Big Papi Bio

Reader Kevin F. alerts me to the April issue of Boston magazine. It includes excerpts of a biography written with the Herald's Tony Massarotti. It's due out April 17, according to Amazon (which also informs us that Flo "has a 3282 batting average"!).

As though we didn't have enough reasons to love Pedro Martinez:

After the 2002 season ended, I knew there was a chance I was not going back to Minnesota. I never thought it would happen the way it did. I was released. Not long after that, I was out to dinner at a restaurant in the Dominican named Vesuvio when I ran into Pedro Martinez and his cousin. We started to talk. Pedro made a call to Jack McCormick, the Red Sox's traveling secretary, and I think Jack called Theo Epstein. It didn't take too long for Epstein to call my agent, Fernando Cuza, and before I knew it we had a deal.

What if Pedro hadn't made that phone call, bro? What if I had signed somewhere else? What if I didn't get the chance to play in Boston, where people are as crazy about baseball as they are in the Dominican?

And:

After we won the World Series, the whole city was going crazy. People were yelling out our names everywhere we went and we all felt like heroes. The day we had the parade we took the duck boats through the streets in downtown Boston. When we drove off the road and pulled into the Charles River, I looked at everybody and I was like, "How is this going to float, dude?" It was really cold outside and I don't really like the water, so I put on a life vest. Everybody cracked up.

I've always been surprised that there hasn't been any kind of Pedro bio. There are a couple of short books written for pre-teens and teenagers, but that's it.