What Martinez missed then, what everybody missed when Boston manager Grady Little left him in too long in a Game 7 loss to the Yankees in the American League Championship Series the year before, was that it really boiled down to one daddy, not a whole team of them.
Matsui, the Most Valuable Player of this World Series, hit a double after Martinez was left in that night in 2003, later scoring the tying run and erasing a 5-2 Boston lead. Aaron Boone's 11th-inning home run later won it for New York, and the Red Sox fired Little within 2 weeks.
No such fate will await Charlie Manuel in Philly, of course, for his loyalty and baseball instincts were as much a reason that the Phillies won their second world championship in 2008 as they were a cause for last night's 7-3, season-ending loss to the New York Yankees that extinguished their hopes to force a seventh game, or to repeat as world champions.
In 2003, Little's transgression was not reaching for Alan Embree, a reliable situational lefthander used in that role all season. Perhaps the biggest difference for Manuel between this year and last, the biggest difference between this season's Phillies and last year's version, is how often those type of roles hadto be altered due to injury and ineffectiveness.
Their closer set a record for futility. Their ace went AWOL. J.A. Happ, who later surrendered Matsui's fifth and sixth runs batted in last night, was one of Manuel's two most reliable starters in the second half. Yet, both he and Joe Blanton were sent to the bullpen when the postseason started, and both seemed to lose sharpness because of that. Rather than use either as starters throughout the postseason, Manuel went repeatedly to Cole Hamels, hoping he would find his 2008 mojo in the bigness of the season, and to Martinez - hoping he would find his 1998 fastball.
