Joe Reina

Security walked Nick Martinez out of Yankee Stadium when he was in college. Practice had been canceled, so he and his roommate went to a Yankees game against the Red Sox early, had too many, got loud, and got removed. Here is the line he uses about it now. "Next time I was at Yankee Stadium I was pitching." Tonight he starts Game 1 of the World Series for the Tampa Bay Rays. Understand how far that is. He was not a pitcher in college. He played the infield at Fordham, five miles from that stadium, and hit .295 over 148 games. He pitched in relief 15 times and gave up more than five runs every nine innings doing it. Texas took him in the 18th round in 2011. Four years in the Rangers rotation and it never clicked. In 2017 he went 3 and 8 with a 5.66 ERA and they took him off the 40 man roster that December. Adrián Beltré, who is in the Hall of Fame, had already pulled him aside and told him to stop thinking of himself as an infielder and commit to pitching. Martinez says he was not receptive. So nobody in the majors wanted him and he went to Japan, partly just to stop living under the threat of being cut loose every week. Here is how that started. In the entire 2019 season he pitched four innings. Four. All year. Then he rebuilt his changeup over there using pitch data and an odd grip with two fingers in a V, and it turned into the best pitch he has. In 2021 for the SoftBank Hawks he went 9 and 4 with a 1.60 ERA and 138 strikeouts. "We could talk for an hour about how Japan changed my career." San Diego signed him in 2022. Cincinnati gave him 26 million dollars. In June of 2025 he came three outs from a no hitter. Tampa Bay signed him last winter for one year, and he made the All-Star team and finished the season with a 3.10 ERA. Now the part that complicates it. He is 36 years old. He has never been anybody's ace, he has bounced between starting and the bullpen his whole career, and Texas was not wrong about the pitcher they had in 2017. He is 61 and 63 for his life. But look at what happened in October. In the game that sent Tampa Bay past the Yankees, Nick Martinez pitched three and two thirds innings and gave up two runs. He did it in that building. Then he won Game 4 of the ALCS, one run in five and a third. Here is what people in that clubhouse say about him. His manager calls him everybody's biggest cheerleader. His catcher says he is the guy you go to for anything. The second baseman from Belen Jesuit in Miami who got escorted out of Yankee Stadium takes the ball tonight in the first game of the World Series.