04/14/2002

BOSTON --

Here are the numbers:

Three hits, five runs, seven strikeouts, three walks, one wild pitch and two hit batters, 102 pitches, 59 for strikes. Five and one-third innings of work.

They lie there as cold and unemotional as notations on a ledger sheet.

But what do they mean?

That was the question with Pedro Martinez yesterday.

That's always the question with Pedro these days, the new reality he now lives in.

Once upon time these numbers would have been forgettable for Pedro, a throw-away day in a career that seemed to be scripted by the baseball gods. Once upon a time this would have been one of those early-season performances that no one would have had much of an opinion on, 51/3 innings in a game where all the true dramatics came late.

But this is not once upon a time.

This is Pedro trying to come back from a shoulder injury that all but robbed him of his season a year ago, an injury that made him see his baseball mortality for the first time. The kind of injury that changes everything, makes Martinez a baseball version of some existential hero, living in some strange landscape where the past no longer counts and the future is uncertain. Some new place where each time he goes to the mound it's all a blank canvas.

So there was Pedro yesterday, in his third start of this young season that has so many more miles to go before it sleeps, getting lit up in the first inning as if he were just another fifth starter trying to hang in the rotation. By the time the smoke had cleared the Yankees were leading 4-0 and it was beginning to look like Opening Day, the day Pedro looked like some discount-store version of what he used to be.

Deja vu all over again?

That was the bad news.

The good was that he settled down after that, got better as the game went along. Even if the two hit batters, the wild pitch, and the three walks say that his command was as shaky as a teenager on vacation. In the fifth, his last full inning, he struck out Bernie Williams, Jason Giambi and Jorge Posada, as if it were two years ago, back when the "K" signs used to hang on the bleacher wall like a necklace around a debutante's neck.

So what does it all mean?

Who knows.

Before the game Yankee manager Joe Torre was asked if Pedro had become a curiosity factor.

"He's still the elite to me," Torre said.

Torre talked about the night in the '99 playoffs when Martinez had come out of the bullpen to shut down the Indians, even though he was hurting and didn't have his great heat, getting by on guile, command, heart and knowing how to pitch.

"Even without hs best stuff he's still a threat," said Torre.

Even without his best stuff.

For that's the real question, isn't it? How much of his best stuff does he now have? And if he doesn't have it all, can he get it back?

Because now it's as though Pedro is still in spring training, testing his limits, protected as if he's some baseball version of a hothouse flower, one that constantly must be monitored. Yesterday, it was 102 pitches, 17 more than he threw last Sunday in Baltimore.

A year ago these were David Cone numbers, the numbers of a once-great pitcher trying to hang on, pitch into the sixth inning, keep his team in the game, give it a chance to win. A pitcher who had learned to exist in the land of diminished expectations.

Is this Pedro's future, always on a pitch count, protected from himself, trying to save a career that now has a frayed rotator cuff hovering over it, a pitcher's worst nightmare?

Or was yesterday another positive step on the journey back to what he once was, someone who was virtually unhittable, as good as it gets?

Or will the answer ultimately lie somewhere in the middle, Pedro not being the Pedro of old, but still effective, still able to give his team a chance to win, even if he no longer can go into the late innings anymore?

Even without his best stuff.

That's what no one seems to know, Pedro included.

"I didn't feel like coming out," Martinez said. "I was feeling better and better every winning."

Yet, in almost the next sentence he talked about the need to listen to manager Grady Little when Little comes to take him out, as he knows this is all uncharterted territory, one in which the past no longer counts and the future is one big question mark hanging over the Green Monster. One in which each start will be examined with a jeweler's eye, the subtext to this season.

That's the new reality Pedro now lives in, the new reality the Red Sox now live in. For it all comes down to Martinez, all comes down to the shoulder of this man whose every start seems like a walk into the unknown. All the hopes and dreams of this season.

It all comes down to Pedro.

Who right now is a six-inning pitcher.

Even if yesterday was better than the numbers might indicate.