. But at home when you get booed . . . he’s out there trying his best and not trying to do bad.”
The next complaint out of Marte about the negativity will be the first. He says little, even to White Sox players and coaches. That could be one reason some teammates might still wonder about Marte themselves.
They want to tell you Marte understands the enormousness of the next 10 days for the franchise, that he possesses the mental strength to endure the next wave of pressure, that his next time on the mound the memories of last week will not paralyze him with fear.
But they cannot. That would require taking a leap of faith regarding Marte’s state of mind, an area that’s off limits to most everybody in the clubhouse.
He is known as a sensitive sort, the type of guy who quietly absorbed former Carlos Lee’s teasing last season but took the first opportunity to plunk him during a spring-training at-bat because he did not forget. Likewise, some of Marte’s late-season funk could be tied to remembering midseason rumors that the Sox were set to trade him to the Florida Marlins.
The more Marte shuts off from teammates, though, the harder it gets for him to shut down hitters.
“We talk to him, but sometimes it’s hard to talk to some people because they’re really closed off, closed-minded,” said Garcia, who has known Marte since they were briefly teammates in 1999 with the Seattle Mariners.
“Damaso’s not really stubborn, but he’s really quiet and doesn’t talk too much. Sometimes when guys are like that, it’s hard to help them.”
Talented but touchy
That has been Marte’s pattern almost since the day he was discovered by a Mariners scout as a raw 17-year-old with an electric arm in Santo Domingo.
Marte, who grew up poor idolizing former Dodgers pitcher Ramon Martinez, had been shining shoes and selling coffee on a street with his mother when he discovered an opportunity to try out.
The scout, Ramon De Los Santos, was sold on Marte after seeing him throw just four pitches. He signed him on the spot for a $4,000 bonus with incentives. Before long, Marte started turning heads at the Class A level as a starter.
“His arm was alive,” De Los Santos, who also discovered David Ortiz, recalled Monday on the phone.
In his first season as a starter, Marte averaged 8.2 strikeouts per nine innings due to a nasty slider and fastball. But even back then, minor-league manager Mike Goff, now in the Mariners’ front office, labeled Marte “a high-maintenance guy” and was quoted as saying, “You wonder if he wants to pitch.”
Guillen expressed similar concern last month when banishing Marte from the Sox after he was late one day in the midst of his struggles. It took a Marte apology to the entire team before he was allowed back in the fold.
“Every day in the playoffs, somebody is going to be a hero and a goat,” Guillen said. “It’s not like football or basketball, where you have to wait. It’s every day, and if he’s not strong enough to be mentally prepared to fail, he’s going to have a lot of trouble in this game.”
In the meeting between manager and player Sunday, Marte told Guillen he believed he still could get tough left-handers out well enough to help the Sox win the World Series.
“When you are a player and a professional, you have to remain mentally strong because if you don’t, you won’t get people out,” said Marte, almost as if he was reciting what Guillen told him. “I don’t think I’ve lost confidence because I think I have my command, my fastball, my slider.”
Pitching coach Don Cooper just wants Marte to stop thinking and start throwing again like the guy who had been one of the league’s most feared lefties the previous two seasons.
“More than anything, some of the mental things going on with him are choking the physical things,” Cooper said. “Damaso can be a little bit of a dangerous guy to the opposing team. As much as he’s struggled, I think when a hitter is in there facing him, he’s saying, `This Marte, he’s pretty good.’ Now if he can get back to the guy where we want to get, he’s going to be great.”
If not, Marte will hear about it.
———-
dhaugh@tribune.com
