Part 12 (1/2)

Beside his penchant for pitching inside, Martinez irritated the Yankees with his bench jockeying, another old-school tactic that seemed out of place in the modern game. He would insult the Yankees from the Boston dugout. Catcher Jorge Posada was a favorite target. Martinez would question Posada's intelligence and call him ”Dumbo,” a reference to the catcher's prominent ears. It was a shrewd tactic, for Martinez knew that Posada was an emotional player, and the more Martinez riled Posada the more Posada became distracted. Posada was a career .191 hitter against his tormentor entering the 2003 ALCS.

In Game 3, however, the Yankees would not let Martinez have his way with them. Boston staked Pedro to a 2-0 first-inning lead off Clemens, but the Yankees, led by the fiery Posada, fought back with aggressive hitting against Martinez. Posada opened the second inning with a double and later scored on a single by journeyman outfielder Karim Garcia. Derek Jeter hit a home run in the third inning to tie the score. And by the fourth inning, the Yankees were so emboldened by their hacks against Pedro that they turned the tables and were razzing him from their dugout.

”You've got nothing!” they yelled at Martinez.

It was Posada who started another rally in the fourth, this time with a walk. Nick Johnson followed with a single off the Green Monster in left field, a shot that sent Posada to third. Hideki Matsui drove the next pitch into right field for a ringing double that bounced into the stands, scoring Posada. Now the Yankees, led by Posada, were all over Martinez with catcalls from the dugout.

Martinez was facing Garcia, a lefthanded batter, with first base open and a righthanded hitter on deck. His first pitch to Garcia was a fastball that whistled straight for Garcia's head. Garcia ducked, and the ball glanced off his left shoulder.

The Yankees were outraged. The way they saw it, Martinez threw at Garcia intentionally, having grown frustrated with their aggressive swings and mouthing off from the dugout.

”Was Pedro trying to make a point? I'm sure he was,” later said one of Martinez's teammates, pitcher John Burkett. ”Roger does it, Randy Johnson does it at times and Pedro does it. I don't think he was trying to hurt him. He was trying to send a message. It was, 'f.u.c.k this, I've got to put a scare into somebody.' And he did.”

Martinez claimed the pitch carried no intentions. It simply got away from him.

”Why am I going to hit Karim Garcia?” he said. ”Who is Karim Garcia? Karim Garcia is an out. He's not the out I want to let go.”

The catcalls continued from the Yankee dugout. The next batter, Alfonso Soriano, hit a groundball to shortstop that the Red Sox turned into a double play, but not before the enraged Garcia slid hard into second baseman Todd Walker in an attempt to disrupt the pivot and to vent his anger at being hit. Garcia picked himself up off the dirt and glared angrily at Martinez as he jogged across the infield toward the third base dugout. Martinez rightfully interpreted Garcia's stare as a message that Garcia believed Martinez had purposefully tried to hit him.

”Why am I going to try to hit you?” Martinez yelled at Garcia. ”You're my out!”

”Motherf.u.c.ker!” Garcia yelled back.

”You're the motherf.u.c.ker, you dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d!” Martinez shouted.

”When I said that,” Martinez said, ”Posada jumped up on the dugout steps and started screaming at me in Spanish. I could hear him yell at me and then he made a comment about my mother.

Posada is Latin. He should know if you don't want to f.u.c.k with someone you don't say anything about their mother.

”One thing in the Dominican culture you have to be very careful about is saying anything about someone's mother. You say something about someone's mother, you're picking a fight right away. If I even see someone raising his voice to his mother, you're going to get slapped in the mouth. Posada is from Puerto Rico. Being Latin, he should know that.”

Martinez no longer cared about Garcia. He turned his attention to Posada in the dugout. Martinez raised his right index finger and pointed it to the right side of his head and yelled something in Spanish at him. Martinez said he yelled, ”I'll remember what you said.” Posada and the Yankees heard and interpreted something very different. They saw Martinez's actions as a clear threat that he was going to hit Posada in the head with a pitch the next time he batted.

