Pedro Martinez: The Peak That Redefined Dominance

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Pedro Martinez's career in numbers, centered on his 1999 and 2000 seasons in the highest-scoring era in decades, with context on what 2.07 and 1.74 earned run averages meant and what the numbers cannot show.

In 1999 and 2000 Pedro Martinez posted earned run averages of 2.07 and 1.74 in the American League, in seasons when the league as a whole allowed about 4.9 earned runs per nine innings. The second-best ERA in the league was 3.44 in 1999 and 3.70 in 2000. The gap to second place was 1.37 runs in 1999 and 1.96 runs in 2000, margins that ERA races almost never produce.

That pair of seasons is the center of a career that was 219-100 with a 2.93 ERA and 3,154 strikeouts, three Cy Young Awards, and a Hall of Fame election in 2015 with 500 of 549 votes. Martinez was 5 feet 11 inches and 170 pounds by the historical listing's, small for a pitcher who threw so hard and so well, and he pitched in an offensive era that makes his numbers read as if they came from a different sport. The rest of this article follows the career in phases and explains what the figures meant at the time.

Manoguayabo to the Dodgers

Pedro Martinez was born on October 25, 1971, in Manoguayabo, in the Dominican Republic. His older brother Ramon was already pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Pedro signed with that organization as a teenager. Innings in this article are written in baseball notation, where .1 means one third of an inning and .2 means two thirds.

He made his major-league debut on September 24, 1992, at age 20, and pitched 8 innings in two games that year with a 2.25 ERA. In 1993 he spent his first full season in the Dodgers' bullpen. He appeared in 66 games, went 10-5 with a 2.61 ERA, and struck out 119 batters in 107 innings, a rate of about ten per nine innings that was unusual for a reliever then. After the season the Dodgers traded him to Montreal for second baseman Delino DeShields.

Montreal: the rise

The Expos gave him a starter's role and he became a front-line pitcher with them. The record for those four seasons:

The first three seasons were good, with ERAs a little better than the league and strikeout totals that rose each year. The fourth was an outburst. In 1997 he led the National League with a 1.90 ERA at a time when the league average was about 4.20. He struck out 305, with Curt Schilling's 319 the only higher total in the league, and he won the National League Cy Young Award. Greg Maddux, whose career profile covers a very different kind of pitcher, was second in the NL ERA race at 2.20.

Martinez was also a pitcher who batted in Montreal, which makes his hitting line one of the odd entries in the database: .099 for his career, 43 hits in 434 at-bats, 190 strikeouts. National League pitchers hit, and Pedro was no exception. That changed when he moved to the American League, where the designated hitter meant he seldom batted.

Boston: the peak, 1998 to 2000

The Expos could not keep him. After the 1997 season Montreal traded him to Boston, and the Red Sox signed him to a long contract. The three seasons that followed are the ones this career is built on.

In 1998 he was second in the American League ERA race to Roger Clemens, 2.89 to 2.65. In 1999 he won the pitching Triple Crown: 23 wins, a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts, leading the league in all three, and he won the Cy Young Award. He also won the All-Star Game MVP at Fenway Park that July. In 2000 he won the ERA title again at 1.74, with the Cy Young Award, and his strikeout rate was about 11.8 per nine innings in a league that averaged far less.

The league ERA column in the table above is calculated from the historical team totals. It shows how far above his peers he was working: in 1999 he allowed 2.79 fewer earned runs per nine innings than the league average, and in 2000, 3.17 fewer. His 1999 strikeout rate of about 13.2 per nine innings was extraordinary for any era, and in 2000 it was about 11.8. Randy Johnson, the other great pitcher of the time, struck out 347 in the National League that year, the only higher total in the majors; his career profile fills in the other side of that pairing.

Five ERA titles and the distance to second place

An ERA title says a pitcher was the best in his league that year. The margin says how much better, and Martinez's margins are the cleaner way to appreciate him. He won five ERA titles, and in each one the pitcher in second place was a different, respectable starter.

The 1997 race was close to a contest of equals, since Maddux was one of the best run preventers of the decade. The 1999 and 2000 races were not contests at all. In 2000 the runner-up was Clemens, a pitcher with seven Cy Young Awards, and he finished almost two runs behind. These are the margins that make a reader pause on the page, and they are why the 1999 and 2000 seasons are the ones people use when they argue about the best pitching seasons of the modern game.

The figures also show how much of his career value was concentrated. Between 1997 and 2003 he won three Cy Young Awards and five ERA titles, and he did it while missing time in some of those years. That concentration is why his career win total of 219 looks modest next to the 300-win pitchers of earlier generations, and why a candidate with fewer wins still went into the Hall of Fame with more than 90 percent of the vote. The voters were rewarding the height of the peak, not the length of the career.

The offensive era he pitched through

To see what those numbers meant, put them beside the scoring environment. In 1999 major-league teams scored 5.08 runs per game and hit 1.14 home runs per team game, and in 2000 they scored 5.14 and hit 1.17. For comparison, the 2025 season was at 4.45 runs and 1.16 home runs per team game. The late 1990s were a period of heavy offense, with two new clubs added in 1998 and hitters who swung for the fences. Records such as Barry Bonds's 73 home runs in 2001 come from the same environment, and the American League of 1999 and 2000 had a designated hitter to make life harder still on pitchers.

