Part of appreciating genius is witnessing its ruin. Anyone who loves Billie Holiday for the tenor of her voice and effortlessness of her phrasing is pained when listening to the worst of her last recordings, when her voice was cracked and broken. No one who understands what Muhammad Ali achieved as a man and a fighter can bear to think of his late fights, and what they cost him. Still, people listen to Holiday’s late recordings and study Ali’s fight against Larry Holmes, because there is no way to understand these figures without taking them in whole.

Yesterday, as Pedro Martinez prepared to take the mound in Cincinnati for his first start in a year, not one honest person could have said that they weren’t a bit afraid for him. Martinez is an absolute artist, baseball’s answer to Holiday or Ali, and the thought of age and injury ruining him is painful. From 1997 to 2003, he was better than any pitcher has ever been, and while everyone knows that he’ll never be that good again, the mere idea of a crippled Martinez being embarrassed by the shabby Reds was a terribly sad one.

There was no need to worry. Martinez’s day will one day end, but to judge by his performance yesterday, it won’t happen soon. Here is the kind of game Martinez threw. In the fifth inning, with one out, a one run lead, and a man on base, Ken Griffey Jr. came to the plate representing the go-ahead run. Martinez was cautious with his first two pitches, a rolling curve and a loose changeup, and fell behind in the count. His next pitch was a cut fastball that came in over the heart of the plate, barely above 80 mph. Griffey just stared at the thing as it settled in as a strike. He would eventually walk, but the point was made: If Martinez is not what he once was, it’s certainly not because he’s lost his confidence or ferociousness. The great surprise of yesterday was not, as it might have been, how fragile Martinez suddenly looked, but rather how strong. Coming back from a very serious shoulder injury, the sort that has destroyed many careers, he was understandably tentative at first, throwing sliders and curves and changeups and only chancing the odd straight pitch, no more than one to a batter. This led to bad results. A ball dribbled up the third base line and left fielder Moises Alou misplayed a line drive; that made the score 2–0.

By the time the Reds’ sixth batter, Javier Valentin, stepped to the plate, something changed, and Martinez let loose, seemingly less concerned with the situation and more concerned with punishing the enemy for their gall. Valentin got three fastballs in the middle of his at-bat, two at 88 and the third at 89, the three hardest pitches Martinez had thrown, and flied out to right. Still later in the game, Martinez just got stronger. In the fifth, facing Brandon Phillips, he threw at 88, 89, and 90. This was the second to last batter he would see.

Martinez showed what he needed to show. His fastball was consistently at 86 to 88, and hit 91; his slider came in a register below, in thelow80s, and moved; his change sank and dipped in the 70s; he put all of them where he needed to put them, for the most part, and at times, as against Scott Hatteberg in the second and against Alex Gonzalez in the fifth, there was outright violent motion at the end of his pitches. His slow curve lolled to the plate and didn’t look to be obeying him very well, and until the fifth he mainly avoided trying to tie up hitters inside, but this was the sort of rust you’d expect from a sound, healthy pitcher who’s missed a few starts to a minor injury, not from someone who just stared the end of his career in the face.

With multiple pitches working in different registers, reasonable command, and all the playful aggression with which he’s always pitched, Martinez looked yesterday to be near ready to pitch through October. That doesn’t mean he is. He’s limited to 75 pitches right now, and we can’t assume he’ll get stronger down the stretch. There’s a chance that as he regains his feel for his pitches he’ll sharpen his control and movement, but also a chance that he may not, and that some may just go missing, perhaps often. And against a lineup featuring fewer batters with huge holes in their swings, he wouldn’t have looked so strong. Griffey and Adam Dunn didn’t do much with some pitches and sequences that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz would have just scoffed at.

The Mets don’t need, and no one expects, the brilliant Pedro of 2000. We may never see such a pitcher again. The hopes, in order, were that the man wouldn’t show up on the mound a burnout, and that he’d have enough life in his arm to make his genius relevant. Put another way, the hopes were that he would do nothing to diminish his legend, and that he’d show himself ready to add to it. He didn’t disappoint; but then again, he never does.