Clemens, of course, would not let such actions go unanswered. The question was not if he would respond with a militant pitch-just a little something ”to move somebody's feet”-but when. A jam in the sixth inning of a close game, with one out, a 4-2 lead and the tying runs on base, did not appear to be the proper opening for retribution, but Manny Ramirez figured differently. The Yankees always discussed in their pregame scouting report meetings that Ramirez was uncomfortable with inside pitches. The reports said you could get Manny off his game by occasionally throwing b.a.l.l.s on his hands, off the plate. Such warning shots could make Ramirez less bold about diving into outside pitches. (The reports also included notations that such pitches typically had no effect whatsoever on David Ortiz, Boston's other big slugger and confirmed Yankee-killer. Ortiz would respond to any such pitches simply by spitting into his palms and resuming his customary, aggressive place practically on top of home plate. Unlike Ramirez, the Yankees regarded Ortiz as unable to be intimidated.) Clemens uncorked a high fastball that, while somewhat inside, did not come all that close to hitting Ramirez. Still, Ramirez, sensing as all of the Red Sox did that Clemens would not let the fourth-inning incident with Martinez go unchallenged, thought Clemens threw at him. Ramirez ducked and then, bat in hand, stormed toward the mound. The players and coaches from both dugouts immediately dashed toward the middle of the field-except for one 72-year-old Yankees coach who made a straight line toward the Boston dugout. Don Zimmer had seen and heard enough of Martinez. This incident, Zimmer figured, was caused by Martinez and his years of throwing at hitters and mouthing off at the Yankees. He saw Pedro in his red warmup jacket across the field and that's where he headed. Zimmer didn't know what he was going to do when he got there; he just knew he was fed up with Martinez.

”The only thing I remember,” Torre said, ”is when I was going out of the dugout Zimmer was on my left and maybe a step or two below me. I was going to say, 'Zim, you stay here,' but I knew it was fruitless. I mean, me stopping him, or anybody stopping him, it wasn't going to happen. It's the last I remember Zim. And then I was in the middle of the scrum with everybody else in the middle of the field, and I heard Zim or somebody yell something near their dugout, and I look over. He's already on the ground.”

Zimmer had charged Martinez in the manner of a bull in a ring, and a stunned Martinez had responded in the manner of a matador. He sidestepped Zimmer and pushed Zimmer to the ground.

”He reached for my right arm,” Martinez said. ”I thought, Is he going to pull it? Is he trying to hurt me? I tossed him down.”

The sight of this 72-year-old man tumbling to the ground, his bald pink head, capless, against the dark green gra.s.s in front of the Boston dugout, was so jarring as to effectively end what otherwise might have been a full-scale brawl. (Clemens said at first he thought the p.r.o.ne, round body might have been that of teammate David Wells.) Zimmer was unhurt, though the Yankees would insist he be strapped to a gurney and hauled away in an ambulance to a hospital. Zimmer was, however, deeply embarra.s.sed. He called a news conference the next day and, through tears, apologized for his actions. His contrition did not stop New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg from suggesting that Martinez would be arrested if he had acted that way in New York.

”Whatever kind of baseball they want to play, we're going to play, but we didn't start that,” Clemens said after the game, barely containing his anger toward Martinez. ”Sometimes when you get knocked around the ballpark, you get your ticket punched. I've had it many times. These guys have done it to me. If you don't have electric stuff and you're not on and guys are hitting b.a.l.l.s they shouldn't be hitting, you might stand somebody up. But just because you are getting whipped, you don't hit [somebody] behind somebody's neck . . .

”I wasn't a part of all that. I went in there and I was trying to strike Manny out, and bottom line is he started mouthing me and the ball wasn't near him. If I wanted it near him, he'd know it.”

Torre pulled Clemens after he pitched out of that sixth inning by getting Ramirez to ground into a double play. Clemens might have lasted longer, but Torre figured Clemens had spent himself physically and emotionally in such fitful battle. He had noticed the veins bulging on Clemens' neck. The Yankees couldn't get through the game without one more fight, this one a b.l.o.o.d.y one in the New York bullpen between a Fenway Park security guard, pitcher Jeff Nelson and right fielder Garcia, who hopped the fence. The rivalry had become sheer madness, so when Torre needed order restored, he turned to the reliable coolness of Mariano Rivera. The closer took care of the final six outs of a 4-3 victory with no runs, no hits and no incidents, requiring just 19 pitches to do so.

The outrageousness of Game 3 established the animosity and compet.i.tiveness of the series that would build toward the seventh game. Starting with Game 3, the teams alternated wins over four games in which each one hung in the balance into the ninth inning. So it would come down to this: the Yankees and Red Sox playing each other for the 26th time that year-the most two teams had seen of one another in baseball history-and a Yankee Stadium reprise of the Martinez-Clemens pitching matchup. To add to the drama, the game stood a chance to be the last time Clemens pitched in the big leagues. He had announced his intention to retire after the season, an intention that actually took four years to consummate. But the expectation at the time was that this might be his last game.

