Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (33 page)

There have been 1,077 postseason games in the history of baseball. In only 13 of them did a team lose after it led by at least three runs with no more than five outs to go. But only twice did the losing team blow a lead that big and that late while leaving its starting pitcher in the game: the Cubs in Game 6 with Mark Prior and, two nights later, the Red Sox in Game 7 with Pedro Martinez. Two losses with matching DNA. Two out of 1,077. A .2% match. Crazy.

How the Cubs and the Red Sox invented a new way to lose within 48 hours last October is, prosaically, the story of how fatigue rendered each team’s ace incapable of holding a lead. Revisiting the two games with the principal figures involved also reveals that this is a story of how baseball can take on religious properties, when belief in the unseen is as good an explanation as any.

MARK PRIOR threw a 94-mph fastball with his 99th pitch, and Marlins pinch hitter Mike Mordecai lifted it into leftfield, where it settled into Moises Alou’s glove. Five outs to go.

Cubs president and CEO Andy MacPhail, sitting in a mezzanine box, began rehearsing in his head what he would say to the national television audience upon being presented with the NL championship trophy. He reminded himself that he would need to find his tie in order to look proper for such a moment.

Prior, the Cubs’ ace righthander, had retired eight straight hitters while working on a three-hit shutout. Chicago led 3–0.

Waveland Avenue felt like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, though a crowd waiting for a ball to drop would prove to be a cruelly prophetic image. About 3,000 people packed shoulder to shoulder in the autumnal chill on the famous street that runs parallel to the leftfield wall at Wrigley Field, the little jewel box of a ballpark that was quaking with excitement. The Cubs were going to the World Series, something no one under the age of 58 had ever witnessed, including Hillary Clinton, who once said, “Being a Cubs fan prepares you for life—and Washington.”

Chicago police had decided before the game that the Wrigleyville streets would be given over to 90 minutes of celebration immediately after the game, as long as there were—hey, hey—no open containers. The crowd was ready. Everyone thought Prior looked great. Everyone thought Prior looked strong.

Everyone, that is, except Prior.

“Most times when I pitch,” he says, “I feel like in the second, third, fourth innings I’m just getting warmed up. If things go according to plan, I get a little boost after that in the middle innings, and I feel stronger at the end of the game.

“This time I didn’t feel that. I felt like I had the same energy level the whole time. I never got that second wind.”

Prior, 23, was drafted by the Cubs out of USC in 2001 and won 18 games for Chicago last season. This night, however, would be his official Cubs baptism.

The Cubs are a Franciscan franchise. For core virtues they embrace humility (they welcome opponents to “the friendly confines” of Wrigley), poverty (as it relates to winning) and love of nature (especially sunshine, grass, ivy and choice hops and barley). The Cubs may not have invented the concept of lovable losers, but they certainly have perfected it.

“I was excited to be drafted by the Cubs,” Prior says. “But I got called up in a year we lost 95 games, and you start hearing all the time about the negatives. It gets drilled into you. Even while we were winning last year, people were bringing up 1908 or 1984 or 1969 over and over again. It wears on you.”

The Cubs’ first-year manager, Dusty Baker, had left a successful 10-year run in San Francisco to change the culture in Chicago. He was the embodiment of cool, grooving to Coltrane or Miles Davis in his tiny office while munching on a toothpick and speaking a language of optimism that sounded Greek to the Windy City. Winning baseball seasons in Chicago were treated like mild winters, totally unexpected flukes that surely meant hell to pay the next year. “It was probably my most difficult year managing,” Baker says. “Toward the end of the year I was psychologically worn out. I thought at the end of the year we were pretty close to getting the mind-set turned around.”

Pretty close. Five outs from the World Series, and one strike away from whiffing centerfielder Juan Pierre, Prior fired a 96 mph fastball. Pierre swatted the pitch hard, just inside the leftfield line, for a double. Alou fielded the ball in foul ground, near the brick wall of the stands. A few feet away, in the front row of those stands, a 26-year-old man raised in the religion of the Cubs—in his lifetime the team had accrued only seven winning seasons, none consecutively—wished hard for those five outs.

