NEW YORK – Charlie Manuel must really love Pedro Martinez(notes). The alternative is he really hates his bullpen.
Either would be entirely sensible on many nights.
For this one, however, the Phillies’ affable, lovable and mostly competent manager let his affections for his game and runty right-hander run away with his intellect, and as a result the Phillies lost their chance to return to Philly halfway to another World Series championship.
As it is, they do have their Game 1 win. And they do know they are capable of shutting down any and all parts of the Yankees’ lineup. And they do go home now for three games, all of which is very good news, even after their 3-1 loss Thursday night at Yankee Stadium.
It’s just, it could have been better. It may have been a long shot, because Manuel was going to need a run against Mariano Rivera(notes). But, just one. Not two. A man with a bat in his hands can get lucky and find a run against Rivera. A team with six outs to spare probably will not get lucky enough to find two.
The Phillies’ Pedro Martinez watches the home run of Yankee Hideki Matsui during the sixth inning of Game 2.
Yet, down a single run in the middle of the seventh inning, Martinez having reached 99 pitches, having spent the previous few days weakened by illness, and having grinded through the Yankees for more than two hours, Manuel sent Martinez to the mound again.
He shouldn’t have.
Over the next eight pitches, Jerry Hairston Jr.(notes) singled, Melky Cabrera(notes) singled and so Manuel was at Martinez’s side, taking the baseball and telling him what a fine job he’d done up until those last eight pitches. In came Chan Ho Park(notes), on came pinch-hitter Jorge Posada(notes), and on a line-drive single in came pinch-runner Brett Gardner(notes) from third base with the Yankees’ third run.
The Yankees led 3-1 and Rivera made it look like 10-1.
You’re wearing Phillies’ gray Thursday night and it would have been next to impossible not to fall in love with Pedro. He was again savvy in his pitch selection and precise in his pitch execution. Mark Teixeira(notes) got a changeup in the fourth and Hideki Matsui(notes) a curveball in the sixth, they hit them for home runs, and that was about it for the mistakes.
Pedro operates now with at best an average fastball. Maybe it brushes up against 90 mph with the wind blowing in, but that hardly matters. Often enough, the Yankees lunged at curveballs too far off to reach, and they lost sight of changeups that died on their way to their bat barrels, and they straightened up when Pedro kept them honest on their hands.
But the man was done after six innings and it sounds almost like he tried to tell Manuel and his pitching coach, Rich Dubee, when they asked even an inning before.
“I said I never felt as strong as I would like to because I’ve been under the weather the last two days,” Martinez said. “That’s not an excuse. But I didn’t feel quite as strong. I haven’t been eating right. I had very little sleep. But, I felt good enough to make pitches and that’s what I told them. … They trusted that and left me in there the last two innings.”
So, apparently after he reminded his coaches he’d been sick, he gave up the Matsui home run in the sixth and then the first two batters to reach in the seventh.
“He said he felt good,” Manuel said. “He said that he was fine. He said he wanted to go back out and pitch. The bottom of the lineup was up and everything and I thought he hadn’t lost anything.”
Maybe it’s a difficult assignment, judging the new Pedro. He threw 119 pitches for the Phillies on Sept. 8, then 130 on Sept. 13. By his next start, in Atlanta, he’d developed a sore neck, however, and he hadn’t thrown as many as 90 pitches in two starts since – one in the regular season and one nearly two weeks ago in Los Angeles. On that day against the Dodgers, Pedro allowed two singles in seven innings, left with a 1-0 lead, and watched the bullpen give away the lead and the game.
The Phillies’ Pedro Martinez, smiling as he exits Game 2, said he was feeling under the weather the past two days.
So, perhaps it was the memory of that afternoon that got Manuel to thinking about whether Pedro was equipped to keep going Thursday, and on which side he was going to err this time. Perhaps Pedro is by the sixth, seventh and eighth innings a moving target, and a proud one, except he mentioned three times after the game he’d been sick, twice when he wasn’t asked. He insisted he was good to go, even, well, you know, “regardless of how much I coughed and how much my chest hurt and sore throat or whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
Six innings would have been fine. Even, as it turned out, kind of heroic, all of it considered.
And while the seventh inning cost the Phillies their puncher’s chance at the Yankees and Rivera and a commanding lead in the World Series, it did afford Pedro one more shot at the Yankee fans, and they at him.
Leaving Manuel and his catcher, Carlos Ruiz(notes), on the mound, Pedro trudged across the infield toward the third-base dugout and angled toward the stairs to his right. As he reached the rail, he stopped and looked into the stands, smiling and taking it all in. Their chants had been half-hearted, even when goaded by organ music. Some fans applauded politely. Others weren’t as generous.
But he took them all in.
“It’s a new Yankee Stadium,” he said, “but the fans remain the fans. … Like I remember one guy sitting right in front of the front row with his daughter, sitting with his daughter, and his daughter in one arm and a cup of beer in the other hand and saying all kinds of stuff. I just told him, ‘Your daughter is right beside you. It’s a little girl. It’s a shame you’re saying all these things.’
“I had to stop and tell him because I’m a father myself and, God, how can you be so dumb to do those kinds of things in front of your child? What kind of example are you setting?”
Maybe the guy was up there and maybe he wasn’t. Certainly Martinez didn’t appear to say anything to anyone before he disappeared into the dugout. He put his head down and walked down the stairs. If it all did exist, however, perhaps he could have made eye contact with that little girl, smiled gently, and asked her one thing.
“Who’s your daddy?”
