Cooperstownitis—a cranial inflammation that recurs annually, in anticipation of the tallying of the latest Hall of Fame ballots—is a baseball-related illness to which I long ago developed immunity. The solemnity of the process by which retired ballplayers are considered for embronzing, the piousness of many veteran voters about the standards being upheld, not to mention the intemperate rebuttals from progressive critics—for me, these elicit a yawn, and some deflecting perspective. I think often, at this time of year, of Pedro Martinez, the Red Sox pitcher who once responded to yet another postseason defeat at the hands of the Yankees by reminiscing about life in Santo Domingo. “Fifteen years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree, without fifty cents to pay for a bus,” Martinez said then, not unhappily. “And today, I was the center of attention of the whole city of New York.”

Today’s announcement that Martinez will join the Hall’s Class of 2015 sends my mind dreamily back to September of 1999, five years before the great mango moment, and just a couple of months after I moved to New York City. A Sox fan in enemy territory, I was sitting in the upper deck at the old Yankee Stadium, third-base side, shading into left, and I watched Pedro plunk Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ leadoff batter, in the arm. So far, so standard: for a pitcher with such uncanny control, Martinez hit a suspicious number of batters. (He looked sweet, but he played fierce.) Then followed the greatest pitching performance I’ve ever seen live, as my guy struck out seventeen of the next twenty-seven Yanks he faced. He was still throwing hard then—upper nineties, in spite of his slight frame—but it was that great changeup you noticed most, from a distance on high. Martinez was about a foot shorter than Randy Johnson, who will also enter the Hall this summer, but he had the fingers of a lanky giant, out of which the ball would almost unspool, as if on a thread.

Unlike Johnson, and unlike Roger Clemens, who came up short again this year, owing to his presumed drug use (and to the piousness mentioned above), Martinez was overpowering without appearing so. For years, at Fenway, I used to try to sit (or sneak) as close to the mound as possible when Clemens was starting, so that I might feel a sense of that raw power and menace. With Martinez, it was the other way around: he seemed perpetually vulnerable, his mastery best appreciated from afar, like a magician. Perhaps this is why some of my most lasting close-up images of Pedro consist more of lowlights than highlights: the dumbstruck look on his face just before he guided the head of a charging Don Zimmer to the grass, in the 2003 divisional playoffs; the nervous licking of his fingers as Grady Little left him to wilt during that series’ epic Game 7. But weep not for poor Pedro; this was a man who would also adopt as a sidekick a dwarf actor, whom he held aloft and called his “lucky charm.”

Let us pause, while we’re at it, for a brief salute to another new honoree, Craig Biggio, a rare entrant in the catcher-second-base-center-field division, an up-the-middle specialist who excelled, most of all, in getting plunked. “I’ve been very lucky and very fortunate,” Biggio told me once, as he approached Don Baylor’s modern record of two hundred and sixty-seven bruise-balls. They used to say that three thousand hits guaranteed you a plaque in Cooperstown. (Not so, Palmeiro!) Well, I’d hereby like to propose a new benchmark: two hundred and seventy-five plunkings. It’s an élite club, featuring Hughie Jennings, H.O.F. Class of 1945 (two hundred and eighty-seven H.B.P.s), and now Biggio (two hundred and eighty-five), with no counterfactuals. “Oh, it hurts like hell,” Biggio added. “I’m not going to lie about it.” Martinez only hit him once.