The man looked like a
Sibley Guide
version of a Cubs fan, if the bird experts had ever expanded their artistry into the domain of sports spectators. Bespectacled, he wore a Cubs cap with earphones atop it, listening to the broadcast of the game. Over a green turtleneck he wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with
RENEGADES
, the name of the youth baseball team he helped coach. He was unaware that the quiet life he knew was about to end.

MARTINEZ THREW a 93 mph fastball with his 107th pitch, and Yankees first baseman Nick Johnson lifted it to shortstop, where it settled into Nomar Garciaparra’s glove. Five outs to go.

The Red Sox held a 5–2 lead. Martinez was still throwing hard. He knew, however, that the radar gun was an inadequate indicator of how he was feeling. “Even when I’m fatigued, I can still throw hard,” he says. “My arm speed may be there, but location is where I suffer, and that’s because my arm angle drops. I throw three quarters, yes, but it’s three-quarters steady. If I start to get tired, my arm drops a little more, and that causes the ball to stay flat over the plate. My velocity doesn’t change, but I can’t spot the ball as well when I’m tired. That’s what happened.”

Martinez had not slept well on the eve of Game 7. He was anxious, sure, but his body clock was off: He’d flown from Boston to Tampa (where the Red Sox had ended the regular season) to Oakland (where they had opened the playoffs) to Boston to Oakland to New York to Boston to New York in the previous 20 days.

The fallout from Game 3 had also taken its toll on Martinez. That epic, six days earlier at Fenway Park, had been the sizzling prelude to Game 7. New York had knocked Martinez around for four runs on six hits before the righthander was even out of the fourth inning. So emboldened were the Yankees by the hard swings they took at Martinez that they yelled at him from the dugout, “You’ve got nothing!”

The fourth inning of Game 3 began with a walk to Jorge Posada, followed by a single by Johnson and a double by Hideki Matsui. Martinez, working with a base open, had seen enough. With his next pitch he whistled a fastball behind the head of Karim Garcia. The pitch hit a stunned Garcia in the back.

“I don’t think Pedro was trying to hurt him,” says John Burkett, a Red Sox righthander since retired. “He was trying to send a message. It was, F--- this, I’ve got to put a scare into somebody. And he did.” (Martinez claimed the pitch simply got away.)

In the bottom of the fourth inning that day, Red Sox leftfielder Manny Ramirez caused both benches to empty when, bat in hand, he glowered at Clemens after a pitch that was nowhere close to hitting him. Don Zimmer, the portly 72-year-old Yankees bench coach, charged across the field at Martinez. “He reached for my right arm,” Martinez says. “I thought, Is he going to pull it? Is he trying to hurt me? I tossed him down.”

Zimmer fell awkwardly to the ground in front of the Red Sox dugout. He would apologize through tears the next day for his actions, but that 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.

So it should have come as no surprise when, ahead 4–1 after a rather easy sixth inning in Game 7, Martinez sat next to assistant trainer Chris Correnti and said, “Chris, I’m a little fatigued.”

The Red Sox are a Calvinistic franchise. Fathers have passed to their sons, who have passed to their sons, a doctrine of predestination. Only by the grace of God, and not by a wicked starting rotation, can the Red Sox ever win a World Series again. The Calvinists’ God, however, also marks certain souls for damnation. So it is that Fenway Park in the late innings of a close game can be churchlike in its silence. The faithful can only wait for God to do His work, knowing that it includes more damnation.

“I want to win a World Series with Boston more than anything else,” Martinez says. “I’d rather win one with Boston than three or four with any other team. I’ve had so many people say to me they pray to God they don’t die before the Red Sox win the World Series. But after that, they’re satisfied, they can die.”

The Yankees made Martinez exert himself in the seventh. Jason Giambi hit his second homer of the night to cut the lead to 4–2. Enrique Wilson and Garcia followed with singles. Martinez gamely fanned Alfonso Soriano, though it took a grueling six-pitch at bat to do so. He had thrown 100 pitches. As he walked off the mound, Martinez gave thanks to God by pointing to the sky, his usual coda to a full night’s work.

In the far end of the dugout Garciaparra threw his arms around Martinez, a gesture of appreciation for his effort. At the other end of the dugout pitching coach Dave Wallace pulled his pitching log notebook from his pocket, scratched out Martinez’s name and, with the lefthanded Johnson due up next inning, wrote in the name of lefthanded reliever Alan Embree.

