Pedro
Page 19
My brother Ramon (right) helped me keep my 21-year-old head on straight in 1993, when I spent nearly all of my rookie season as a reliever for the big-league Dodgers. After the season, the Dodgers bet against my future and traded me to the Expos. They lost that bet.
Focus On Sport/Getty Images
Felipe Alou, who played amateur baseball briefly with my father, always had my back as my manager with the Expos. In Montreal, he helped me find myself and mature into a complete pitcher.
AP Photo/Paul Chiasson
Life was sweet with the Expos.
Panini America
When I began my big-league career as a starter in 1994 with the Expos, I had an explosive fastball but my control was erratic—and as a result, I hit a few batters.
Focus on Sport/Getty Images
Usually batters were charging me, but I completely lost it in late September 1996 after the Phillies’ Mike Williams threw a couple of pitches at me during my at-bat. The brawl was a doozy—check it out on YouTube. I began the next season, 1997, with a suspension but ended it with my first Cy Young Award.
Major League Baseball
Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette, who also traded for me when he was Montreal’s GM, welcomed me to Boston in November 1997. I told Duquette after the second trade that I was a goner after my first year in Boston because I wanted to be a free agent. Then the Red Sox made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Boston Globe/Getty Images
Once catcher Jason Varitek understood how I wanted to attack hitters, he and I became a lethal combination throughout my peak seasons with the Red Sox, including my two Cy Youngs in 1999 and 2000.
Boston Globe/Getty Images
In between starts, I could get a little chatty in the dugout.
Kuni/Boston Herald
My pitching coach Joe Kerrigan always had lots of theories about how he thought I could be better. Here I am not listening to one of them during a mound visit.
David Maxwell/Getty Images
I wanted to put on an unforgettable show at Fenway Park for the 1999 All-Star Game and I did, striking out five of six National League batters, including Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. I won MVP of the game honors.
Bill Belknap/Boston Herald
On September 10, 1999, I threw one of my best games, a 17-strikeout, one-hitter against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. I didn’t feel good that night. I had a bad cold, plus I was cranky because my pitching coach Joe Kerrigan had given me grief for skipping the pitchers’ meeting.
Jim Mahoney/Boston Herald
Any start against the Yankees was a big deal when I was with the Red Sox. But when it was a Martinez/Clemens matchup, the game was touted as a heavyweight bout—even though we were never in the ring at the same time.
Boston Herald
Gerald Williams of the Devil Rays, the first batter I faced in a September 2000 game, thought I hit him intentionally with a pitch. What was he thinking? I’m sure he regretted going after me the instant he got tackled by a fast-charging Jason Varitek.
AP Photo/Steve Nesius
A half-inning before all hell broke loose and Don Zimmer charged me at Fenway Park in Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS, I gave the Yankees’ Karim Garcia an earful after he made a spikes-high slide at our second baseman, Todd Walker.
AP Photo/Charles Krupa
I have so much respect for the older generation. My one regret in baseball is that during Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS when Don Zimmer charged me, cursing my mother, I wish I had turned the other cheek and run away, letting him chase me around Fenway Park.
AP Photo/Newsday, Paul J. Bereswill
Yes, Grady Little surprised me by asking me to keep pitching in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS against the Yankees. But I’ll take the blame for the final outcome. Those runs I gave up to the Yankees are on me, not Grady.
David Bergman/Corbis
Yankees fans always worked extremely hard to make sure I could hear exactly how they felt about me, but I had no problem shutting them out or turning the negativity, like “Who’s your daddy?” chants, into a positive.
Mike Segar/Reuters/Corbis
I never knew what the “three little midgets” Manny claimed to have in his head would make him say or do next. Manny being Manny was basically one big, mischievous, and completely unpredictable kid.
AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Curt Schilling and I didn’t hang out with each other off the field, but when we were teammates in 2004, we talked a lot of baseball. Our approach and styles were completely different. One technique of mine he picked up in 2004 led to his ankle and “bloody sock” injury.
Marc Serota/Reuters/Corbis
I urged the Red Sox to sign my friend David Ortiz after the Twins released him. They listened, and the rest is history.
Brian Snyder/Reuters/Corbis
My “idiot” teammates used to toss my little friend, Nelson de la Rosa, around like a football, but they never hurt our team’s 2004 postseason good-luck charm.
European Pressphoto Agency/Al Bello
This is Curt, David, and me filming our Disney World commercial right after we won the 2004 World Series in St. Louis. I began singing an off-script ditty that was used in the spot.
AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
I couldn’t believe the throngs who showed up in Boston for the victory parade after we won the 2004 World Series. Even though I got conked on the head by a baseball that somebody tossed at me, I barely felt it.
AP Photo/Bizuayehu Tesfaye
Team owners John Henry and Tom Werner look on, concerned perhaps about what Kevin Millar, the biggest “idiot” from our group of 2004 Red Sox Idiots, might say during a 10-year anniversary bash at Fenway Park.
Chitose Suzuki/Boston Herald
Signing with the Mets in 2005 meant I was reunited with bullpen coach Guy Conti, my “white daddy” from my days as a minor leaguer with the Dodgers. Guy taught me my changeup, so I owe him a lot.
