Pedro Martinez' 1999 season will forever rank as one of the best of all time. In an era where new offensive heights were being reached with some regularity, the Sox' ace recorded a league-best 2.07 ERA and struck out 13 batters per nine innings. When the end of the season came around, he received every first place vote for the Cy Young Award, and came in second in the MVP race despite receiving more first place votes than eventual winner Ivan Rodriguez.

He was putting up dead-ball era numbers against steroid era competition, playing in tiny Fenway Park. And he was never better than when he was facing the best.

The National League lineup in the 1999 All-Star Game was, to put it simply, loaded. Anchored by a 3-4 punch of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who had one season before chased and surpassed Roger Maris' home run record, the top-6 was a murderer's row of men who are either future Hall of Famers, or are doomed to be kept off due to steroid allegations.

Them and Matt Williams.

It was this group of six men that Pedro Martinez was asked to get out, and not one of them really stood a chance.

First up was Barry Larkin, who actually put up a fight, fouling off a number of 2-2 fastballs to stay alive. Then Pedro dropped the changeup on him, and he was helpless, swinging and missing for the first strikeout.

Larry Walker was up next. He would strike out only 52 times during the 1999 regular season, but Pedro had no problem, catching him looking on the fourth pitch.

In came Sammy Sosa, but one of the greatest home run hitters of the day could not catch up to Pedro's fastball. The inning ended with Pedro's third strikeout in front of a packed Fenway crowd.

Pedro was far from done, however. The one man who beat Sosa out the year before stood in to start the second: Mark McGwire. His record proved little protection against Pedro, however, and he went down the same way as all the rest.

The streak was finally broken up by Matt Williams, of all people. One of the more strikeout-prone members of the lineup, Williams did manage to put the ball in play, reaching first when Pedro's defense failed to back him up the first time he asked them for any help. But Pedro would not be denied his 1-2-3 inning, as he struck out Jeff Bagwell with speed enough for Ivan Rodriguez to gun Williams down at second.

The National League had sent its best at Pedro, and he had sent them back broken and bruised. There was no such thing as a match for Pedro around the turn of the century, and he proved it that night in July.

The Red Sox have had their share of superstars over the years, but it's possible that none of them compare to Ted Williams. The Splendid Splinter finished his career with 125 WAR over 19 seasons, despite missing time to join the war efforts in World War II and the war in Korea. In a career full of memorable moments, Williams himself admitted that his walk-off home run in the 1941 All-Star game, "remains to this day the most thrilling hit of my life." 

The 1941 season was the one where Williams hit .406/.553/.735, the kind of line that, in today's game, looks like it has typos in it. It was the second year with an All-Star appearance for Ted, out of 17 years in his career when he would earn those honors. In his 19 years, just once did his OPS fall below 1000. He hit 521 homers, had 2,654 hits, and reached base via walk or hit 4,675 times. All of that sounds impressive, and it earned him a career line of .344/.482/.634 -- that just goes to show you how incredible his 1941 campaign was.

Williams came to the plate with the American League down 5-4 in the ninth inning, following a Joe DiMaggio grounded that scored a run on a botched double play attempt by the defense, with runners at the corners. He had already doubled to drive in a run earlier, and this time around, he took a 2-1 pitch from National League hurler Clause Passeau and drove it into the stands in right field for a walk-off home run and AL victory. 

It may be tough to believe this is the finest moment in Williams' career, but hey, he was there, and we weren't, and unlike some present-day Red Sox, his playoff games didn't have the same kind of happy endings. Don't feel like Sox fans were cheated, though, as they were able to see one of the greatest hitters of all-time do what he could do for 19 glorious and memorable seasons.

There are two Eephus pitches that stand out in Red Sox history.

The first is a sad tale for us Bostonians. In Game 7 of the 1975 World Series, with the Sox up 3-0, Bill "Spaceman" Lee took the mound and offered up three Eephus pitches to Tony Perez. The last one didn't work, and Perez sent the ball out of the park for a two-run shot that would have made the difference in ending the "curse" 30 years earlier.

But this series is about great moments, not terrible ones, and the All-Star Game, not the World Series.

So let's talk about Ted Williams and 1946. Freshly back from World War II, Williams had rejoined the Red Sox and gotten right back into the swing of things--pardon the phrase--hitting .347/.512/.693 in the first half of the season to earn his fourth All-Star selection.

Meanwhile, Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell had been working his way through the National League to the tune of a 3.36 ERA. And, for the last four years, had been peddling his unique Eephus pitch--he called it "the Blooper"--to NL hitters, who couldn't do much of anything with it. To that point, despite starting well over 100 games with the Eephus in his arsenal, Sewell had not allowed even one home run off it.