“After the seventh,” Martinez says, “Chris and Wallace told me that was pretty much it. They were going to talk to Grady [Little, the Boston manager].”

For a moment, Martinez figured he was done. And such a moment is all it takes to trigger the shutdown of a pitcher’s competitive systems. Rebooting is never easy. “Your energy level drops,” Martinez says. “As soon as you think you’re out, even for 30 seconds, you get tired and out of focus.”

Martinez was getting ready to leave for the clubhouse with Correnti when Little approached him. According to Martinez, Little told him, “I need you for one more [inning]. Can you give me one more?”

“I didn’t know what to say,” Martinez says. “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.”

So Martinez told Little he would try to give him another inning. Little, sensing Martinez’s fatigue, decided on a backup plan. “I’ll tell you what, Petey,” Martinez says Little told him. “Why don’t you try to start the eighth. I might even send you out there just to warm up.”

The implication was that Embree would be summoned at any sign of distress, even if it occurred as Martinez threw his warmup pitches.

“Help is on the way,” Little told Martinez.

Says Martinez, “At that point, I thought I was batter by batter”—that he would be removed if a runner reached base.

David Ortiz gave Boston another run to spare with a homer off David Wells in the top of the eighth. Martinez, the game more secure, marched back to the mound with a 5–2 lead. “I was a little fatigued,” he says. “But I did not believe I was giving up that lead. That had never happened to me. You might as well be up 10 runs instead of three—that’s what it seemed like to me. We had enough to win.”

Little, then 53, slightly plump, twinkle-eyed and gray-haired, speaks slowly in a soft voice with a lilting Southern accent. He was Central Casting’s version of a big league manager, popular with his players. Indeed, when Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino had introduced Little, a former Boston coach, as manager during a hastily called team meeting in spring training 19 months before, a happy Martinez had celebrated in front of Little with a raunchy jig in the nude.

As Martinez tossed his eighth-inning warmup pitches, Embree threw in the bullpen. Mike Timlin and Scott Williamson were available too. The three relievers had dominated New York throughout the series, allowing only one run in 11
¹
/
₃
innings and just five hits in 36 at bats. Little would later tell club officials that, as well as the trio had pitched, he did not trust them to keep their nerves under control in such a pressurized spot. He trusted no one more than Martinez.

Little preferred a fatigued Martinez to any of the fresh relievers, and not just to start the inning. The manager would make the same decision a second, third and fourth time when trouble arose in the eighth. “It’s the way we’ve always done it,” Little says. “Ninety percent of the time when we send Pedro back out there he completes the inning. He gets out of his own jams. I’d rather have a tired Pedro Martinez out there than anybody else. He’s my best.”

Until Game 5 of the AL Division Series against Oakland, Martinez had been removed eight times mid-inning in his 60 starts for Little—four of them against the Yankees—and only once after the seventh. But in a subtle bit of foreshadowing, Martinez had not been able to get through the eighth inning of that game in Oakland. Little had pulled him after two hits and used four relievers to secure the final six outs to make possible the New York–Boston steel cage match.

Ten days later, with a World Series berth on the line, the manager had more confidence in Martinez. Little was unaware that the quiet life he knew was about to end.

LIKE JUAN PIERRE, who had doubled on 2 and 2, Luis Castillo made Prior exert himself. He worked the count to 3 and 2. No one was throwing in the Cubs bullpen. Mets lefthander Al Leiter, working as an analyst for Fox, remarked, “[Prior] hasn’t shown any reason to have any [bullpen] activity. His stuff’s the same.”

When Castillo fouled off the sixth pitch of the at bat, however, Cubs pitching coach Larry Rothschild stood up in the dugout, picked up the phone and ordered reliever Kyle Farnsworth to start getting loose.

Prior had averaged 113 pitches per start during the regular season, the most in baseball. Baker pushed him beyond that in the postseason. Prior had thrown 133 and 116 pitches in his two previous starts, the most recent one a 12–3 win in Game 2 in which Baker sent him back out for the eighth inning with his team leading by 10 runs. Baker explained that nothing can be taken for granted in a playoff game. Now Prior’s odometer had hit 234
²
/
₃
innings for the year—a leap of 167
²
/
₃
from his combined minor and major league total as a rookie.