Mariano Rivera made a lot of very good baseball players look very bad for a very long time. A total of 993 different hitters recorded at least one at-bat against Rivera during his 19-year major-league career with the New York Yankees. Close to two-thirds of them posted a batting average of .200 or worse against him, with nearly half failing to record a single hit off Rivera and his magical cut fastball.

For that reason and so many more, Rivera was elected into the Hall of Fame on Tuesday by the voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. He is the first player in history to be voted in unanimously, a remarkable achievement that has long been seen as an impossibility. As Rivera receives the sport’s ultimate honor, it seems fitting that he will be joined in Cooperstown this summer by his greatest nemesis: Edgar Martínez—the only person ever to conquer the great Rivera.

Martínez, the longtime Seattle Mariners designated hitter, owned Rivera in a way that almost doesn’t sound real. Including the playoffs, Martínez went 11-for-19 against him for a .579 batting average—by far the best of anybody who faced Rivera more than five times. Five of those hits went for extra bases, making Martínez the only player to accomplish that feat. Rivera even intentionally walked Martínez twice, proving that Martínez achieved the near-impossible: He scared the fearless.

“He had more than my number,” Rivera said in an interview with Charlie Rose after his retirement in 2013. “He had my breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Before developing the cutter that he calls a “gift from God,” Rivera came up in 1995 as a conventional starting pitcher, and not a particularly good one. Martínez devoured him that year, going 6-for-7 with two home runs, a double and five RBIs. That includes a single in the American League Division Series, the same series that provided Martínez’s signature moment: a two-run double down the left-field line off Jack McDowell that scored Ken Griffey Jr. from first base and sent the Mariners to the next round.