| Brady Martinez as a Sun Devil. |
Sometimes life just doesn’t go where we expect it to.
And that is just as true for Brady Martinez as it has been for anyone else.
Four years ago when I first interviewed him he had just completed a successful season as the quarterback for Carbon High’s best football squad in 50 years and was in the middle of a pitching run for the Dinos that would lead to the schools first state baseball championship in a half a century.
At the time he had decided he was going to play baseball for Dixie State College the next year and would like some day to “play for the Dodgers.”
The Los Angeles Dodgers that is.
The 3A baseball championship his team won that year changed the course of his life as he went north instead of south the next fall, to play baseball for the University of Utah. For two years he labored on the mound for the Utes before he went on a mission for his church.
When he returned he found that the Utes program had changed and a former coach at Utah was now at Arizona State, in the PAC 10, a much stronger baseball league than the Mountain West. His former coach wanted him to come to Tempe to play, and so he went south to much warmer temperatures and what has turned out to be a much hotter college baseball career too.
Martinez has found his mark at the Sun Devil school. While with the Utes he had compiled a 6-4 record with eight saves, and had a 4.44 ERA. Not bad.
Oh, yeah. He was also named all Mountain West second team his sophomore year.
But things are even better now. Not only is he playing for a lot bigger school in a much bigger league, but his stats are out of this world. As of April 9 he was 3-0, with an ERA of 2.49. In the 25 innings he had pitched he has struck out 35 batters.
That puts him as the league leader in strikeouts. and that’s in a league where the teams actually play near Dodger Stadium.