Martinez did not sleep well before Game 7. For one reason, his body clock was askew from a weary travel schedule. In the previous 19 days he had flown from Boston to Tampa to Oakland to Boston to Oakland to New York to Boston to New York. For another reason, Martinez was anxious, even fearful, of the hostility he might find in New York after the incidents from Game 3. He read and heard comments that he should be thrown in jail for what he did to Zimmer, and that fans were going to come to Game 7 armed with rocks and batteries to throw at him in the bullpen. His brother, the former pitcher Ramon Martinez, wanted to watch his kid brother pitch with the pennant on the line at Yankee Stadium, but Pedro would not allow it.

”Stay in Boston,” he told Ramon. ”Anything can happen.”

Martinez made certain not to leave his hotel room while in New York. On the day of Game 7 he ordered some Dominican food delivered to his room rather than venturing out for lunch. He took the team bus to the ballpark, rather than trust a New York cabbie to bring him safely to the ballpark. The Yankees never liked Martinez much, but now he felt the wrath of the citizens of the city for having flung an old, huggable man to the ground.

Burkett, knowing this was likely to be his final season, had toted a video camera throughout the playoffs. It was rolling in the clubhouse before Game 7. One of his favorite images, taken un.o.btrusively, is of Martinez, sitting alone, facing into his locker, his face taut with concentration and anxiousness.

Martinez embraced the challenge, clearly outpitching an ineffective Clemens in the early innings. Boston whacked Clemens for three runs in the third inning, while Martinez was giving the Yankees nothing. Kevin Millar ripped Clemens' first pitch of the fourth inning for a home run, and it was 4-0. The Red Sox didn't stop there. Trot Nixon walked and then Bill Mueller lashed a single to center field. The Yankees were on the cusp of getting blown out, already down four runs to a sharp Martinez with Boston runners at first and third and no outs. Torre had little choice but to pull Clemens from the wreckage before it grew even worse. Clemens walked off the field in that slow, ambling cowboy walk of his, but the Yankee Stadium crowd was in too foul of a mood to send him off to his retirement with polite applause.

When the bullpen door swung open, an accidental reliever walked out. It was Mussina. There he was making the first relief appearance of his professional life and having to do so by parachuting into the middle of an inning-exactly the scenario Stottlemyre had told him would not happen. Trouble was, Stottlemyre did not tell Torre he promised Mussina he would relieve only at the start of the inning. All Torre knew was that the game was on the line right now and it was time to break gla.s.s in case of emergency. Mussina was his best option.

Mussina first had to face Boston catcher Jason Varitek. He struck him out on three pitches. Next up was center fielder Johnny Damon. Mussina induced a groundball to Jeter, who turned it into an inning-ending double play. Just like that, with six pitches to two batters, Mussina had auth.o.r.ed his signature moment as a Yankee. Until then he had acquired the reputation of a nearly great pitcher. Reliable, yes, but always somehow short of real greatness. He had never won 20 games in a season, had come within one strike of throwing a perfect game against Boston in 2001, and had lost four straight postseason decisions for the Yankees, including two in the 2003 ALCS alone.

Mussina's relief work grew in stature as the game unfolded. The Yankees finally broke through against Martinez when Jason Giambi whacked his first pitch of the fifth inning for a home run. Meanwhile, Mussina tacked on two more shutout innings. He had thrown 33 pitches and kept the Yankees within range of Pedro when Torre decided to take him out after the sixth inning, turning to lefthanded reliever Felix Heredia to face Damon and Todd Walker, two lefthanded hitters due up for Boston.

Told he was done for the night, Mussina turned to Torre in the dugout and said, ”I thought you weren't going to bring me in in the middle of an inning.”

Said Torre kiddingly, because he was unaware of what Stottlemyre had told him, ”Well, I guess we lied to you.”

Then Torre turned serious. He drew closer to his pitcher and told him, ”All I can tell you is you pitched the game of your life here. If anybody ever questions how you handle pressure, you answered that right here. Don't you ever forget that.”

”Thanks,” Mussina said.

”Oh, and one more thing,” Torre said. ”Maybe when we come back next spring we'll take a look at you out of the bullpen.”

”No, no. No, thanks,” Mussina said.

