Nearing the End of the Road

By Jack Flynn
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008

There’s always a danger in writing a column like the one I’m about to write. Pedro Martinez is pitching tonight, after all, and he may make these words look very foolish in the light of day.

Bold statements have a way of coming back to bite those who make them, but it needs to be stated anyway – Martinez is just never going to fully recover from the shoulder injury that robbed him of the 2006 postseason and most of the 2007 regular season. All your worst fears about his future have come true, whether you want to admit or not.

The great Pedro of the late 90s and early 2000s is gone for good, replaced by a valiant but ultimately pedestrian warrior who can no longer be counted on for anything more than league-average performance. At this point, the Mets would even welcome mediocrity from Martinez, who has pitched at a level far below that in 2008.

It’s a shame to speak in such stark tones about a man whose greatness has always transcended simple description. Even now it is hard to refer to Martinez solely by his last name, as journalistic protocol dictates. The more familiar “Pedro” has become so ingrained and singularly recognizable in the minds of baseball fans, in an admiring and iconic fashion that few athletes will ever know.

But he is no longer Pedro, the sublime performer whose peak seasons between the ages of 25 and 30 were perhaps the best for a starting pitcher in baseball history. He is more appropriately referred to as Martinez now, the former ace who is still struggling to get his career back on track after the type of shoulder surgery that has killed the careers of many pitchers before him.

A generation ago, a torn elbow ligament routinely sent pitchers to a premature retirement, before a man named Dr. Frank Jobe came along and revolutionized the treatment for such an injury. (What, you thought Tommy John was a surgeon as well as a starting pitcher?) No such panacea exists for the treatment of rotator cuff injuries, a series of muscles in the shoulder that support the violent overhand motion featured by baseball pitchers.

The simple and sad truth is that few players ever recover from this type of shoulder injury. A pitcher’s range of motion is usually compromised for good, and he cannot throw as hard or as often as he once could. Martinez’s injury is described as a right rotator cuff tear in the Mets’ media guide, but contemporary reports have also referred to it as a torn labrum. Regardless of the exact nature of the injury, it has been nearly two years since Martinez went under the knife to get his shoulder fixed. In retrospect, it’s hard to be surprised by the results on the field.

He has made only 11 starts in the last two years, giving up 75 hits in just 58.3 innings. Only one of his six starts in 2008 has met the Bill James definition of a quality start (a Game Score of 50 or higher) and Martinez has been knocked around in each of his last two starts.

He never looks dominant anymore, even when he’s pitching well – as one watches Martinez there’s always a sinking feeling that a big inning is lurking just around the corner. For me, it really locked in on Friday night against the Yankees, as Martinez struggled to keep up with Sidney Ponson in the nightcap of the two-stadium doubleheader.

Martinez bobbed and weaved to keep the Yankees off the board in the first three innings before getting touched for two runs in the fourth. Then in the fifth, Derek Jeter stepped to the plate after an infield single to lead off the inning. Martinez just couldn’t put Jeter away after getting the count to 2-2, at which point the Yankee shortstop fouled off three straight pitches before working out a nine-pitch walk.

The old Pedro would’ve put Jeter away easily, because the old Pedro had enough of an arsenal to put anyone in baseball away at any moment. But this version of Pedro Martinez couldn’t do it, and ended up allowing two more runs in the inning before ultimately taking the loss.

Yes, I know that Martinez told reporters over the weekend that he may have been tipping his pitches, but that’s a familiar refrain for any pitcher who has had a sustained run of unexpected poor performances. I believe it when I see a similar run of success, now that Martinez will surely have his glove closed when he throws the changeup.

Martinez is in the final year of the long-term contract signed after the 2004 World Series, and I’ve been surprised by how any people expect the Mets to resign him after the season. The Mets may well do so, but it doesn’t mean that it would be a good idea. It’s painful to watch a baseball immortal pitch as a shell of his former itself, and I fear the Mets and their fans will know only disappointment if they bring Martinez back for the 2009 season.

Sure, Pedro Martinez could go out and pitch seven shutout innings against the St. Louis Cardinals tonight. His fastball might consistently reach the low 90s, his curveball might bend and bedazzle the Cardinal sluggers and he may walk off the mound with a wide smile at the conclusion of his night’s work, reveling in the feeling that he has finally turned the corner.

Then tomorrow, everyone else will be writing their “Pedro is back” column, while I will look like a short-sighted reactionary, fodder for a snide comment or two on the message boards and in the blogosphere.

Come what may, and for what it’s worth I hope I am terribly wrong about Martinez. But I have history and physiology on my side, which coldly wins out over sentimentalism every time. I believe that the inevitable and irreversible decline of Pedro Martinez is well underway, and there’s no coming back from it.

Jack Flynn has never had a rotator cuff injury, because the coach of his CYO team discriminated against left-handers and wouldn’t let him pitch. He has many other interesting theories about baseball, all of which can be found at his blog, Productive Outs and Crackerjack.