In the batting cages at Dodgertown, wrapped in catcher's gear, staring through horizontal bars, pelted by hard and undeveloped sliders, Russell Martin still knew.
He had left third base at the passing suggestion of it, not because he didn't like it there, where the air isn't clogged with quite so much dust or mayhem.
They told him a big league journey of a thousand contusions began with a single squat. He believed them.
Martin could not have known it, but he was becoming a symbol of a new Dodgers organization, rebuilt from the bottom up. He did not mark the beginning of it, or the best of it, or even the last of it. He was just a good kid, adequately skilled, with a malleable psyche and a rigid spirit.
He held that new mitt as steady as he could while a Dominican right-hander named Jose Diaz, big enough that everyone called him Jumbo, became his first battery mate.
In the weeks that followed, Martin graduated to intrasquad games on the back fields, where coaches such as Jon Debus, Travis Barbary and Dann Bilardello observed from a screen set up a few feet off his heels. When his half-innings were through, he sat beside them, and they asked him about pitch selections, talked him through in-game quandaries, then patted his shoulder and sent him out again.
It was the fall of 2002. Martin, raised in Canada, had been drafted that June from Chipola Junior College in Marianna, Fla. He'd gone in the 17th round, following better-known prospects James Loney, Greg Miller and Jonathan Broxton, among others. But it didn't matter to him.
"Every year I played, I was trying to make the big leagues right now," he said. "It never felt far away."
From the toehold of those afternoon games, half an inning catching, half an inning listening, an organization pushing from behind, it was 3 1/2 years.
"I saw him have some tough nights," said Terry Collins, then the Dodgers' minor league field coordinator. "He went to the backstop a lot of times. \o7A lot\f7 of times. But he stuck with it."
Dan Evans, the general manager hired during the 2001 season, had arrived at Dodger Stadium to find a flawed, pricey major league roster, with $210 million in guaranteed salaries spread through future seasons, and a farm system ranked 28th out of 30 teams by Baseball America.