AP Photo/Gregory Smith
This was such a Mets moment: the sprinklers went off at Shea Stadium during a start in June 2005.
AP Photo/Frank Franklin II
Especially on the days I started, tending to my flowers was how I relaxed and made the time go by as fast as possible before it was time to leave for the ballpark. Here I’m at home in Westchester, New York.
Pedro Martinez Collection
Carolina and I were married in 2006. We began dating when I was with the Red Sox and she was at college in Boston.
Pedro Martinez Collection
My Mets career was tempered not only by my own injuries, but also my father’s battle with brain cancer. He lost his fight in July 2008, around the same time my own passion for playing the game began to fade.
Pedro Martinez Collection
I finished my career in 2009, pitching the final half of the season as a Phillie. The last start of my career, No. 423, was a World Series game at Yankee Stadium.
Drew Hallowell/Getty Images
My mom, Leopoldina, and I embraced after the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery unveiled a painting of me by my friend Susan Miller-Havens in 2011.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
In the summer of 2014, I was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame. The class was peerless (left to right): Red Sox radio broadcaster and dear friend Joe Castiglione, Roger Clemens, Nomar Garciaparra, and me.
Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald
After a couple of years of retirement, I got too antsy to stay home all the time. The Red Sox hired me and I got back on the baseball field, giving back to the game and teaching young pitchers all that I knew about pitching.
AP Photo/David Goldman
18
Alpha Male
IN 2000 I was the alpha male of the American League.
I was in command. I knew every hitter, I knew what to expect, and I knew what to do. Anything I needed, I provided.
I had settled into Boston finally—I knew where I was, and that I belonged there.
&nbs
p; Of course, there were one or two bumps along the way in 2000, but everyone had begun to realize that was part of the package with me. I continued to be a magnet for flare-ups and misunderstandings, but I could flick them away and produce results that have yet to be topped.
My numbers from 2000 tell a different kind of story.
When I played, I paid zero attention to my numbers. I knew others were keeping track, and I knew that my numbers were good, but nobody told me how good.
Now I understand how numbers help tell my story.
There are two ways to look at ERA: the standard way and adjusted.
My plain old ERA in 2000 was 1.74, a full quarter-point less than in 1999 (2.07) and less than half that of my next closest competitor, Roger Clemens in Toronto at 3.70. The average ERA in the American League in 2000 was 4.92—the highest it had been since 1996 (5.00). You’d have to go back to 1936 (5.04) to find a higher league average, and that one was a blip. From 1994 through 2004, a span known as “the steroids era,” offense ruled the day. Runs, home runs, slugging percentages, total bases—the offensive numbers from back then bulge off the stats page like a flexed biceps, and the league averages in ERA swelled accordingly.
That’s where the adjusted ERA statistic—also known as ERA+—comes in handy. ERA+ takes into account not only the league averages of the time but also the ballpark a pitcher pitches in. If a pitcher who pitches half his games in Coors Field, a hitter-friendly ballpark, has the same ERA as someone pitching in a pitcher-friendly ballpark like Shea Stadium, then the Colorado pitcher has a higher (better) adjusted ERA. The baseline for adjusted ERA is 100. In 2000 my ERA+ was 291, 48 points higher than it was in 1999 and 72 points higher than 1997. My 291 ERA+ is the highest single-season ERA+ of the modern era. The only other pitcher to post a higher one was Tim Keefe, who reached 293—in the dead-ball era 120 years earlier, back in 1880.
I led the league in strikeouts in 2000 with 284, which was a dip from 1999, when I had 313, but I dropped my walks total almost in half, from 67 to 37. I pitched 217 innings in 2000, 3⅔ more innings than in 1999. My drop in walks improved my strikeout-to-walks ratio from 8.46 in 1999 to 8.88 in 2000.
I decreased my hits allowed from 160 to 128, which on a hits-per-nine-innings basis meant a drop from 6.8 in 1999 to 5.3 in 2000.
That 0.923 WHIP I had in 1999, which was just a hair better than 1997’s 0.932? I shaved it down to 0.737 in 2000. Nobody’s ever had a lower single-season WHIP than that in baseball history, not even Tim Keefe (0.800 in 1880) and other dead-ball legends such as Walter Johnson (0.7803, 1913) and Christy Mathewson (0.8268, 1908).
In 2000 American League hitters averaged .276 at the plate with a .349 on-base percentage. Against me, they hit .167 and got on base at a .213 clip—each is an all-time single-season record, in both leagues. Batters’ OPS against me was .473.
After pitching five complete games in 1999, I pitched seven in 2000, four of them shutouts. I had 13 complete games and four shutouts in 1997 with the Expos, but it’s important to remember that I was pitching in the National League, where the lack of the designated hitter always means an easier time for every starter.
