EDITOR’S NOTE: This excerpt from “The Franchise: Boston Red Sox: A Curated History of the Sox” is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org or TriumphBooks.com/FranchiseRedSox.
Following (almost) immediately in the footsteps of Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez could not have been more different than his pitching predecessor.
Clemens was a big, strong Texan. Martinez was a slight, lean Dominican.
Clemens had the classic power pitcher build, an imposing physical presence supported by two tree trunks for legs.
Martinez gave the appearance that a stiff wind might blow him over. His original organization feared that he couldn’tphysically withstand the demands of being a starting pitcher in the big leagues.
Clemens was prone to long, rambling answers, full of nonsequiturs and malapropisms. Martinez, raised to speakSpanish, worked to command the English language as precisely as his pitches and showed remarkable fluency with his second language.
But they were not without some similarities.
Each was fiercely proud and relentlessly competitive. Each could be stubborn and occasionally capable of a mean streakon the mound. Neither thought twice about sending pointed messages via his lethal fastballs.
And there was this: each could make a compelling case that he was the best starting pitcher in modern Red Sox history.
That one followed the other by just one season makes for a fascinating “what if” scenario: imagine the two had been teammates in Boston. How might that have changed the course of franchise history?
As it is, we’re left with this: from 1984 through 2004, a period of better than 20 years, the Red Sox had, in all but oneseason (1997), one of the two best pitchers the game has ever known.
Martinez, unlike Clemens, did not begin his career with the Red Sox. He was acquired in one of the more lopsided tradesin baseball history in November 1997, arriving via Canada, 11 months after Clemens had taken the reverse journey, spurningBoston for the Great White North, two pitching legends (nearly) passing in the night.
The loss of Clemens—and his subsequent brilliant first season in Toronto—may have led Red Sox GM Dan Duquette to pursue Martinez. Duquette had famously derided Clemens as being “in the twilight” of his career, only to have Clemens post one of his best seasons ever: 21–7, 2.05, a career-high 292 strikeouts, and the first of two consecutive pitching Triple Crowns.
Whatever the motivation, it was a brilliant trade. The Red Sox surrendered young pitchers Carl Pavano and Tony Armas for Martinez, fresh off winning the National League Cy Young Award. It marked the second time in his career that Duquettehad traded for Martinez—five years earlier, he had stolen him for the Expos, from the Dodgers.
Duquette had seen how much the Red Sox missed having a legitimate No. 1 starter in 1997. The only Sox starter to make 30 or more starts that season was Aaron Sele, who compiled a 5.38 ERA as the Sox finished fourth in the five-team AL East,20 games out of first place.
As a member of the Red Sox, Martinez was brilliant from the start. In 1998, he won 19 games and had a 2.89 ERA, good enough to finish second—irony alert—to Clemens in the Cy Young Award balloting. With the rotation bolstered by Martinez’s presence, the Red Sox won 92 games and reached the postseason for the first time since 1995 before being ousted by Cleveland in the division series.
In 1999, Martinez was even better, winning 20 games for the first time (a career-best 23) and posting a 2.07 ERA. The CyYoung Award was a given, but Martinez probably deserved the AL MVP award, too. He lost out when a voter from New York inexplicably left him off his ballot altogether.
That season featured two starts that, separately, captured Martinez’s obstinance and his brilliance.
In August, Martinez reported late to Fenway on a day in which he was supposed to start. Manager Jimy Williams, more than a little set in his ways himself, deemed this a violation of team rules and pulled Martinez from his scheduled start, replacing him with journeyman Bryce Florie.
Williams later inserted Martinez into the game and the tardy ace was the winning pitcher in relief. Afterward, Martinez expressed regret for not notifying the team that he would be arriving later than usual but was incensed that Williams had publicly embarrassed him.
“Jimy had to prove he was the boss,” said a seething Martinez, who had angrily confronted Williams in the dugoutover the perceived slight.
A month later, it was the New York Yankees lineup that was late.
In one of the more masterful pitching performances anyone could recount, Martinez throttled a mighty Yankees lineup that was headed for a second straight championship the next month. He allowed a solo homer to Chili Davis with two out in the second inning and then didn’t allow another baserunner the rest of the way, retiring the final 22 hitters he faced in succession.
He finished the night with 17 strikeouts, no walks, and one hit allowed.
It was, on paper, every bit as impressive as either of the 20-strikeout performances by Clemens, and given the qualityof the opposition, perhaps better. Neither the 1986 Seattle Mariners nor the 1996 Detroit Tigers were a match for the dynastic Yankee teams of the late 1990s. October saw Martinez come out of Game 1 of the ALDS after four shutout innings with an upper back/shoulder strain as the Red Sox fell behind two games to none in the series.
