Wednesday night saw the greatest pitcher of my lifetime begin what will likely be his last season of pitching in the Major Leagues. Pedro Martinez, the most dominating pitcher of the last 20 years and, arguably, in the history of the game, won his 215th career game by throwing five innings for the Philadelphia Phillies while giving up three runs and striking out five.
Martinez doesn't have 300 wins the magic number to get into the Hall of Fame. He is not the prototypical 6'4", 225-pound pitcher that we see on the mound today. As someone who's stood next to him, I can say he's lucky if he tops 5'10" and weighs 165 pounds soaking wet. But if you look only at the surface of Martinez you don't get the sense of what a dominating pitcher he has been.
In the late 1990s, Martinez had some of the most amazing seasons a pitcher has ever had. In his last season with the Montreal Expos in 1997, Martinez had a 1.90 ERA with 13 complete games in an era in which complete games had gone the way of the dodo bird.
After the 1997 season, Jim Beattie '76 traded Martinez from the woods of Canada to the birthplace of America, Boston. It was with the Red Sox that Martinez really made a name for himself. From 1998 through 2003, Martinez went 91-28 and never posted an ERA above 2.89. He led the American League in ERA four times and struck out nearly 1,500 batters. He did all this during the steroids era when guys like Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez were pumping their veins full of performance-enhancing drugs.
Even these impressive numbers don't fully capture what it meant for Martinez to be on the mound. Go back to the All-Star Game in Boston in 1999, one of Martinez's most famous performances. He pitched the first two innings of the game for the American League and struck out Barry Larkin, Larry Walker, Sammy Sosa and McGwire consecutively. A batter reached on an error before Martinez struck out Jeff Bagwell and the runner was caught stealing second to end the inning. These were some of the most formidable hitters in the game, and this was the year after McGwire and Sosa had their famous chase for the home run crown.
In 1999, in quite possibly his most memorable performance ever in a non-All-Star game, Martinez came in for the final six innings of Game 5 of the American League Division Series against the Cleveland Indians. Battling an injured back, Martinez did not give up a single hit and led the Sox to victory.
Yet these stories only tell you what he did on the mound. They don't describe the aura and the respect that surrounded Martinez in his prime.
When Martinez was traded to the Red Sox, there was intense excitement. I remember exactly what the front page of the Boston Globe looked like on that day. Martinez's performances caused this excitement to grow. It got to the point where four out of five games, people would go to the game to see the Red Sox but on that fifth day, people would go to the game to see Martinez. On these days the Globe would print the Sox box score in both English and Spanish, so Martinez's fellow Dominicans could read the score in their language. At times, the Globe even published an article in Spanish. The rest of the team took a back seat while Martinez worked his mastery.
And what mastery it was. Here was this short skinny man firing fastballs at 95 miles per hour, with oddly long fingers that allowed him to make the ball move like no other pitcher in the game. He threw a curve ball that would make opposing hitters' knees buckle. His changeup may be the best the game has ever seen. And he could throw all these pitches wherever he wanted.
During Wednesday night's Red Sox telecast, the Red Sox announcers got around to talking about Martinez. One of the commentators was Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley.
"I'm not in the same category as [Martinez]. . . . He's one of the all time greats," Eckersley said.
Eckersley also said that Martinez was the greatest pitcher he had ever seen. Coming from a Hall of Famer, this certainly says something not only about Martinez's talent, but also about the great respect that everybody in the game has for him.
Watching Martinez on Wednesday, you could see that he had lost a lot of his stuff. His fastball was 90 to 92 mph and his curveball had lost some of its bite. His changeup still had its incredible movement, but at 79 mph, it was not the same pitch that it once was. Nevertheless, I couldn't help be reminded of the old Martinez, the masterful Martinez. You could still see that confidence on the mound. He still had those Jheri curls sticking out from under his hat, and if I squinted really hard I could convince myself that his red Phillies uniform was really a Red Sox uniform and that I was watching the Martinez of old the Martinez who was the greatest pitcher that I have ever seen.