A 2.07 ERA in that league is therefore worth much more than the same ERA in 1968, and this is the logic behind the adjusted statistics that fans see on player pages. The historical record does not carry ERA+, which compares a pitcher's ERA to the league's and adjusts for park, but the comparison is easy to make by hand: divide the league ERA by the pitcher's ERA. In 1999 that is 4.86 over 2.07, about 2.3. In 2000 it is 4.91 over 1.74, about 2.8. Official adjusted figures that account for park effects differ somewhat from this rough division, so treat the numbers as a guide and not as published ratings.

What the strikeouts meant

His reputation rests on a combination of velocity, a changeup and a breaking ball, and the ability to place all of them. The historical record has no pitch data, so this article cannot describe his pitch mix in numbers, and it does not try to. It does show command: over a career he allowed 760 walks and 2,221 hits in 2,827.1 innings, a WHIP of 1.05, and 3,154 strikeouts against those 760 walks is a ratio better than four to one.

He also kept the ball in the park in a home-run era, allowing 239 in his career, about 0.76 per nine innings. In his peak years the strikeout totals show what an at-bat against him looked like: 313 in 1999, 284 in 2000 and 305 in 1997. His 213.1 innings in 1999 were a modest workload by the standards of earlier decades, so the dominance came without the volume that older aces piled up.

Injuries and the later Red Sox years, 2001 to 2004

Shoulder trouble cut the 2001 season to 18 games and 116.2 innings, though he still posted a 2.39 ERA. The next two seasons were another strong pair. He went 20-4 with a 2.26 ERA in 2002 and 14-4 with a 2.22 ERA in 2003, leading the American League in ERA both years, which gave him five ERA titles in all (1997, 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2003).

The 2003 season ended in a way Red Sox fans remember: in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Yankees, Martinez was pitching in the eighth inning with the team ahead, and the Yankees tied the game that inning and won it in the 11th. The 2004 season was the payoff. His ERA rose to 3.90, but the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918, and Martinez was on the roster as one of the top starters. His postseason line in the database is 6-4 with a 3.46 ERA in 16 games, 14 of them starts, over 96.1 innings.

The Mets and the Phillies

After 2004 he signed with the New York Mets. He pitched 217 innings in 2005, going 15-8 with a 2.82 ERA, and was an All-Star in 2005 and 2006. The next three years were hard. He went 9-8 with a 4.48 ERA in 2006, made only five appearances in 2007, and finished 5-6 with a 5.61 ERA in 2008. The Mets franchise history tells the story of the club he pitched for in those years.

He returned in 2009 with the Phillies, pitching 44.2 innings over nine games with a 5-1 record and a 3.63 ERA, and that team reached the World Series and lost it. His last regular-season game was September 30, 2009. The all-star list in the database shows eight selections: 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2006.

The Hall of Fame and the legacy

Martinez appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2015, his first year of eligibility, and received 500 of 549 votes, with 412 needed. That is about 91 percent. He went in the same year as Randy Johnson. The Red Sox retired his number 45 that summer, and in the Dominican Republic he is treated as one of the great figures of the sport.

His career totals in a few lines: 219 wins and 100 losses, a .687 winning percentage; a 2.93 ERA; 46 complete games and 17 shutouts in 409 starts; 3,154 strikeouts in 2,827.1 innings. Three Cy Young Awards in 1997, 1999 and 2000, with the first in the National League and the other two in the American League. One Pitching Triple Crown. One All-Star Game MVP.

What the database cannot tell us

The historical record is a record of counting statistics, and it has real limits for a pitcher like this. It has no pitch velocity, no spin rates, no swing-and-miss rates and no pitch-by-pitch data, because those were not recorded in the 1990s in a form the database holds. It has no wins above replacement, which would put his seasons on a common scale with position players. And the Negro Leagues rows for 1920 to 1948 are not relevant to a pitcher of his era.

What it can do is compare him with his peers year by year, and on those terms there is little doubt. For the leaders pages, the player search and the Hall of Fame page for pitchers, the site has the tools to check any of the figures above.

Common questions

How many Cy Young Awards did Pedro Martinez win? Three: 1997 with Montreal in the National League, and 1999 and 2000 with Boston in the American League.

What was his best season? The usual answer is 1999, when he won the pitching Triple Crown with 23 wins, a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts. His 1.74 ERA in 2000 was lower, and many people consider it the best season of run prevention of the era.

Was he elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot? Yes, in 2015, with 500 of 549 votes.

Did he win a World Series? Yes, with the Red Sox in 2004. He also pitched in the 2009 World Series with the Phillies, a loss.

How many strikeouts did he have? 3,154 in his career.

Where to go next

To compare Martinez with the other great pitchers of his generation, read the profiles of Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux and Ken Griffey, one of the great hitters of the same years. Parents and coaches of young players can start with the guide to coaching T-ball and coach-pitch.