Pedro Week: The Many Faces of Pedro Martinez

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With Pedro Martinez set to be inducted into the Hall of Fame this weekend, Fenway Pastoral takes a look back at some of the images of a baseball icon’s career in Boston.

When he played for Boston, Pedro was a man who radiated extremes. On the one hand, the man most fans saw the most of – the side we paid to see –  was intensely competitive and bitter. He took everything personally. Pedro once confirmed that, sadistically, he invented reasons to hate the opposition by going so far as to imagine twisted scenarios such as players bounding and gagging his mother and holding a knife to her throat. These were the things he conjured up when he dug deep for extra zip on a fastball.

This brooding made his sense of humor and playfulness all the more stark on those occasions when he’d let it out. Pedro was unapologetic; a man of complexities that, decades from now, will not be lost in the oversimplification that tends to come with the passage of time. He was indeed a pitcher of a thousand scowls on the mound, but he somehow seamlessly transitioned into the man who was infectiously personable off the field.