Pedro Martinez spent the late 1990s and early 2000s doing something that should not be physically possible: dominating Major League Baseball during the single most inflated offensive era in the sport's history.
We're talking about the steroid years, when guys who looked like they ate other guys were launching 50 homers a season and pitchers were basically human batting tees.
And yet there was this 5-foot-11, 170-pound string bean from the Dominican Republic making the best hitters alive look like they'd never held a bat before.
Let's talk numbers, because the numbers are genuinely unhinged.
He was basically playing a different sport than everyone else on the field.
He struck out 284 batters, walked 32, and gave up 128 hits in 217 innings.
Then there's the 1999 All-Star Game, where he struck out the first six batters he faced.
Not random scrubs — Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, the whole chemically enhanced Murderers' Row.
He carved them up like a guy who'd been told they were talking trash about his mother.
It remains one of the most electric moments in All-Star history, and it took him about fifteen pitches.
Boston hadn't won a World Series since 1918 when Pedro arrived.
The franchise was a psychological institution of suffering.
Then he shows up, wins the Cy Young in his first year, and drags that cursed organization to the 2004 title — the one where he famously came out of the bullpen on fumes and gutted through relief innings against Cleveland and New York.
He was the reason the whole thing flipped.
As the guy who once threw Don Zimmer to the ground during a brawl (which, to be fair, was incredible television).
As a punchline about "Who's your daddy?" from Yankees fans.
Meanwhile, every conversation about the greatest pitcher ever starts and ends with names who pitched in eras where the mound was higher and the hitters were smaller and slower.
Pedro did it in the hardest possible conditions, in the steroid capital of the world, in a bandbox ballpark, against lineups that would make modern pitchers request a trade.
He didn't have the longevity of some guys, sure.
But peak-for-peak, nobody has ever been better.
Not Nolan Ryan, not Roger Clemens, not anyone.
The Hall of Fame finally inducted him in 2015, which was nice and also about a decade late in terms of public appreciation.
He's now a beloved analyst who tells it like it is, which is basically the same energy he brought to the mound.
The man never pretended to be anything other than terrifying.
So here's the closing thought: baseball fans love to romanticize the past, but they consistently underrate the guy who beat the past's cheaters at their own game while weighing less than a large golden retriever.
Final Thoughts
And we should still be talking about him every single time someone brings up the best to ever do it.