Hardball Hyperbole: Chapter 26

In today’s edition, Pedro Martinez gets shelled by the Yankees once again, and his response was: “What can I say? I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.”

This could not be happening again, could it? That was the stinging thought that had to be on the minds of every tortured soul sitting in Fenway Park on Friday night, Sept. 24, 2004 as they watched a Red Sox manager stay too long with Pedro Martinez, a decision that ultimately resulted in a gut-wrenching defeat.

“It had a lot of similarities to the playoff game last year,” Yankees starter Mike Mussina said. “History tends to repeat itself - but usually not that quickly.”

Eleven months earlier, former Red Sox manager Grady Little essentially signed his termination papers with his decision in Game 7 of the ALCS to leave Martinez in the game amidst a bubbling Yankees rally. Entering the eighth inning with a 5-2 lead, Pedro gave up a double to Derek Jeter and an RBI single to Bernie Williams, and that’s when Little paid a visit to the mound to check on his ace.

There was no doubt what needed to be done, and before Little reached the mound, lefty reliever Alan Embree should have been trotting in from the left-field bullpen at Yankee Stadium. Rather than ask Martinez how he was feeling after 115 pitches, and then believing the superstar when he said he was fine (which is what every competitor is going to say), Little should have thanked him for a job well done and pulled him. Any Red Sox fan will tell you it was a no-brainer decision.

Instead, Little patted Pedro on the back and told him to ‘go get ‘em.’ Two batters later the game was tied and Boston would go on to lose on Aaron Boone’s 11th-inning walk-off homer, and Little was out of a job.

On his way out the door, Little made it clear that he did not think he deserved to be fired and his parting remark was, “I’ll be another ghost, fully capable of haunting.”

Apparently, this was the night Little’s ghost decided to make its haunting return because, as Yogi Berra would say, it was deja vu all over again.

Martinez had thrown 101 pitches through seven innings and the Red Sox were clinging to a 4-3 lead. It had been a strong response from Pedro after the beating he had taken five days earlier in New York. However, the time had come for Little’s replacement, Terry Francona, to turn the game over to his bullpen where he had three of his most trusted relievers - Embree, Mike Timlin, and Keith Foulke - ready to go.

They were ready to go, by the way, because the night before against the Orioles, Francona had not used any of them. Instead, he went with his second-tier guys who turned a 5-5 tie into a 9-5 deficit by allowing four runs over the final two innings of what became a damaging 9-7 loss. Coupled with New York’s victory over Tampa Bay, it gave the Yankees a 4.5-game cushion as they arrived in Boston for the final regular-season series between the teams.

“I was trying to protect some people,” Francona said, clearly inferring that he wanted his best guys available for the Yankees. “If there’s some blame, I’ll take it.”

To start the eighth, the Yankees had lefty swinging Hideki Matsui and switch-hitters Williams, Posada and Ruben Sierra due up, so Pedro was not going to have the platoon advantage on any of them. Still, Francona sent him back out and Matsui hit his second pitch over the fence in right for a tying home run as Fenway buckled with disappointment.

“If I run out there after two pitches, you understand what I’m saying, it would make it look like I wasn’t making a very good decision before the inning,” Francona said.

Well, it wasn’t a good decision, but he had the chance to rectify it. Instead, he stayed in the dugout and watched as Williams hit a ground rule double to right. He stayed put again when Posada struck out, and he stayed put once more when Sierra roped a line drive single to right that sent Williams home with the go-ahead run as the fans stood there with disbelieving looks on their faces.

“I thought he was in command of what he was doing,” Francona said. “I wouldn’t have left him in if I thought he was out of gas. I thought he deserved to stay out there, and actually the reason he stayed out there is because I thought he was going to get them out. Two pitches into the inning, he’s still, in my opinion, he’s OK.”

It might as well have been Little sitting there in the post-game interview room trying to explain away the awful decision he had made.

The Yankees had grabbed a 2-0 lead in the third when Alex Rodriguez drove home a run with a single and then took second on an errant throw, later stole third and scored on a Gary Sheffield groundout. But Boston got that right back on a two-run homer by Manny Ramirez off Mussina in the bottom half, and then took the lead in the fourth on a solo homer by Trot Nixon. The Yankees tied it on Sierra’s sacrifice fly in sixth, and the Red Sox went back ahead when Johnny Damon homered off Tom Gordon with two outs in the seventh.

As soon as the ball landed, the Red Sox bullpen should have leaped into action to prepare to close out the final two innings. Instead, it remained quiet and when Mark Bellhorn grounded out to end the inning, and out went Pedro for yet another calamitous eighth, one that left Boston 5.5 games out with just nine left to play.

