Anthony Fenech

Detroit Free Press

Well, let me tell you, Patti Bixler says.

This is the absolute fondest memory of her older son, Victor Martinez, and she tells everybody this. And when his little brother Ryan Bixler tells people that ask him what kind of person his older brother is, he tells them this: That the night before his eighth brain surgery of the summer before his sophomore year of college, his older brother stopped by after his baseball game. But not just any game: his major league debut.

Before the game, Ryan was in excruciating pain. His parents didn't want to leave him alone in the hospital room all night, but Ryan told them to go. Because his older brother is Victor Martinez and he is starting at catcher for the Cleveland Indians.

It has been 12 years since the first of Victor Martinez's 1,668 hits.

This year, the Tigers' designated hitter hit .335 in 561 at-bats. He hit 32 home runs. He struck out 42 times.

His numbers are, in many shapes and sizes, those of the best hitter in baseball.

At 35, Martinez is still in shape, still bigger in the batter's box than his six-plus frame, menacing at pitchers with his mouthpiece, grinding them into 2-2 counts on six pitches and then he knows what's coming: Their best pitch, because they don't' want to go to a full count. And then there's a single to left. Double to right. Home run.

He is the heartbeat of a team hungry for the final course of a four-year meal of maddening missteps and he doesn't think about it every day because he has a lot of stuff going on, but he thinks about it, and he wants to win a World Series.

"Bad," he says, one day at his locker.

Every Tiger has a locker. At the top of every locker, there is a wood-stained compartment with a white English D on it.

Look around and you can see every one.

Every one except Martinez's, because it's covered up with pictures of his family.

Ask about his family and you might not get the answer you'd expect.

Victor Jesus Martinez doesn't know exactly when it was, but he thinks it was around 5 when he started playing baseball on a field behind his house in Venezuela, swinging a tin bat and playing shortstop with somebody else's glove.

He has a younger brother, David, an older brother, Carlos, and an older sister, Olga,

He loved Ozzie Guillen and the A's uniforms and this Mizuno baseball glove, but his family was poor, too poor for the glove. His mom played the lottery and one day said let's play these numbers and if I hit the lottery, I'll buy you the glove.

"Yeah right, Mom," he pointed out, "you never win" and sure enough, Margot Martinez hit the lottery — it wasn't much, he said — and she bought him his first baseball glove, a Mizuno.

He felt like he was naked, he said, except he was wearing a mask and catcher's equipment and a catcher's mitt and back in Venezuela, the pitchers threw somewhere between 88 and 90 m.p.h. and C.C. Sabathia was definitely not throwing 88-90 m.p.h. in this bullpen session and, "it was really not fun for me," Victor Martinez said.

He signed with the Indians for $8,000 in June 1996. He was 17. He played shortstop until that winter, when they told him he wasn't going to play shortstop anymore but here, throw this equipment on, play catcher and "I was ready to go home," he said.

But he wasn't going to do anything at home, his mom said, so keep trying and see what happens and how was he going to tell her, a nurse who double-shifted for years to put maybe $100 a week into a family of four kids, that he was going to quit because the Indians were moving him to a new position?

"I told myself that now is my time to do everything that she's done for us," Martinez said.

And so he put his equipment back on and after the opening game of the Mahoning Valley Scrappers' 1999 season, Patti Bixler will tell the story, her husband, Bob, says.

"She tells the best stories," he said.

"OK," Patti said.

"I had an old friend ask me if we wanted to host a baseball player and I was like, 'Oh, well oh, OK.'

"Because our oldest was going to the academy in July and I thought, well, that might kind of ease the pain.

"So, she said, come to the first game, so we went to the first game, we were supposed to have an American ballplayer live with us, but he chose to get an apartment.

"So we're standing there.

"We're talking to other people we know, I'm standing there and I see these four boys.

"So I talk to everybody.

"Obviously.

"So I go up to them. Only one spoke English, his name was Dennis Malave and I said, you know, where are you guys living? And he told me and how do I put it, we didn't think it was the best neighborhood, so I tell Dennis, I'm going to take you boys home.

"I turned to Bob, I said go home and get our van because we had a big van and I said, we're taking these boys home."

They took two of them, found the other two places to stay but shortly after the season started, Victor Martinez lost his translator when Malave got called up and Patti Bixler struggled with Martinez because he couldn't speak English.

"It was making me crazy," she said.

She started by making him signs, putting them on things around the house like the TV and cupboards and dishes, and at first, Patti said, "Every time Victor would talk to me in Spanish, I'd grab his face and I'd say, 'Victor, speak to me in English' and I'd say the word and he'd say it back."

