You can call it Monday morning quarterbacking if you want. You weren’t there,
and I didn’t say much at the time. People claim now that they were yelling at
televisions, in droves, probably something like “Get him outta there; can’t you
see he’s done”.

You can take the high road. I finally have my high-school yearbook, so I have
looked up a quote I have tried to remember for years: “The past, which as
always, did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned, or even before they are simplified” (Paul Fussell).

The thing is, it is not very far in the past, yet, and it didn’t take any imagination to see that Pedro Martinez was gassed. With a lefty and a righty warm in a bullpen that had given up all of a run in sixteen and a third post-season innings, a three-run lead, and five outs to go, Pedro Martinez gave up a double, a single, a double, and a single to consecutive batters while the one man who could stop the carnage, with no more than a tap on his wrist, froze like a drunken teenager taking a five-litre mustang toward an oak tree.

The only way I can look at it now is this: Grady Little couldn’t pull the trigger, and consequently a Red Sox team that was not only the best I have seen in twenty years of watching, but was peaking in mid-October, is done. Grady Little froze. Grady froze. It’s better the shorter it gets.

Really, it was much worse: watching pitch after pitch, knowing Pedro was done, imagining the worst that could happen on any pitch (the long ball, of course) theoretically (the line score) and physically (the swing, the arc, the ribald roar of the fans through a television speaker). The actual results: strike, ball, foul, a fan hitting Matsui’s double as it flew into the right-field corner, leaving runners at second and third, the cheesy TV cuts (runner at third, runner at second, extreme close up of P. Martinez, extreme close up of J. Posada), and, finally, J. Posada’s two-RBI piece-of-shit flare to impossibly shallow left field, were horrific. Grady Little finally walked on to the field to pull P. Martinez with the score tied and the cat out of the bag. The plays are final.

The past, as always, did not know the future, but the decisions are made, and the consequences are irrevocable. Twenty years of “dear God, get him out of there” won’t change the line score, but it will turn the vivid image (television close up) of a facial tic, a twitching below the left eye of a gassed Pedro Martinez, as a lied-to Grady Little walks back to the dugout, no doubt thinking “he said he had something left, he must have something left”, into a much more
bearable “Grady froze”.