Pedro Martinez on Chris Sale: ‘I see myself’
Hall of Famer sees a path back
FORT MYERS, FLA. >> Earlier this week, Chris Sale told the Herald that other than his own family, Pedro Martinez is probably his biggest fan in the Red Sox organization.
The Hall of Famer agrees, but explains that it goes deeper than that; he also sees them as kindred spirits, even twin flames.
“Every time I see him, I see myself,” Martinez says.
Anyone who’s seen the 6’6″ Florida lefty and 5’11” Dominican righty discussing a bullpen session may have some questions.
“I came to Boston pretty much with the same hype and same kind of expectations,” he explains, “I was also skinny.” Classic Pedro quip.
Famed Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda was among those who thought Martinez was too small to be an MLB starting pitcher, and relegated him to the bullpen in the early years of his big-league career.
“I can totally relate to everything that goes on with . From the moment he got here, the competitor he was. I knew about him, though,” Martinez said. “He was no stranger to anybody about what he was doing and what he intended to do when he got to Boston. And he actually did it really well. And we got a championship with him, and he’s just a warrior out there. That’s exactly who I was. So everything he does, and the way he approaches the game is very common to the way I used to be.”
Sale came to Boston in a blockbuster trade with the White Sox. Between 2010-16, he threw 1,111 innings with a 3.00 ERA, 1.065 WHIP, and the ability to limit home runs (2.5%) and walks (5.8%) while putting up towering strikeout numbers (27.9%). Opposing batters hit .224/.280/.352 against him during his
South Side days. In 2012, he began a streak of seven consecutive All-Star seasons that stretched into his first two seasons with the Red Sox.
Martinez arrived in Boston in 1998, the reigning National League Cy Young with the gone-but-not-forgotten Montreal Expos. 1997 had been his second consecutive (and second career) All-Star season, and he’d led MLB with a minuscule 1.90 ERA and 0.932 WHIP, plus 13 complete games; nowadays, a pitcher getting through one complete game in a season is something to write home about.
By the end of the 2000 season, Martinez would have two more Cy Young Awards. He came close to four in a row; in his first season in Boston, he finished runner-up to Roger Clemens, who’d left the Red Sox for the Blue Jays two years prior.
Sale also finished as the AL Cy Young runner-up in his first Red Sox season. After leading MLB with a 2.45 FIP, 214 1/3 innings, and a career-high 308 strikeouts, his first (and thus far only) 300-strikeout season, he came in second to one of his new teammates this year, Corey Kluber.
Watching Sale pitch, “It’s like I’m watching myself in another body frame and in another person,” Pedro says, “But the attitude on the mound, the way he approaches the game, how aggressive and intimidating he is, is pretty much how I used to be.”
But he acknowledges one key difference, too, “I was never very very very vocal out here where the media would probably find out, but inside the clubhouse I was, I was someone that took pride in keeping everybody together, keeping everybody as a unity, and Chris Sale does that as good as anybody in baseball.”
Leadership comes in many forms. Down 4-0 in the seventh inning of Game 4 of the 2018 World Series, footage of Sale screaming and swearing in the dugout went viral on social media. “That kind of lit a fire under everybody, we didn’t wanna see him mad anymore,” Brock Holt said after the Red Sox came back to win the game.
The four seasons since that championship haven’t been kind to Sale. After he signed a five-year, $145 million extension (with a vesting option for 2025) with the Red Sox before Opening Day in 2019, he’s made 36 starts for a grand total of 195 2/3 innings. All but 48 1/3 of those frames were before his April 2020 Tommy John surgery.
Though the southpaw returned to the mound in August 2021, his career has since been derailed several times more, first by a rib stress fracture that pushed his 2022 debut to July, then a fractured pinky in the first inning of his second start, and finally, a broken wrist that ended his season before he could return. This is his first “normal” spring training since 2019.
“He got hurt, I’ve been there. He’s had success. I’ve been there,” Martinez said.
Martinez never had Tommy John, a common surgery in today’s game, but he understands what it feels like to be a competitor whose body won’t let him compete. During the 1999 postseason, Martinez’s strained back injury and incredible emergency relief appearance were a focal point of Boston’s latest attempt to reverse The Curse. The hip, calf, and hamstring injuries that plagued his Mets and Phillies tenures began occurring when he was about Sale’s age (he turns 34 in March).
Chris Sale is Pedro Martinez’s guy, and vice versa.
Set the last few seasons to the side for a minute and consider what a powerful duo they are: one of the orchestrators of the greatest comebacks in sports history, and a pitcher currently attempting to mount a comeback of his own. Jedi Master and Padawan is a fitting descriptor for the pitcher who once wore a Yoda mask in the Fenway dugout.
“I’ll tell you, I absolutely love him dearly,” Martinez says. “Like he says, I’m a big fan. He’s not wrong when he says I’m probably his biggest fan here, because I am, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m a fan of someone. But if that someone is going to be like Chris Sale, I’m extremely proud to be his fan.”
There’s something Martinez wants fans to understand, too.
“I can relate to his struggles,” he reiterates, “Physically, mentally, I can totally relate to everything else. I just hope that many more people will probably stop to think about him as a human being.”