Torre, of course, was kidding, but Mussina's clutch relief work had allowed some levity and hope in a game the Yankees still trailed by three against a determined, if somewhat weary, Martinez. The lack of sleep, the anxiety about the cauldron of New York, the three weeks of crossing times zones . . . all of it sapped a bit of energy from Martinez. Even though he cruised through the sixth inning, Martinez came off the field, sat next to a.s.sistant trainer Chris Correnti and offered something revealing: ”Chris,” he said, ”I'm a little fatigued.”

In the seventh, Martinez locked down the first two outs without apparent difficulty. But then Giambi hammered his second home run of the game to cut the lead to 4-2. Now Martinez only needed to dispatch Enrique Wilson to end the inning. Wilson normally would be the last guy you would want taking an at-bat when you were down to the last seven outs of your playoff life. Quite simply, Enrique Wilson was one of the worst hitters ever to play for the New York Yankees. He appeared in 264 games for the Yankees and batted .216. Only four men in the history of the franchise ever hit worse with that much time in pinstripes: Bill Robinson (.206, 196769), Jim Mason (.208, 197476), Lute Boone (.210, 191316) and Steve Balboni (.214, 198190). Moreover, Wilson was neither especially fleet nor adept in the field. His value essentially came down to one specific and unexplainable skill: he could hit Pedro Martinez. Wilson was a career .500 hitter against Martinez, with 10 hits in 20 at-bats, including a freakish 7-for-8 performance that year alone. Torre started Wilson at third base on those numbers alone, though his regular starting third baseman had given him no reason why he should stay in the lineup. Aaron Boone, looking overmatched, was. .h.i.tting .125 in the ALCS, with two hits in 16 at-bats. Naturally, Martinez could not get Wilson out. Wilson reached base with an infield single. Garcia, whom Martinez had treated as his plastic duck decoy for Game 3 target practice, smacked the next pitch for a single.

Martinez had so cruised through most of the game that he had thrown only 11 pitches out of the stretch position before Garcia's. .h.i.t. But now that the Yankees had the tying runs on base and Soriano at bat, Martinez had to tap whatever reserve tank of energy he possessed. Soriano fought Martinez through a grueling six-pitch at-bat. On the last pitch, Soriano swung and missed for strike three. It was Pedro's 100th pitch of the game. As Martinez walked off the mound he gave thanks to G.o.d by pointing to the sky. Red Sox Nation recognized the body language. It was Pedro's usual coda to a full night's work, his signature signoff. It was the look of a man who was done, who had delivered his team with 100 pitches to a 4-2 lead and within six outs of the World Series. Martinez's teammates recognized the look. As Martinez walked into the third-base end of the Boston dugout, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra threw his arms around Martinez in a hug, a gesture of appreciation for the game he pitched. At the other end of the dugout, nearest to home plate, Boston pitching coach Dave Wallace pulled his pitching log notebook and a pencil from his pocket and ran a line through Martinez's name. Pedro, to the coach's best a.s.sumpton, was done. Underneath Martinez's scratched-out name Wallace wrote ”Embree.” Alan Embree, a lefthanded pitcher, would start the eighth inning to match up against Nick Johnson, a lefthanded hitter and the first Yankee due up in the inning. Wallace and Correnti congratulated Martinez on his effort, a job well done.

”After the seventh,” Martinez said, ”Chris and Wallace told me that was pretty much it. They were going to talk to Grady.”

At that moment, Martinez figured he was done for the night. Such a moment is all it takes to trigger the shutdown of a pitcher's compet.i.tive systems. Rebooting is never quick and easy.

”Your energy level drops,” Martinez said of that mental shutdown. ”As soon as you think you're out, even for 30 seconds, you get tired and out of focus.”

Martinez, slipping on his warmup jacket, was getting ready to leave the dugout for the clubhouse. Suddenly Little approached him.

”I need you for one more [inning],” the manager said. ”Can you give me one more?”

Martinez was stunned. First of all, he had already a.s.sumed that he was done. And second of all, how was he supposed to answer the question? Was he even permitted, in the unwritten macho code of the game, to refuse the manager's request and say he wanted to come out of a Game 7?

”I didn't know what to say,” Martinez said later. ”Do I come out after the sixth or seventh? If anything happens, everyone will say, 'Pedro wanted to come out.'

”I wasn't hurt. I was tired, yes. I never expressed anything about coming out. The only way I would say that is if I was physically hurt. The only way.”