Pedro Martinez: "I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddies."

[MavKikiNYC]

Words that will live in infamy.


IN BIG SPOT, FRANCONA COMES UP VERY LITTLE

BY MIKE VACCARO
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September 25, 2004 -- BOSTON — We knew Pedro Martinez was a little shaky against the Yankees. We'd seen it. We'd felt it, on that forever night 11 months ago, when Yankee Stadium rocked to its foundation as the Yankees fought back from the abyss while one addled manager let one exhausted ace absorb the beating of his life.
But we couldn't have known this:

"I can't find a way to beat the Yankees," Martinez said last night. But he didn't end there.

"I just tip my hat," he said, "and call the Yankees my daddies." But he didn't end there, either.

"I wish," Martinez finally admitted, "that they would just [bleeping] disappear."

This was the pitcher that Terry Francona would later insist, "looked strong to me."

If that's so, then Francona owns precisely the pair of rose-colored blinders that Grady Little used last October, when he kept Martinez on the mound in the eighth inning of Game 7 of the ALCS.

And that has to be the second-most horrifying development to emerge from this thoroughly bizarre 6-4 beating the Yankees administered last night.

No. 1, with a bullet, was Martinez' meltdown, which officially brings to a close the run of one of the Yankees' all-time colorful dance partners. Remember when Pedro was defiantly declaring "Wake the Bambino — I'll drill him in the ass!"

What's left of him now? How can the Red Sox possibly bring him back now, after this most troubling concession speech? And more frightful to Martinez' free-agent prospects, how can the Yankees ever again think about wooing him over to the other side of the Great Divide now?

Francona? For the very first time last night, as he walked to the mound to finally pull his pitcher, Francona could feel the wrath of 86 years crumbling down on his shoulders.

"If I thought he was losing it," Francona would say later, "I would have taken him out."

If that's the case, then it's official: to accept the job as manager of the Red Sox is to forfeit your common sense. It happened to Grady Little once, and now he sleeps with Boston's baseball fishes, after keeping Pedro in too long during another fabled eighth-inning meltdown, 11 long months ago.

And now, it was Francona's turn. Martinez entered the eighth with a 4-3 lead and 101 pitches in his tank. His 103rd was driven into the right-field bullpen by Hideki Matsui, for a game-tying home run. Soon, Bernie Williams was stroking a double. And soon after that, Ruben Sierra punched in the go-ahead run.

Fenway Park was apoplectic. Bad enough that cheering for the Red Sox is filled with a crowded roster of historic misery; now, these dreadful moments have encores? Did Pesky hold the ball 11 months after the '46 World Series? Did another critical ball bleed through Billy Buckner's legs? Did Mike Torrez ever serve up another fat fastball to Bucky Dent? They might as well. Because all of those possibilities swirled through the agitated imaginations at Fenway last night as Francona left Pedro in there to take his beating.

And to think: that was merely prologue.

To think: Pedro Martinez, once the most feared pitcher in all of baseball, had been reduced to a pathetic puddle. Yes, we knew the Yankees weren't afraid of him. But who knew they owned him? Who knew they were his daddies?

Only Pedro knew. And now we all do. Forever.

[sike]

and the regret will set in...when??