Martinez goes off on strike zone cameras

Tuesday, July 29, 2003 | 9:04 a.m.

MLB Snapshot

Helton, a Tennessee native who turns 30 next month, is hitting .348, second in the NL to Albert Pujols (.376) of St. Louis. And he's on pace to drive in more than 122 runs, his average over those last five years.

This year, experiments (four-man rotation, slugger Adam Dunn hitting leadoff) doomed Boone. Cincy needs some pitching, because it has the worst ERA (5.43) in the NL. Monday, it needed two fall guys.

They are 54-50, within earshot of the wild-card contenders and begin a three-game series tonight in Philadelphia (57-47) before heading to NL East-leading Atlanta.

Add Pedro Martinez to the growing list of ticked-off pitchers who have lost their cool this season because of two new cameras.

Last Friday night at Fenway Park, Martinez, Boston's ace, tossed what would have been a gem if he hadn't missed the plate more than a few times and if the Red Sox had not been upended by the Yankees.

Like Curt Schilling of Arizona, Tom Glavine of the New York Mets and Greg Maddux of Atlanta, Martinez joined the ever-growing roster of hurlers who do not care for the QuesTec cameras.

Less-commonly known as the Umpire Information System, the cameras are run by QuesTec Inc., a publicly traded company founded by Edward Plumacher and based in Deer Park, N.Y.

The company's system of cameras and computers measures, within about an inch, whether pitches are balls or strikes. It also details spin and trajectory, and Fox has used the information for graphics on its television broadcasts.

In 2001, Major League Baseball signed a five-year contract with Plumacher. After games, home plate umps get a CD that shows how their calls compared to QuesTec. MLB wants at least 90 percent of its umpires' calls to match the machine.

That's the $5,000 camera that Schilling busted with a bat in Phoenix on May 24.

Next season, every park is scheduled to have the QuesTec system. This year, it has been installed in 10.

Martinez wishes Fenway weren't one of them.

His mid-summer simmer Friday turned to a boil -- with Boston leading -- in the seventh inning, after Derek Jeter worked him for a walk.

Martinez wagged his right index finger at home plate umpire Dana DeMuth. Then Martinez framed a box, emphatically outlining the right and left sides, and top and bottom, of a strike zone.

Finally, Martinez gestured with his glove hand toward DeMuth, imploring DeMuth to try his hand at hitting the zone.

"That's enough, Pedro," DeMuth said, according to the Boston Globe. "That's enough."

For showing up DeMuth, Martinez was extremely fortunate that he did not get tossed. As it turned out, the Bombers rallied against their favorite closer, Byung-Hyun Kim, for a 4-3 victory.

At least one longtime, Boston-based Red Sox follower admitted that he'd never seen Martinez so livid, but Martinez was his own worst enemy.

He fumed early and often, but replays on the partisan New England Sports Network showed that he was out of line. He griped about pitches that were clearly off the plate, and even NESN broadcasters had to swallow their pride upon seeing the tape.

When New York starter David Wells walked three consecutive batters in the sixth inning, some of those balls were closer to the plate than the ones that made Martinez bubble.

The Boston insider said it was a matter of a superstar not getting away with what he had gotten away with for so long. Pedro Rules.

"Just like (Michael) Jordan, who got his share of calls," said the Beantown source.

Maddux, by his infamous grimaces, has been just as frustrated with QuesTec, and Glavine weighed in two weeks ago after dropping to 2-7 at Shea Stadium, another yard that employs the system.

"I'm the poster child," Glavine told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution of his place on the list of QuesTec detractors.

C'mon, Tom, don't think that highly of yourself. Schilling earned that spot when he smacked that camera into the gap for a double.

Like Sports Illustrated, we endorse the QuesTec system -- even if it bruises a few egos and gets several cameras smashed.

It shaves an abundance of the subjectivity that goes into calling a game, which is incredibly apparent when a pitcher fumes but the replay shows that a ball was 6 or 8 inches outside or inside.

And DeMuth deserves a round of applause for doing his job very professionally Friday.

Too bad Martinez can't say the same thing.

That started with his first drag off a marijuana joint as a senior in high school in Compton, Calif., in 1974, just months before Philadelphia drafted him in the first round. In four years, he progressed to cocaine.

Two years after that, the Phillies won the World Series, and Smith had the money and connections to fuel his addiction. He went into rehab and regularly met with a psychiatrist, then he had a relapse after the '87 season.

Smith had spiraled into a marijuana fog in which he blamed John Schuerholz, then Kansas City's general manager, for blackballing him, and he bought a Taurus 9-millimeter pistol in a Spartanburg, S.C., pawn shop.

He pondered when and if he would ever take it to Kansas City and shoot Schuerholz.

"I was getting ready to do things I'd probably regret the rest of my life," Smith told the J-C. "I was thinking irrationally. I was at a point where I didn't care about a lot of things. I didn't care if I spent the rest of my life in jail or dead."

Smith said he owes his life to Dorothy, his second wife. He eventually hooked on with Atlanta, which hired Schuerholz as general manager, after Bobby Cox left that post to be the Braves' manager, in October 1990.

According to the J-C, Schuerholz never knew the degree of animosity that Smith felt toward him.

Insiders believe he became intensely passionate about his profession 20 years later, when his father, Juan, was killed by bandits in Caracas.

Florida reserve infielder Mike Mordecai, who played with Urbina in Montreal, said the Venezuelan whose first name is pronounced "OOO-get" feeds off that intensity.

"It's personal between him and the guy he faces," Mordecai told the Miami Herald. "He's got a lot of (moxie). He doesn't mind rolling the dice on the mound."

That should help the Marlins in their tight race for the NL wild card.