New hall of famer Martinez dominated in Montreal, Boston
Pitcher headed to Cooperstown alongside ‘the Big Unit,’ another former Expo
MONTREAL — When I first heard Tuesday that former Montreal Expos pitchers Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson had been elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame (along with John Smoltz and Craig Biggio) I thought of a day in Chicago in the mid-1990s.
The Expos were in town for a series against the Cubs and I had stumbled on the huge Niketown outlet while taking a walk near the team hotel. I was gawking at a replica of Shaquille O’Neal’s size 21 shoe when I saw a smallish man buying so many shoes, it looked as though he was buying out the store. He had already assembled an enormous pile and he was going for more.
I went for a closer look. It was Pedro Martinez on a shopping spree.
“Geez, Pedro,” I said. “How many shoes can a guy wear?” Pedro laughed. “These aren’t for me,” he said. “They’re for kids back in the Dominican. Every time we come through Chicago, I get a certain number of shoes from Nike. That isn’t enough, so I’m buying more out of my own pocket. The kids back in the D.R. need shoes if they’re going to play ball.”
That was Pedro Martinez. A sweetheart of a guy, as long as you weren’t standing with a bat in your hand.
Ironically, Johnson and Martinez were both fireballers who threw hard and scared the bejeepers out of hitters, even though physically they could hardly have been more different. Martinez was listed at fivefoot-11, but that was only if he was standing on a bat — he’s more like five-foot-nine. Johnson, on the other hand, was a full six-foot-10, as scary a pitcher as the game has ever seen.
Johnson won 303 games and lost 166 in a 22-year career, but won only three and lost four before he was traded from the Expos. Martinez won 219 and lost 100 in 18 seasons and went 55-33 with the Expos before he was sent to Boston, where he won 117 games and, most famously, helped the Red Sox win a World Series in 2004.
Martinez was great in Montreal — but with the Red Sox in 1999 and 2000, he put up two of the greatest seasons in baseball history. In the first, he had 313 strikeouts and 37 walks. In the second, in 2000, he had a 1.74 earned-run average. The cumulative ERA for the rest of the pitchers in baseball that season was 4.78. No one, including Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Clayton Kershaw, has ever done it better.
Congratulations, Pedro. No one deserves it more.