And that was how he learned English that summer, from Patti Bixler in Warren, Ohio, while he learned the American way and catching and when he wasn't busy learning, he was busy worrying about C.C. Sabathia's fastball and he might not have known much English, but he knew enough about Sabathia's fastball that when he would see him throwing in the bullpen, "I just ran away from him," he said.

"I didn't even know how to say dad in English," he said.

But when he did, and when Victor Martinez first called Bob Bixler "Dad," that was when the Bixlers knew it went a little bit deeper than just host dad or host mom.

"It was pretty instant," Bob said.

They bonded over baseball at the dinner table and pool games in the basement and quickly, Bob became the first father figure in Martinez's life in a long time.

He didn't say much about it at first, but when Martinez was 7, his dad died of a heart attack.

And he doesn't say much about it now, only small things, softly, looking away as he punches the pocket of Ian Kinsler's glove.

"I was pretty little," he said. "I remember very little things about my dad."

And that's why his son, Victor Jose, is always at the park, like a semi-sized sidekick the way he follows him around.

"I never got a chance to be with my dad like that," he said.

His dad is in town for the weekend. It's his birthday on Saturday. They'll probably play pool. He'll probably lose.

He beat me once, his dad said. It took me like 100 games, he says.

"My dad is pretty good," he said.

Victor Jose Martinez is 10 years old.

He is named Victor Jose because Martinez had this friend named Jesus Mendoza he used to play ball with and Mendoza used to call him "Victor Jose" and Martinez used to tell him, "I'm Victor Jesus, not Victor Jose," but he did it to everybody, changed their names up a little bit and the more Mendoza said it, the more Martinez liked it.

"That name sounds good," he thought, and his wife, Margret, thought so, too.

He has two daughters: Maria Victoria, 7, and year-old Barbara Victoria.

"They're mumma's girls," Grandma said.

And Victor Jose, he's Victor's little buddy, she says: "He's his shadow."

He plays pepper with his pals before they warm up. He fields grounders before they take batting practice. He runs down balls while they take batting practice.

Patti Bixler always tells him he's going to be better than his daddy.

"He laughs, he's like but Grandma, my daddy, he's a major leaguer!"

Ryan Bixler doesn't remember if he was watching when Victor Martinez got his first big-league hit, a two-run single with two outs in the seventh inning, two strikes and the Indians down two, or if the TV inside his hospital room was even tuned to the game, though he thinks it probably was.

He just remembers that his older brother stopped by after his major league debut.

And when he did, Ryan, true to his word, told him that, "I'm an Indians fan now," and Victor Martinez said move over, he jumped in his bed and they started playing video games.

He doesn't remember which one because remember, he was in excruciating pain but it made him feel better, he remembers that, because he was probably beating his older brother at whatever video game it was.

Ryan is still an Indians fan, but he roots for the Tigers in the playoffs since the Indians don't make the playoffs and he can root for him here, in the fourth inning of a game earlier this month, because even though the game is tied, nobody is on base and "he can't really hurt us now," Ryan Bixler says.

His mom yells "Go Victor!" and she does it just when the crowd gets quiet and he hears her — "Every time," he says — and Patti Bixler's voice is raspy from years of yelling at his games and his dad, it's his birthday.

Bob Bixler is turning 58 on this September day and Martinez is hitting about .800 when his dad is there — "No, really," Ryan, 31, says — and his wife Margret, she just got here.

"Margret, come out here," his mom tells her, and "Victor's up" and then, she says, "damned if he didn't."

Victor Martinez crosses home plate, he pounds his heart, he looks up at his family and he takes the lead on his little brother.

And his little brother cheers because you can root for the Indians but you can't root against family.

Contact Anthony Fenech: afenech@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @anthonyfenech.

Today's wild-card game

Matchup: Oakland (88-74) at Kansas City (89-73).

When: 8:07 p.m.

Where: Kaufman Stadium, Kansas City.

TV: TBS.

At stake: The winner will face the Angels in the ALDS on Friday.

Still going strong

Only three players 34 or older in major-league history have hit at least .335 with 30 homers, 30 doubles, 100 RBIs and struck out fewer than 50 times:

1937

Lou Gehrig

The Iron Horse hit .351 with 37 homers and 37 doubles while striking out 49 times in 569 at-bats at age 34. It was his next-to-last full season.

2002

Barry Bonds

Baseball's career home-run leader hit .370 with 31 doubles, 46 homers and 47 strikeouts in 403 at-bats at age 37. (He also walked 198 times.)

2014

Victor Martinez

The Tigers' DH had his career year at age 35, hitting .335 with 33 homers and 32 doubles while whiffing just 42 times in 561 at-bats.