RHSP—Pedro Martinez

This race could be the most competitive of any team thus far. With three all-time greats in the running, there may be no true correct answer. But I’ll do my best to convince you of mine.

Our three principle competitors are Pedro, Cy Young and Rawjah Clemens. All have their verifiable strengths. All of them—especially Clemens—have unattractive blemishes on their Red Sox record.

Let’s not even mention steroid use. There’s no knowing how early Clemens was using PEDs, so there’s no way we can know if he was juicing while pitching with the Green Monster as a backdrop. His tarnished reputation certainly doesn’t help his legacy, but it’s not the deciding factor.

Clemens is tied with Young for the Red Sox career-wins lead at 192. He had an impressive 8.40 K:9 ratio, posted a 3.06 ERA and won three Cy Young awards and one MVP in 13 Boston years. But his record is too suspect and too inconsistent to be warranted this title.

He had three Boston seasons with an ERA over 4.00, including a final free-agency year where he all but tanked before turning it on down the stretch. While three poor seasons isn’t horrible, especially for the steroids era, beating out the competitive field requires a near perfect record. And if there’s anyone who isn’t perfect, it’s the Rocket.

The easy and seemingly logical choice would be Cy Young, the man after whom our pitching award for excellence is named. Young posted a near-identical record to Clemens, winning the same amount of games, but losing just one more. His consistent performance and his legend vault him over Roger, but he still falls short of Pedro due to a few contributing factors.

First, Young played just one season for a team actually named the Red Sox. While the Hall-of-Famer played in Boston from 1901 through 1908, the local team wasn’t officially called the Red Sox until that final 1908 season. The team had been previously known as the “Americans.”

To give this honor to someone who never "really" played for the Red Sox would be a bit hard to swallow. Although, we’re not going to let nomenclature disallow the supposed Best Pitcher of All-Time from being the Best Pitcher of the All-Time Red Sox.

What is more alarming is that Cy Young never pitched a single inning in Fenway Park. This isn’t an issue of a necessary sentimental connection to the defining home park of the Red Sox, but a notion of the time period.

Young played half of his career prior to the turn of the century, and was out of baseball at the end of 1911—just a few months before Fenway Park opened its doors. As such, it’s hard to be particularly glowing of his achievements, considering they were accrued in an era where baseball had yet to become mainstream fare.

Cy Young wasn’t facing America’s best talent, or at least nothing near the level of competition his successors would, so even his 2.00 Boston ERA needs to be taken with one very large grain of salt.

Also worth taking into account is that just 192 of his 511 career wins were posted in Boston.

So that brings us to Pedro and his incredible late-90s Red Sox surge. The Expos dealt him to Boston after the 1996 season—reason No. 147 why the city of Montreal no longer has a professional baseball franchise. Reason No. 148: they got the horrid Carl Pavano and Tony Armas Jr. as a return on their investment.

Pedro was then given a seven-year contract extension worth over $90 million, and he never looked back. Over the length of the agreement, Pedro won 20 games twice, posted an ERA under 3.00 six times, was under 2.40 on four occasions and posted a 1.74 ERA in Y2K.

In that defining 2000 season, Pedro finished 18-6 with 11.78 K and 1.33 BB per nine innings. Opposing batters hit just .236—on balls in play. He would end the season with a pitching WAR of 10.1 and a Cy Young award on his mantle.

Of course, that was hardly the extent of his dominance. He had posted a 12.1 pitching WAR in the preceding season, and topped 7.5 twice more with the Red Sox. In 1999, he struck out a mind-bending 13.20 batters per nine innings, commensurate with 313 K’s in 213 innings. In the same season, he won 23 games and an additional Cy Young award. He also finished second in the overall MVP voting.

In three other seasons in Boston, Pedro finished in the top three of the Cy Young and the Top 25 of MVP balloting. In his final season in Boston, he finished fourth for the Cy despite posting a (to that point) career-high ERA of 3.90.

This is part of an All-Time team series I'm completing for BaseballDigest.com. Click here to see the entire collection.

Jesse Golomb researches and writes for BaseballDigest.com. He is also the creator and writer of SoapBoxSportsByte, a blog that incorporates statistical analysis as well as fan perspective into daily pieces on the MLB, NFL and NBA. He can be followed on Twitter @SoapBxSprtsByte, or contacted by email at golombjesse@gmail.com.