Starters have less control over their wins total than any other stat, another fact worth considering with my 2000 season. For some reason, our hitters in 2000 struggled. In a season when the average team scored 5.3 runs a game, the second-highest rate since 1938, Boston’s offense managed just 4.89 runs, 12th worst in the league. And the Red Sox hit even less on days when I pitched. My average run support was 4.51 runs a game, more than a run lower than the 5.68 runs a game I got in 1999. My record in 1999 was 23-4. In 2000 it sank to 18-6. In those six losses, we got outscored 63–20, while I lasted an average of eight innings and posted a 2.44 ERA.
Those were my numbers. They resulted in my third unanimous Cy Young, the last Cy of my career. There was no AL MVP drama attached to my season at the end of 2000: our team wasn’t good enough, and there were some boppers that I couldn’t overshadow. I wish I had some postseason stats I could have tacked onto all those numbers, but my team was entering a three-year October drought.
In March 2000, the Red Sox played an exhibition game against the Astros in Estadio Quisqueya in Santo Domingo. Ramon and I each pitched an inning, but the game fell short of my expectations. Tickets were priced so high that the average Dominican could not come close to affording it, and the stadium was about 4,000 shy of its 18,000 capacity. What could have been a great opportunity for Major League Baseball turned into something of a disappointment, one that I felt reflected poorly on US-centric MLB.
“I don’t think people get the right image in Boston about what the Dominican Republic could be,” I said after the game. “The biggest difference between the Dominican Republic and the United States is that we are so free. We are so relaxed, not so [uptight] all the time. We are not so caught up in the economy and in time. If we are poor, we live life poor and happy.”
I won my first four starts in 2000 and was in the process of winning my fifth when I bumped into more ignorance about what it means to pitch inside.
We were back in Cleveland and had lost the first two games by one run apiece. I started the series finale, and unlike my last appearance at Jacobs Field, I was able to use my fastball. Through my first seven innings, I had not allowed a run, just five hits, and struck out 10, and we had a 2–0 lead after Mike Stanley hit a solo home run in the top of the seventh off of Charles Nagy.
I aggravated Einar Diaz and the rest of the Indians in the bottom of the seventh inning. Einar had hit two doubles in his first two at-bats, and I thought he looked a little too comfortable in the batter’s box. I backed him off the plate with a first-pitch curveball. Diaz fouled off the next pitch. That’s when I backed him way off the plate with a fastball near his chin. Just business. We shouted a few jabs at each other before we got back to business. On a 2-and-2 count, Einar called for and received time from the umpire just as I was going into my windup. I was truly pissed then and with my next pitch threw a fastball right by him for the strikeout that left Einar cursing at me as he walked back to the dugout.
Even though I had not hit Diaz, I wasn’t surprised when Nagy hit José Offerman, the first batter of the eighth, with a pitch. José must have been surprised, though, because after taking a step or two toward first base, he veered toward Nagy. He never reached him, but it sparked a punchless scrum that concluded with a warning to both benches that a zero-tolerance policy for hit batsmen was in effect.
One Indian, pitcher Scott Kamieniecki, got really bothered that I stayed in our dugout at first when the “fight” broke out.
Naturally, I had to respond, and I wanted to be sure that I responded like a professional. I surveyed the Indians’ lineup coming up in the bottom of the eighth: Roberto Alomar, Manny Ramirez, David Justice, Jim Thome, and Travis Fryman.
Roberto and Manny were my friends, but I thought it would be too obvious if I skipped over those two to get to Justice or Thome or Fryman—people would think that I was trying to hit the American guy and take it easy on the Latin guy. That would have been unprofessional. So I said to myself, You know what, they hit my second baseman, I’ll hit their second baseman.
I was not worried about my shutout or our slim lead—I had to protect my hitter. So I hit Roberto right in the butt with a fastball. Perfect timing, perfect location—my command was on that day. Even though Roberto told me later that I did the right thing, he and the rest of the Indians cried about me hitting him, and I got ejected right then and there.
Frank Robinson was in charge of discipline that year, and I got his attention. He slapped me with a five-game suspension. Talk about being hardheaded and talk about being aggressive—nobody was more hardheaded and aggressive as a player than Frank Robinson. But he had the hammer then, and he wanted to use it on me more than anybody else. I hit Alomar on the butt cheek. Was that bad? Was that unprofessional? I had to protect my hitter. That’s how baseball works, or at least that’s how it is supposed to.
On May 28, Roger Clemens and I faced each other again, this time in Yankee Stadium, and this time Roger was a lot more on his game than he was in the 1999 ALCS at Fenway. I woke up that day with a high fever. I didn’t eat all day and had a splitting headache when I took the mound. My nose was so stuffy, I was making a mess on my face after throwing some pitches.
We traded zeroes the entire game up until the ninth inning. To that point, Roger had given up just three hits and I had given up four. He had 13 strikeouts, and I had eight. He was outpitching me until Trot Nixon hit a two-run, two-out home run in the ninth inning. That left it to me in the bottom of the ninth, which I began by hitting Chuck Knoblauch with a pitch. Then I gave up a single to Jeter. Not a promising beginning, but after I got Paul O’Neill and Bernie Williams out, Jeter stole second, and then I hit Jorge Posada to load the bases. Tino Martinez grounded out to end the game.