Enter Ted Williams at the 1946 All-Star Game in Fenway. 

By the time the two men faced off in the eighth, the game was all-but-over. The American League was already up 8-0 after the first seven innings, and that was in no small part due to Ted Williams. He'd walked in the first, coming around to score on Charlie Keller's homer, and then provided a long ball of his own to straight-away center off of Kirby Higbe in the fourth. One inning later, and he brought home another run off Higbe with a single before reaching base with another base knock in the seventh.

So he was doing pretty well.

He came to the plate for the final time in the eighth with Sewell on the mound, and he knew very well what was coming. Sewell had told him before the game he was going to throw the Eephus, and true to his word, in came the first one. Williams fouled it off. Two more came to little event, Sewell threw his fourth, and Ted Williams did what he always did best: hit it hard, and hit it far. 

It was the only time Sewell would ever allow a home run off his infamous Blooper, and as Ted Williams rounded the bases, Sewell let him know the only reason he managed it was because Sewell had told him it was coming.

Partially true, yes. But that's not the whole story.

In actuality, the reason is probably because Williams took a different approach. As the pitch came in, Williams got a running start, stepping out well in front of the batter's box when he took his mighty swing. Cheating? Technically. But all we're left with is the memory of Teddy Ballgame hitting the ball like no one else could.

J.D. Drew has long been someone that many people don't like, a shame given how talented of a baseball player he was for much of his career. It all started before he was drafted, when he set some monetary demands to let teams know if they would be able to afford him or not, and the Philadelphia Phillies, who apparently didn't get the memo or didn't care, selected him despite having no intention of paying him. 

It was an inauspicious start, but the right fielder showed he was worth paying for almost immediately, averaged nearly four wins a year during his initial contract with the St. Louis Cardinals (and one year with the Braves). Despite a 2001 campaign where he was worth six wins and that season in Atlanta when he put up a monster 7.5 rWAR campaign, Drew never made the All-Star team until 2008 while with Boston.

He made his lone appearance at the All-Star game count, though, justifying manager Terry Francona's selection of him. He hit a game-tying two-run homer in his first All-Star at-bat in the seventh inning off of Cincinnati Reds pitcher Edinson Volquez, to tie the game at two. He ended up getting four at-bats in the contest thanks to the game going into extra innings and taking nearly five hours to complete, giving him an opportunity to add a single as well.

Francona mentioned that, had the game gone any longer, Drew may have had to take the mound, too, as All-Star teams are not set up well for extra innings. The starting pitchers on the roster all pitch a few frames, so by the time a tie game in the ninth rolls around, bullpens are depleted for both squads despite the enormous rosters. While facing the lineup of the very best hitters the National League has to offer probably isn't the best time to make your mound debut, it would have added to what was already an excellent night for Drew, who took home MVP honors for the winning American League side.

Despite an even better 2009 campaign, where Drew was worth 5.6 wins and hit .279/.392/.522, 2008 remains his lone All-Star appearance, but Drew, as he has done on the big stage before, made it count with a memorable long ball. 

With 18 All-Star appearances for the Red Sox, Carl Yastrzemski stands alone amongst Red Sox, beating out Ted Williams'  17 (though Williams would play in more games due to certain oddities). Often enough, his performances were nothing to write home about--Yaz would go hitless in ten of his appearances--but when he was on, he was on.

This piece could easily have been about Yaz' 1967 appearance, when his three hits and two walks were only devalued by the rest of the team's inability to follow suit. Or perhaps his three-run pinch-hit homer that provided the only runs the American League would score all night. 

Instead, though, we turn our attention to Yastrzemski's 1970 season. 

Arguably the last truly great season of his career, Yaz put up numbers befitting an MVP in 1970, leading the league in both on-base and slugging percentage. Entering the All-Star break with 20 hits in the first 53 at bats of July. He was, to put it lightly, hot. 

That very much carried over.

On July 14, 1970, Carl Yastrzemski collected four hits, tying an All-Star Game record. He opened the scoring for the American League in the sixth, putting them up 1-0 with an RBI single, and closed it as well, scoring from third in the eighth to give his team a 4-1 lead and putting the AL within two innings of winning its first All-Star Game in seven long years.

Of course, as was the case in those days, the AL just didn't win. The bullpen came in, and gave up a three-run ninth before blowing the game in the bottom of the twelfth. But Yaz had already made his place in history, and was named the MVP--only the second time in history a member of the losing team would receive the honor.

