Dear Clayton,
Pedro Martinez’s 2000 season here. I heard you were having a pretty good year, so I took a look at the stats, and wow: We have so much in common. We’re almost identical ERA brothers! Me at 1.74, you at 1.70. Both of us leading our leagues in most of the major categories. It’s only natural that people
keep comparing us. For instance, I saw this thing on the
Washington Post’s website where someone used some “fancy stats” to say you were
having the best season of any pitcher since 1995. Actually, that article didn’t exactly compare us, so much as it implied that you’ve been pitching better than I did at any point during pretty much my whole career. But it did briefly mention me once, so that was nice to see.
There are so many parallels between us, like that we both spent our special seasons in such historic, beautiful ballparks. My season was so magical in part because it was set against the backdrop of beloved Fenway Park, with its distinctive 302-foot distance down the right-field foul line and its equally iconic 310-foot line in left, where, as you’ve probably noticed, there’s a giant wall that turns routine fly balls into doubles and homers. And you, dealing in Dodger Stadium, with its dense, homer-suppressing seaside air and its perfectly symmetrical outfield walls that yield such predictable bounces. Just gems of baseball, both of them.