The Cy Young awards were announced last night and while the Boston Red Sox had only Chris Martin (somehow) get any love from voters, the races in both leagues were still pretty interesting overall. Gerrit Cole won in convincing fashion with newly minted free agent Sonny Gray coming in second in the American League while Blake Snell, despite not having nearly as convincing of an actual case, got 28 out of 30 first place votes in the National League. However, it was Snell's win that led to a gaffe for the ages.
Snell taking home the NL Cy Young made him the seventh player ever to win the award in both leagues which is a pretty sweet accomplishment. Fox MLB, in now a sadly deleted tweet, put together a graphic to honor all seven pitchers: Snell, Gaylord Perry, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Roy Halladay, Max Scherzer, and.....Pedro Rodriguez?
Fox MLB somehow got Pedro Martinez's name wrong
If you hadn't heard of "Pedro Rodriguez" or didn't realize that he had won Cy Youngs in both leagues, you can rest easy because such a player doesn't exist. In fact, a cursory search on Baseball-Reference shows no players whatsoever named Pedro Rodriguez which is actually pretty impressive. A closer look at the now deleted graphic reveals that they were talking about Pedro MARTINEZ who is a tough name to forget/get wrong.
Pedro's accomplishments are a lengthy list. He had a career 2.93 ERA over the course of his 18 year career where he also won three Cy Youngs (one with the Expos, two with the Red Sox), and was an easy choice for induction into Cooperstown. He was simply one of the absolute best to ever do it and somehow Fox managed to get his name wrong. This is like putting Geraldo Rivera instead of Mariano or Willie Randolph instead of Willie Mays.
Mistakes happen and in all likelihood, whichever intern that was responsible for making that graphic got a stern talking to and the situation was fixed pretty quickly. However, it is still REALLY embarrassing for a baseball dedicated account owned by a media conglomerate that has 1.6 million followers to somehow get one of the game's best pitchers of all-time's name wrong.