Say what you want about the present-day Roger Clemens, but the one that wore a uniform in Boston was an absolute force on the mound. During his peak years with the Red Sox, he was nigh unbeatable more often than not. The 1986 season provided many examples of this, as he struck out 20 batters on April 20 against the Seattle Mariners -- a total that has been tied since multiple times, but still stands as the record -- won the Cy Young award thanks to a 2.48 ERA in 254 innings with 238 strikeouts, and took home Most Valuable Player honors during the regular season as well, a rare feat for a hurler. And that wasn't even his most valuable season in a 24-year career.

That wasn't his lone MVP of the season, though, as Clemens also made his first all-star team, and got to pitch three innings in it. He faced nine batters, struck out two, and didn't allow a baserunner. He even came up to bat once, though, predictably as an American League pitcher facing one of the game's best, he whiffed. 

This would be Clemens' best all-star performance in his career. He made the team 11 times -- oddly missing in 1987 and 1989 despite pitching the same as he had throughout his entire peak with Boston -- so that is no small feat. We already discussed his being hit hard in 2004, but he also struggled in 1998 with the Toronto Blue Jays.

Of course, at that point, he was out of Boston and considered public enemy #1 by many, so at least his greatest performance in the mid-summer classic came while wearing a Red Sox uniform, and his poorest ones came while pitching for the Blue Jays and Astros. Schadenfreude seems petty all these years later, but hey, this is Roger Clemens we're talking about.

In his last career at bat, Ted Williams hit his 521st home run, quietly rounded the bases, and then disappeared into the dugout. The fans shouted and cheered; they wanted their iconic moment to end with a farewell, be it a tip of the cap or a wave to the crowd.

But that was not Ted Williams. As amazing a baseball player as the Splendid Splinter was, his 21-year career had been filled with conflict with the notorious Boston Media which, by extension, led to some tensions with the fans. Williams did not tip his cap, only returning to the field to take his position in left before being recalled without a pitch being thrown.

It would be forty years before Sox fans received their moment of closure.

As with everything in 1999, the All-Star Game was all about the end of the century. As the best baseball had to offer took the field, they brought with them some of the best the game had ever seen. Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays all joined the All-Stars on the field that day for a celebration of more than one hundred years of baseball.

But this was Boston, and perhaps no man will ever be able to compare to Ted Williams in Boston.

The man who rode out on the golf cart that night was four decades and two strokes removed from his Hall of Fame career. He could not walk far--thus the golf cart--and had to be pointed in the direction of Carlton Fisk behind home plate for the ceremonial first pitch.

But as he came onto the field that night, with every man, woman, and child giving him a standing ovation much as they had back in 1960, Williams raised his cap and waved, finally taking the curtain call he had earned all those years ago.

Manny Ramirez was signed to a $160 million contract heading into the 2001 season, one that would keep him in Boston through at least 2008. During that stretch, he made the All-Star team every single year with the Red Sox, This shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone who remembers watching him, as he combined an incredible batting eye and swing with some of the top homer power of anyone in his generation, but if you're forgetting just how good he was, consider this a reminder: Ramirez hit .312/.411/.588 over the course of 4,682 plate appearances with Boston. That stretch included 274 homers, 256 doubles, and nearly 700 walks in addition to over 1,200 hits.

Sometimes we forget because of his antics, but it''s no wonder he was always in the mid-summer classic while he was in town thanks to play that spectacular. The 2004 season was one of of his best. That year, he hit .308/.397/.613, finished third in the MVP voting, won a Silver Slugger award, and eventually took home World Series MVP honors in addition to the series honors that had eluded Boston since 1918.

A little more than halfway through the year, he was part of another big game, in which the American League stomped all over National League starter Roger Clemens in the first inning. Following an Ivan Rodriguez RBI triple, Manny Ramirez hit a two-run homer off of Clemens that made the score 3-0. With a little help from Derek Jeter (single) and Ichiro Suzuki (double), those four batters hit for the cycle by themselves -- the first time All-Star team to do so -- in the inning and contributed to the AL's early 6-0 lead.

That would be his lone hit of the game, as his second at-bat ended with an out, but it was a historic and important one. The six runs scored by the AL in the first were enough to win them the game -- one they eventually took 9-4 -- an event that took on more meaning for Ramirez when Boston ended up in the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The players influencing the All-Star game's final score don't always get to directly reap the benefits of home field advantage as Ramirez did, but this one time, in this specific year, Boston and its fans would take any help they could get for achieving the goal of a World Series victory.