With a cool demeanor and a hot bat, Montreal-raised Dodgers catcher Russell Martin is an All-Star favorite whose coming-of-age story could be straight from a novel

	Boosted by a Dodgers campaign, Martin led NL catchers in All-Star votes -- and he could become a perennial pick. Jeff Gross/Getty Images

By Michael Farber

The Los Angeles Dodgers orchestrated a campaign to get Russell Martin elected as the National League's starting All-Star catcher. The push included a rally at Dodger Stadium, promotional T-shirts and bilingual stickers emblazoned with VOT FOR RUSSELL! and VOIX POUR LE RUSSELL!, a gimmick that might have helped lift Martin past Paul Lo Duca of the New York Mets -- Martin led by 120,000 votes as of Sunday -- but certainly cut into the high school French teacher support. Of the four French words on the sticker, two were misused. Not to go all Flaubert on your derrière, but voix, as vote, works only as a noun. And to insert an article before his name and call him Le Russell implies, like the Donald, there is something pompous about a player who does not have an ounce of pretension on his 5' 10", 210-pound frame. Martin is the good-natured son of a Franco-Manitoban mother and an Anglophone Quebecer father, a bilingual 24-year-old who learned his baseball in the middle-class district of Montreal called Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. When he first heard of the clunky translation during the Dodgers' three-game series in Toronto last week, he groaned, chuckled and bolted from the dugout in search of a team official.

Martin was going -- what are les mots justes? -- to break some Balzac.

If the campaign stickers were lost in translation (the Dodgers later corrected their French), the All-Star balloting nonetheless made clear that the baseball world has identified a new cornerstone catcher. Maybe manager Grady Little's analogy of Martin as Seabiscuit, a West Coast thoroughbred who didn't get much initial attention, was valid three weeks ago, but the presumptive All-Star turned into Northern Dancer when he was greeted by seven Canadian television outlets at a press conference before the Blue Jays' series opener.

The encomiums pour in. "The guy is an offensive player, a defensive player, a runner," Arizona Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin says. "He's very aware at a young age of how the game is played. He'll be a multiple All-Star, in my opinion. He does everything." Colorado Rockies bench coach Jamie Quirk, a former major league catcher, says he would take Martin as the first player, even ahead of New York Mets shortstop Jose Reyes, if he were starting a team. "I'd been trying to convince the Dodgers for two years that they had a little Pudge Rodriguez on their hands," says Texas Rangers reliever Eric Gagné, the former Los Angeles closer who attended the same sport-and-study Montreal high school as Martin. "I don't know if he'll win 10 Gold Gloves, but he has a chance to become that [good]. He's got a perfect body, sets a perfect target and is really, really quiet back there. Already he's one of the best at calling games." In Martin's 192 games since joining the team in May 2006, manager Grady Little and pitching coach Rick Honeycutt have found reason to carp about pitch selection perhaps five times. "That," Little says, "speaks volumes." Martin also is a formidable offensive presence, at least by the scaled-down expectations of his grinding position. Through Sunday he had eight home runs. He also led National League catchers in hits (72), runs (42), RBIs (47), stolen bases (13), walks (28), slugging percentage (.454), on-base percentage (.359), games (71) and, presumably, names. He has five. He is, formally, Russell Nathan Coltrane Jeanson Martin.