“There’s no reason to be upset at Tito,” Martinez said, defending his manager just as he had done a year earlier. “It was just frustrating for me not to do my job. How many times had my team given me the lead? I wanted to bury myself on that mound.”

Martinez then uttered the comment that would follow him for the rest of his career, would be the backpage headline on the New York City tabloids, and would become a dreamy mantra for Yankees fans.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is gold for a reporter, and he wasn’t through as he continued on and conceded that the Yankees had his number, a shocking admission for him to make public.

“I can’t find a way to beat them at this point,” he said. “You just have to give them credit and say, ‘Hey, you guys beat me, not my team.’ I wish they would fucking disappear and never come back. I’d like to face any other team right now. To pitch a good game, make good pitches and still can’t beat them. It’s frustrating.”

By the end of the night, the mood was certainly sullen in the Hub. Their Red Sox had blown yet another game to their most hated rival, a loss that almost certainly killed any chance they had of coming back to win the division. And now their ace pitcher, a first ballot future Hall of Famer, was admitting that he couldn’t beat the one team the Red Sox had to beat if they were ever going to end their 86-year World Series drought.

Not even the next two days could erase the frustration.

In what proved to be almost a carbon copy of what had happened the previous weekend, the teams reversed role. Last weekend, the Red Sox had pulled out a huge victory on a Friday night in the Bronx and then gotten blown out of the building in the next two games. This time, following the Yankees huge victory on a Friday night, they served as the punching bag the next two days.

On Saturday, the game was tied 5-5 going to the bottom of the eighth when the Red Sox exploded for a touchdown and an extra point. The seven-run blitzkrieg against Paul Quantrill, C.J. Nitkowski and Scott Proctor included five hits, two walks and a hit batsmen, the big blows being a go-ahead RBI double by Ramirez, a two-run double by Jason Varitek, and two-run double by Doug Mirabelli.

And in the finale Sunday, the Red Sox ambushed Kevin Brown and knocked him out in the first inning by scoring four runs, and newly acquired Esteban Loaiza wasn’t any better as Boston scored three on him in the second inning and six in total during an 11-4 runaway.

It was a highly disappointing day for the Yankees, their No. 1 pitching free agent getting bombarded while Boston’s big ticket signing, Curt Schilling, winning his 21st game with seven innings of one-hit mastery, the lone safety being a two-run single by Posada after Schilling had walked the bases full in the fourth.

There was another contentious encounter, too. This one involved Kenny Lofton giving an elbow to Doug Mientkiewicz while running out a ground ball because he felt the Red Sox first baseman seemed to purposely stand in his way after recording the out.

“Kenny felt that Mientkiewicz sorta went back and blocked his path,” Joe Torre said. “Evidently, it happened before when Kenny was in Cleveland. Kenny thought it was intentional.”

“You watch the replay and you’ll see what you see,” Lofton said. “I didn’t do anything. I was telling myself, ‘Why don’t you get out of the way?’ Most first basemen catch the ball and pretty much get out of the way. That’s (not) the case with him with me, I guess.”

Said Mientkiewicz: “There’s 700 players in the league and he’s the only one I get an elbow from every time. I got nothing personal against Kenny, but I don’t like getting elbowed. It’s a shame, too, because Curt should have been the story of this game. The sideshow took away from what Curt did.”

A couple innings later, Boston’s Pedro Astacio threw a pitch behind Lofton and was ejected as both benches creeped to the top step but remained there. “I hope it was just a coincidence,” Torre said. Just in case it wasn’t, New York’s Brad Halsey buzzed Dave Roberts and was immediately tossed, and this time, the benches did empty though there were no punches, just a lot of pointing and swearing.

“It’s a heated rivalry,” Roberts said. “There’s respect between the teams, but there’s definitely no love lost.”

That’s how the season series ended, Boston winning the battle by owning an overall 11-8 advantage, but about to lose the war because even though it pulled back within 3.5 games with these last two victories, there wasn’t enough time to overtake the Yankees in the division, a point that Torre was quick to make.

It was riveting, acrimonious, exhausting, interminable, and while there were still obstacles in the way - the Yankees would be meeting AL Central champ Minnesota in the divisional series while the Red Sox would tangle with AL West champ Anaheim - it sure seemed like a rematch in the ALCS was on the horizon.

“It might be inevitable,’’ A-Rod said.

“We’re sick of seeing each other, that’s for sure,” Damon said. “One thing is for sure - if we get these guys again in the playoffs, we definitely don’t need to have a meeting to prepare for them. We pretty much know what each other has.”

NEXT WEDNESDAY: The Yankees held off the Red Sox to win the AL East by three games, and then both teams won their divisional series to set up a second consecutive AL Championship Series showdown.