Gamely, the Sox battled back to take Games 3 and 4, and in the climactic Game 5, both teams came out swinging furiously. Boston and Cleveland combined for 15 runs in the first three innings, like two heavyweights intent on landing anearly knockout punch. When the Sox tied things in the top of the fourth, having already gone through two pitchers, they summoned Martinez in relief.
The moment the bullpen door swung open in right field at (then) Jacobs Field, a hush fell over the ballpark. In a matter of seconds, the crowd shifted from giddy to apprehensive. Until then, long-suffering Cleveland fans had felt good about their team’s chances. But even a depleted Martinez had the potential to derail the Tribe.
No one—likely not even Martinez himself—knew what to expect from the pitcher and for how long. He hadn’t appeared since Game 1 and was presumed out for the series, so the mere fact that he had been cleared to pitch at all caught most everyone off-guard.
If Martinez was harboring any self-doubt, he kept it hidden.
With every eye trained on him throughout the ballpark, he jogged n breezily from right field, not an evident care in the world.This was baseball’s biggest stage, the postseason in October, with his team embroiled in a winner-take-all elimination game.
But to watch Martinez head for the mound, you could have easily mistaken it for a spring training game in March.
Then, just as Martinez approached the infield dirt, he stopped at the edge of the outfield cross and met with first base umpire Durwood Merrill. A veteran of better than 20 years, Merrill was 61 and sported a considerable paunch. Minutes before he was to take his team’s fate in his hands on the mound, Martinez used those same hands to playfully rub Merrill’s belly, like someone rubbing a statue of Buddha for good luck.
If Cleveland didn’t already know it was in trouble, that should have convinced it otherwise. Limited by injury or not, Martinez was making sure everyone knew that he was not doubting himself.
What followed was a brilliant display of pitching. This wasn’t vintage Pedro by any stretch—his fastball barely reached the high 80s—but Martinez was an artist that night, masterfully keeping the ball out of the middle of the plate and confounding a mighty Cleveland lineup that had scored a staggering 1,009 runs—the most by any team since in almost half a century— during the regular season.
Martinez relied heavily on breaking pitches and his changeup and spun six shutout, hitless innings.
“When you’re in that situation,” Martinez would tell MLB.com years later, “do or die, whatever resources you have, you have to use. And that’s how I felt. I felt like I had to use every resource that I had. What was amazing was that the Indians never realized that I was hurt. They thought I was going to be the 98-mph guy that they were used to seeing and I never changed my approach and neither did they. It was changeups, breaking balls, little cutters, changeups, and my velocity was never there.”
His heart and head were, however. That, combined with an altered delivery—Martinez lowered his arm angle to reduce the pressure on his ailing lat—was more than good enough. Meanwhile, a three-run homer from Troy O’Leary in the seventh snapped an 8–8 tie and sent the Sox on to a 12–8 series-clinching victory and an ALCS date with the Yankees.
Technically, this would be the first time the Red Sox and Yankees had ever met in the postseason—the fabled 1978 game was actually an extension of the regular season—but the Sox weren’t in the same class as their rivals, falling in five games.
Still, the one game the Sox won was, naturally, started by Martinez, who managed to easily outpitch—who else?— Clemens. By then, the discomfort Martinez felt in the back of his shoulder had greatly intensified to a stabbing ache. Despite what he would later say was “the worst pain I’ve ever pitched in during a game,” Martinez somehow managed to toss seven shutout innings, allowing two hits while striking out 12.
It would be the only Boston win of a one-sided series. But it would stand as evidence—if anyone still needed it—of Martinez’s fierce will to compete, his mental toughness, and his artistry as a pitcher. After two straight trips to the postseason, the 2000 season saw the Red Sox as a franchise regress. They finished just four games over .500, and the year was seen as a major disappointment.
Except, of course, for Pedro, who enjoyed a season for the ages. At a time when offensive production was at record levels across the game—due, in part, to the rampant use of PEDs—Martinez put up numbers that looked like they could have come from the Dead Ball Era. In 29 starts, he was 18–6 with a 1.74 ERA and 284 strikeouts in 217 innings. His WHIP was a cartoonish 0.737, the lowest in baseball history.
No stat, however, captures Martinez’s dominance that season better than ERA+, or adjusted ERA. Designed to consider more variables—such as ballparks and opponents—it seeks to put a pitcher’s performance into the context of its era.
That season, Martinez’s ERA+ was 291, meaning he was 191 percent better than the MLB average that season. Historically, that was the best ERA+ recorded for a pitcher since 1900.
In other words, to put it in terms that are less analytical and more easily understood, Martinez was otherworldly and completely without peer that season.
