The Pedro Express

Jason Michael Barker

Pedro Martinez is the best pitcher in baseball.

Roger Clemens? Injured. Greg Maddux? ERA approaching five. Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Kevin Brown? Martinez has out performed them all this season.

Just how good a season is Pedro Martinez having? Better than his stellar 1997 with Montreal, when he played half of his games in a park which favors pitchers. The fact that he's getting the job done in Boston's Fenway Park, a moderate hitters' park, makes his numbers thus far all the more impressive.

After striking out "just" nine batters in each of his first two starts, Martinez has fanned at least ten in each of his last seven outings, including two games with 15 strikeouts and one with 13. Including his winning start over the Yankees Tuesday night, he's fanned 102 batters in just 66.2 innings pitched, or just over one and a half strikeouts per inning.

He leads the majors in wins (8), strikeouts (102) and quality starts (9), is second in ERA (1.89), and he leads the American League in innings pitched (66.2). So far ahead is he in the strikeout department that he has more K's than the next two pitchers combined in the American League (Dave Burba and Bartolo Colon combine for just 95, seven short of Martinez).

But now on to my point. Last season, the world watched as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa assaulted one of baseball's most sacred records -- that of 61 home runs in a season. Pedro Martinez has a chance this season to eclipse a record which isn't nearly as well known, but is no less impressive.

The year was 1973, and a stellar young fireballer by the name of Nolan Ryan was pitching for the California Angels. Ryan was coming off of a fabulous 1972 season, in which he started 39 games, winning 19, and struck out a league-leading 329 batters while posting a 2.28 ERA in 284 innings.

That year was just a glimpse of things to come, however. In 1973, Ryan pitched a now unimaginable 326 innings (26 complete games out of 39 starts), and struck out a Major League record 383 batters, one better than the old record of 382 set by Sandy Koufax just eight years prior.

What am I getting at here? That Pedro Martinez has a chance to take a run at this incredible mark of 383 strikeouts, right here in 1999.

Of course there's no way Martinez is going to pitch 326 innings, as Ryan did in 1973 (or even 275 innings), but he doesn't have to, because he's averaging more strikeouts per inning (1.53) than Ryan did in 1973 (1.17) when he set the record.

At his present K rate, Martinez would need to pitch approximately 250.1 innings this season to reach 383 strikeouts. That would be a new career high in terms of innings pitched, but it isn't an unreasonable figure by any stretch. Based on 35 starts, 250 innings works out to just over seven innings per start.

However, we already know that he's over one-fourth of the way to the record, so we can fine tune our calculations a bit. As it stands, he's 281 strikeouts from the record through nine starts. Assuming 26 more starts at 7.1 innings per start, he'd need to fan 1.47 batters per inning to tie the mark. If we bump our assumption up to 7.2 innings, the number drops to 1.41, and if we assume a full eight innings per start, he'd need 1.35 strikeouts per inning.

All of those marks are well above Pedro's career strikeout rate, and slightly above his career-high 1997 mark, and unfortunately I don't enough historical data sitting around to know if such a strikeout rate is a reasonable feat over 200 innings, much less the course of an entire season. However, Randy Johnson did maintain a K rate over 1.35 for both the entire 1995 and 1998 seasons, so it has been done.

One more record...

Much of the baseball world has been captivated by the play of Arizona's Luis Gonzalez, who had a 30-game hitting streak going for himself before going 0-for-4 against the Giants Wednesday. The late Joe DiMaggio's 56-gamer back in 1941 is perhaps the most sacred of all baseball records, and it's particularly fresh in our minds with Joe D's recent passing.

Personally, I was hoping Gonzalez wouldn't break the record. Although he retired long before I was born, DiMaggio is my favorite old-time baseball player, and it would be a shame to see his greatest achievement eclipsed, although you have to admit that those final few games would have stirred up a ton of frenzied interest and excitement.

I realize that as a player, DiMaggio has been vastly overrated. He wasn't deserving of the title "Greatest Living Ballplayer" when he was alive, and his career numbers pale in comparison to those of Ted Williams and Willie Mays. Still, he's a Hall of Famer, and for many people he symbolized baseball and the way the game should be played, as well being an American icon.

Luis Gonzalez is, well, Luis Gonzalez. Although I have nothing against him as a person or as a player, he simply does not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the great DiMaggio.

about the author

On the bad advice of an old link, Jason Michael Barker has invested heavily in asbestos. Fortunately, it will serve him well when he opens the mail of Diamondback fans who read this. He's at jmb@strikethree.com.