FG on Fox: A True Myth About Pedro Martinez
By the time you are voted into the Hall of Fame, you gather as many urban legends as legitimate accolades: Babe Ruth called his shot, Harmon Killebrew was the model for the MLB logo, Wade Boggs drank 64 beers on a flight once. It has been said that peak Pedro Martinez had four pitches and each was the best of its type in baseball. Legit or legend?
The current crop of Hall of Fame inductees are the first that have any data that give us any hope of answering this question. The PITCHf/x era is said to have started in 2007, and that is indeed when the numbers linking individual pitches to their outcomes begin.
Unfortunately, it’s not very instructive to say that Martinez’s changeup had the 42nd-best swinging strike rate among the 78 pitchers that threw at least 300 changeups in 2008. Pedro was 38 years old that year, and though he pitched over 100 innings, by wins above replacement it was the worst effort of his career. Not a great time to test the legend.
Over at FanGraphs, though, we have Baseball Info Solutions data back to 2002. That year, Pedro won 20 games and had probably the third-best season of his career. He was 31, and it wasn’t his best year, and the numbers come to us from humans rather than computers, but it’s the best we can do with available statistics.
Here’s how Pedro’s change, curve, and fastball did that season by swinging strikes. Whiffs are not the only way to judge a pitch, but they are what we have on hand currently — and the pitcher never had an above-average overall grounder rate, so it’s not likely his individual pitches were elite by that measure either. By whiffs at least, he was comfortably above the league’s averages with those three pitches.
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With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Maybe 2002 was Pedro’s third best season, although I would put 1997 ahead of it because he went deeper into games but his stuff that season was a full step and a half down from his peak-peak seasons. He didn’t come back from his 2001 shoulder injury as the same guy stuff-wise and then kept declining thereafter as his arm angle got lower and lower. The 1999-2000 version of Pedro, yeah, I’d say he had three of best pitches in the game. There were others who great fastballs along with him but none better when taking into account movement, command and velocity. As amazing as his changeup was, I liked his curveball better. Hitters could layoff his change for balls or fight it off but Pedro’s curve was so sharp and went for strikes so often that very, very rarely did they ever do anything off it. The effective efficiency of his curveball was incredible.
My changeup was better than Pedro’s!!!
By ’02, Pedro didn’t throw a slider but would mix in a cutter. As you saw, it wasn’t really a swing and miss pitch for him but something he seemed to throw more often to left-handed hitters. I’m not sure if it was the shoulder injury in ’01 that caused him to make the change, or if it came earlier. And as Stephen pointed out, come ’02 Pedro’s stuff was post-peak and using it as a means of debunking the myth seems disingenuous.
I had no choice, 2002 was the best season for which I had data.
If you go by pitch f/x value, Felix had the most valuable sinker, 2nd most valuable change, and 4th most valuable curve in the majors. Although, if you group 4-Seamers, 2-Seamers, and Sinkers together into a “fastball” category with no distinction between I believe he ends up 6th. In any case, I think you could argue Felix having 3 top-5 pitches this past season.
I purposely used stats that ignored balls in play noise, which the pitch type values do not.
I don’t think you debunked the claim that he had the best pitch in baseball of 3 pitch types.
You used data from *arguably* his 3rd best season (I’d say it was his 4th best), and the conclusion was that he had 3 top 5 pitches. Is it really that much of a jump to think that in what many consider the best pitching season of all time (1999), those pitches were all slightly better and he actually did have the best fastball, changeup and curve ball in the league?
The myth was that he had the four best pitches in baseball. And you might have noticed in the title and the path my piece took that I found the truth in the myth more interesting than the fact that his slider was never the best slider in baseball.