RON CORTES / Staff photographer
Pedro Martinez gestures from the Phillies' dugout after exiting the game.
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Paul Hagen: Charlie sticks to his game plan for Pedro
LOS ANGELES - Former Red Sox manager Grady Little and Charlie Manuel are good friends. Little was fired by Boston, in large part, because of the frenzied backlash after he left in Pedro Martinez just long enough to allow the Yankees to tie, and eventually win, Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series.
The Phillies manager won't get canned this winter, no matter what happens in the rest of the postseason. But as he boarded the team charter back to Philadelphia late yesterday afternoon, he was already being roasted for doing the exact opposite of what got Little into trouble.
Yes, baseball is a funny game.
Manuel lifted Martinez from Game 2 of the National League Championship Series at Dodger Stadium, with a 1-0 lead, after only 87 pitches. He had shut out the Dodgers on two singles through the first seven innings.
The Phillies lost, 2-1, when the bullpen gave up the lead in the eighth.
For this, he gets points for consistency. He had said, after the somewhat surprising announcement that Martinez would get the assignment over Joe Blanton or J.A. Happ, that he was looking for somewhere between 75 and 90 pitches from a 37-year-old who hadn't pitched since Sept. 30, while leaving open the possibility he could be extended slightly beyond that.
The result, however, made those consistency points about as useful as Confederate money.
"He was gone," Manuel said later. "I mean, I think he was spent . . . It was a hot day and he hadn't pitched in [2 1/2 weeks]. He did a tremendous job and he actually took it farther than I anticipated when the game started. To me, Pedro was done."
One who did not second-guess the move was Martinez himself.
"I felt pretty fresh. But at the same time, that's the temptation of pushing it. You push it and then what happens the next time? It was [a long layoff] without pitching. It's the first time I've ever done that in my career, if I'm not mistaken," he said.
"It's a little risk. You either pay for one or take the other. I'm not saying I'm going to get hurt, because I've been pretty healthy, but after [that much time], I think seven innings was good enough.
"I would have loved to go one more or maybe the rest of the game, if I knew I was going to stay healthy the next day."
Manuel allowed Martinez to throw 130 pitches against the Mets on Sept. 13. In his next start, he popped a rib and ended up throwing only seven more ineffective innings the rest of the season.
If the manager had let him stay in and he'd been hurt again, he'd have been ripped.
If he'd let him stay in and Martinez had given up the decisive runs, he'd have been toasted, too.
That just comes as part of the job description. It's easy enough to criticize the quick hook, now that everybody knows what happened. It might have been better if he had kept him in the game.
Of course, it also could have been worse.
The quote
Dodgers third baseman Casey Blake, on how he felt when he realized that he wouldn't be facing Pedro Martinez when he led off the bottom of the eighth: "Very happy."
