Pedro in the Pantheon: Dominant Dominance in 2000

Baseball’s here and now is most notable for its almost uncouth levels of offense. Records fall and lose their luster. Benchmarks of yore are swatted into obsolescence. The time span of the typical game is more of the Cecil B. DeMille variety than of the Woody Allen. It’s a tumult, to be sure.

Almost overlooked in all this is an improbably scrawny Boston righthander who plies his trade as though a man out of time. Indeed, Pedro Martinez’s numbers for the 2000 season look as though they were culled from 1968: 18-6, 1.74 ERA, 217 innings, 128 hits, 32 walks, 284 strikeouts. That’s fine mound work in any era, but it’s particularly eye popping in today’s game, when runs are anything but dear. If we place his efforts in the context of time and place, we’re led by the hand to an inevitable question: Was Pedro Martinez’s performance in 2000 the greatest ever?

None of us is thunderstruck by the idea that Martinez is the greatest pitcher of today, but can we justly call his work last season the greatest ever?  Should we ask this question of a player whose ERA for the year in question was not in the top 100 of all time? Yes we can, and yes we should.

ERA, among traditional pitching measures, passes muster reasonably well, but, as is the case with any unadjusted, non-normalized metric, it can be only so instructive. To gain a sensible remove, we must consider that the American League ERA for 2000-4.91-is the third highest of the twentieth century. This should surprise no one who watched a day’s worth of scores roll across a ticker at night and was struck by the, well, footballishness of them.

To put Martinez’s ERA in perspective, we need to adjust it to take league performance into account, along with the moods of Fenway, where he made 13 of his 29 starts. The best tool for this is a statistic called ERA+, which is nothing more than a ratio of the park-adjusted league ERA to the park-adjusted ERA of the individual pitcher, with the decimal dropped for ease of expression. One important thing to note is that ERA+ is inversely proportional to ERA; a low ERA yields a high ERA+. Therefore, the higher Martinez’s ERA+, the more impressive is his season. ERA+ is scaled so that a value of 100 means dead average: the pitcher’s ERA+ is the same as the league’s park-adjusted ERA.

Pedro Martinez’s ERA+ for 2000 is 292 — 185 percent superior to the league average. This is the best ERA+ of the twentieth century (being a purist of the calendar, I’m counting 2000 as part of the twentieth century). Relative to league performance, Pedro Martinez’s ERA is the best of the past hundred years. The last and lone hurler to better Pedro’s mark was Tim Keefe in 1880 with an ERA+ of 294 (and an ERA of 0.86). Conditions in that era were so different from those of today that it is impossible to usefully compare the two stunningly dominant seasons.

Yes, Martinez’s season in 2000 was dominance unabated. The signposts are everywhere. In terms of keeping the opponents off the basepaths, Pedro was unchallenged in history. His combined walks and hits per nine innings was 6.636 the lowest ever. And this number is a straight measurement, not normalized to a league or an era. Despite working in one of the hitter-friendly eras in baseball history, Martinez’s was stingier with baserunners than every other pitcher, from every other era. But there’s more.

His raw ERA of 1.74 led the American League by a healthy margin. Just how healthy? Roger Clemens finished second, but his ERA of 3. 70 was closer to that of Rolando Arrojo, owner of the thirty-eighth best American League ERA, than it was to Pedro’s. In fact, taking a cue from ERA+, if we form a ratio of Clemens’s second-best ERA to Martinez’s loop-topping mark, we find that the resultant figure of 213 is the highest ever. No ERA league leader in the annals of the game has been so far ahead of his runner-up.

We also find that Martinez led the American League in a bevy of pitching categories in 2000: ERA (1.74), shutouts (four), strikeouts (284), opponents’ on-base percentage (.213), opponents’ slugging percentage (.259), fewest hits allowed per nine innings (5.31), fewest home runs allowed per nine innings (0.71), average versus lefthanded batters (.150), average versus righthanded batters (.184), average allowed with runners in scoring position (.133), strikeout-to-walk ratio (8.88) and quality starts (25). That .213 opponents’ on-base percentage is the lowest of the twentieth century. Yet there is still more that etches his season in sharper relief.

Pedro’s opponents’ batting average of .167 trumps the previous gold standard, .168, set by Luis Tiant in, appropriately, “the year of the pitcher,” 1968. Martinez’s 8.88 strikeout-to-walk ratio is the second lowest of the century, behind only Bret Saberhagen’s mark of 11.0 from his unheralded 1994 season. But if we look at the more enlightening proportion of strikeouts to walks plus hits, we find that Pedro’s mark of 1.78 is easily the greatest ever.

He also thrived in what should otherwise be troubling circumstances for a pitcher: he was 12-1 on the road, with a 1.66 ERA, a .190 on-base percentage, and a .213 opponents’ slugging percentage allowed.

His 18-6 record is somewhat underwhelming. However, Martinez’s ERA in those six losses was 2.44. If you ignore the small sample size, that ERA — taken only from games he lost — would have led the majors. If we take the park-adjusted league ERA and form a ratio this time to Pedro’s park-adjusted ERA from this past season’s losses, the yield is an ERA+ that would still rank in the top thirty of all time. Even in games he lost, he dwelt in rarefied air.

So did Pedro Martinez craft the greatest season of pitching ever? That the question can even be asked speaks volumes. A better query might be: How exactly is it that Martinez can perform at such unassailable level and not win an MVP in one of the last two seasons? It’s a farce and it bespeaks of the flaws of the award and our dreary, modern predilection toward offense. Even when we have recognized his excellence, we’ve given short shrift to a man who is pitching with the force of history.