You can see the statue on First Avenue near the homeplate entrance to Safeco Field. In your imagination you can see it, that is. It's a stocky ballplayer with the forearms of a lumberjack, a massive jaw and the look of total concentration in his eyes. It is the year 2020, and a thirtysomething dad is sharing an umbrella with his young son. (It's Seattle, remember.) He's reading the inscription on the base of the statue: "Edgar Martinez ... 'Gar' to his teammates ... His Loyalty to our city, Dedication to the game and consistent Excellence helped us fall in love with the game ... Seattle's First Baseball Hero."

The father then begins to tell the son the story of Edgar.

He tells of how, when other superstars left Seattle for more money, you never read more than a few words in the papers about Edgar's contract. And you never read, even when he was putting up one monster season after another, that he was in a walk year or wanting to see what else was out there. "He married a gal from Bellevue," the father says. "One of the sportswriters fixed them up, and he never wanted to leave after that." He tells the son that Edgar, even though he grew up in Puerto Rico, became a local and kept a boat docked on Lake Washington. "Even spent his winters here," the father says.

"And the things this guy did to be such a great hitter." The father tells his son how, whenever Edgar got a new shipment of bats, he'd take each one out of the box, place it on his own digital scale and mark it with a magic marker, because he didn't trust the scales at the factory, and every half-ounce was critical. And how he'd use a slightly heavier bat in batting practice than in a game.

"Used to lift weights after every game, too," the father says. And he tells the boy how Edgar only smiled when Jay Buhner teased him, calling him GNC, after the vitamin store, because of Edgar's daily diet of protein supplements, multivitamins and fish oil tablets. "They also called him a computer geek, because he was always on the Internet researching diet and nutrition. But he smiled at that, too."

Late in Edgar's career, the father explains, people learned that Edgar had been hitting .322 or better for six straight seasons, with all kinds of doubles, home runs and RBIs, despite a problem with his eyes that kept them from working in unison. "So every day, Edgar would do 30 minutes of eye exercises," the father says. And he talks about this chart Edgar carried with him that looked like a picture of two vertical lines of Life Savers, red on one side, green on the other ... and how he once heard Edgar explain that he had to stare between the lines until he was looking at a brown Life Saver ... and how tedious these exercises were, but how Edgar said, "I was told these exercises would be my only chance to keep the problem from getting worse. So I do them every day."

"And there was a great debate about whether Edgar deserved to get into the Hall of Fame," the father says. "Because he spent most of his career as a designated hitter." And then the dad gets a little annoyed: "A lot of people didn't even remember that Edgar was a good third baseman. But when he ripped his hamstring in an exhibition game in '93 and missed almost the whole season, his manager, Lou Piniella, didn't want to risk playing him in the field anymore because they needed his bat in the lineup.

"And that's not even getting into how the Mariners buried him in Triple-A for a few years." The father's yelling now. "Even though Edgar hit .329 at Calgary in '87, they sent him back there in '88 so he could hit .363 ... and then when he gets off to a slow start in the big leagues in '89, they sent him back there again! The old, lousy Mariners cost him 500 career hits, easy. Sometimes I'm amazed Edgar was even around in '95, when we beat the Yankees in the division series. With our backs to the wall, he hit a game-winning grand slam in Game 4, then a game-winning double in Game 5. We don't win there, son, who knows if we even have a baseball team today.

"And then came 2001," the father says, getting teary-eyed. "The Mariners had their greatest season ever. They had all these veteran players and, well, they thought Edgar was a god. Even though he was a quiet man, they all said, 'It's Edgar's team.'" The father then remembers the Mariners catcher, Dan Wilson, saying, "The hardest thing in baseball is to be consistent. When you watch what Gar does every day, you realize why he is the most consistent hitter in the game. From his diet to his eye exercises to his weightlifting, he leaves nothing to chance, and he never takes a day off. He's a rock."

And a hero in this town.

This article appears in the July 23 issue of ESPN The Magazine.