If you make a habit of watching Pedro Martinez pitch, you have to be ready at any time to see something so extraordinary you can’t believe it.

Six years ago, Martinez pitched the best game I’d ever seen. On September 10, 1999, with the Red Sox in a race with the Oakland A’s for the wild card and still within hailing distance of the first-place Yankees, he took the mound in Yankee Stadium and struck out 17, walking none and giving up one hit, a home run for which Chili Davis practically apologized.

Martinez had the best fastball, curveball, and changeup in the game that year, and somewhere in his mind something had clicked. He went from being one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball to being the best of all-time – in 1999, he was better than Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson or Walter Johnson, and he proved it a month after his legendary performance against the Yankees by topping it in the playoffs.

Martinez was injured and unavailable for the first four games of the Red Sox’ tilt with the Cleveland Indians, who in 1999 became the first team in 50 years to score 1,000 runs. The fifth game was a wild one – at Jacobs Field, the score was 7-5 after the visiting third, and then the Indians took the lead in the bottom of the inning. Martinez came out in the fourth and denied the Indians anything.

Pitching against arguably the greatest lineup in history with an injured shoulder blade that cost him five miles per hour on his fastball, Martinez made Jim Thome, Roberto Alomar, and Manny Ramirez look like fools. He pitched six no-hit innings and struck out eight; the Red Sox went on to face the Yankees for the pennant.

Martinez may have lost a few miles on his fastball since 1999, but that competitive spirit – along with his intelligence – keeps him at the level he’s at now: still one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Yesterday, it was easy to see. Forget about Braden Looper blowing the save – it happens, and over the course of the year Looper will make up for it by winning some close ones. Mets fans should just appreciate the privilege of having already seen Martinez on top of his game.

He came out against the Reds clearly at something less than his best. D’Angelo Jimenez, Ken Griffey, Sean Casey, and Austin Kearns all made decent contact with the ball, leaving men on first and third with two outs and the monstrous Adam Dunn at the plate. Dunn hit 46 home runs and walked 108 times in a 2004 season that really only hinted at his enormous potential; sure enough Martinez, working with a fastball that wasn’t getting much above 90 mph, was careful with him, running the count to 3-1.

There, he made his only mistake of the game, lobbing in a fastball that had absolutely nothing on it. It wasn’t a stupid pitch – Dunn holds the record for strikeouts in a season, and has a tendency to be a bit passive, making it a wise move to try to sneak one by him. There was nothing passive about his swing, though, which launched the ball somewhere into Kentucky.

At that point, you could have been forgiven for thinking that maybe this was one of those days that the 33-year-old Martinez suffers through at this point in his career, when things aren’t going for him. Such was not the case. His fastball somehow picked up another three or four miles per hour, and he struck out eight of the next nine hitters in a good Reds lineup. Jimenez, the one who didn’t strike out, walked on a full count that saw a couple of borderline pitches called for balls.

That really shouldn’t be too surprising. It’s usually a bad idea to play psychologist from afar, but Pedro Martinez is an extraordinarily proud, competitive, and aware player. He wasn’t about to look bad in his Mets debut, not with seemingly half the world having come to the conclusion that his 2004 season – his worst in a decade and one in which he was still one of the five best pitchers in the American League – was the first sign that he’d finally started to lose it. The ferocity with which he went after the Reds lineup was nothing more than what he’s brought to every game I’ve seen him pitch, for years now.

It’s also a little bit dangerous. Whatever it is that allows a man who shouldn’t be pitching to no-hit the 1999 Indians or find an extra few miles an hour on his fastball after giving up three runs in the first inning of his first game with a new team is the same thing that probably will end up cutting his career short and proving all the doubters right. Until that happens, pay whatever you have to for the best tickets possible when Martinez takes the mound at Shea. You just won’t believe what you’ll see.