Manager Grady Little sat in his office in Yankee Stadium about 2 1/2 hours before Game 7 of the American League Championship Series a week ago Thursday night.
Little's Red Sox were counting down the minutes to the first pitch of the deciding game, anxious yet confident that they were going to tumble the New York Yankees and head into the World Series for the first time since 1986.
As he sat in his chair, Little kept tossing a baseball a few inches in the air and catching it, a smile on his face as he answered questions about the importance the magnitude of the game the Sox were about to play.
"Pressure? This isn't pressure. Pressure is owing a million dollars to the bank and gambling that your cotton crop is going to come in. That's a lot of gambling on crop. One year we had a storm that wiped out half the crop," said Little, thinking back to the four years he spent outside of baseball as a cotton farmer in Texas in the late 1970s.
So he wasn't exactly all torn up about it when Bucky Dent's fly ball made it over the Green Monster in the playoff game in 1978, an excruciating loss to the Yankees that still gives Red Sox fans nightmares.
"Back then I was 28, making sure the cotton was picked on time and was going to the gin and to the market more than I was concerned with the results of a playoff game. That's pressure. This is fun," said Little.
About 6 1/2 hours later, Little wasn't smiling. The manager made a decision to leave in a tired Pedro Martinez in the eighth inning, and, as every Boston fan in the rabid Red Sox region is painfully aware of right now, the move backfired loudly.
The Yanks tagged Martinez for three runs in pulling even at 5-5, eventually winning the game and the series, 6-5, on Aaron Boone's first-pitch homer off Tim Wakefield in the 11th.
In the wake of the defeat -- though ownership denies the decision was made based solely on the results of Game 7 -- the Red Sox are expected to fire Little . . . or, more accurately, not pick up the 2004 option on his contract. Now that the World Series is over, the announcement is expected to come early this week, perhaps today.
The second-guessing of Little began before the first pitch of the eighth, with Martinez already having thrown 100 pitches, the Sox up by the score of 5-2, and a rested bullpen that had been blowing away the opposition in the postseason. And the second-guessing, which turned downright venomous as the lead and then the game stunningly disappeared, hasn't let up yet. And it won't until (if ever?) the Red Sox should capture their first World Championship since 1918.
What unfortunately will be lost in the angst surrounding the Sox' loss to their bitter rivals is that this was a great series of baseball, featuring virtually non-stop intensity and drama, not to mention agonizing twists and turns along the way, with Boston's band of never-say-die players showing great determination throughout the playoffs, as they had during the regular season.
Say what you want about the "Cowboy Up" slogan and the shaved heads. Call it bush league, if you will. But this year's version of the Red Sox at least showed some esprit de corps unlike so many of Boston's team in the recent past.
And the action in the series began heating up after the teams split the first two games at The House That Ruth Built.
Not all of it was pretty. There was the ugliness in Game 3 at Fenway Park with Pedro's headhunting, Manny Ramirez's overreaction, Martinez's shoving of 72-year-old Yankee coach Don Zimmer to the ground in self defense and an altercation in New York's bullpen.
There was Wakefield's knuckleball shutting down New York for the second time in the series, this time a 3-2, Game 4 win, fueled by homers from Todd Walker and Trot Nixon. There was clutch pitching from David Wells in New York's 4-2 Game 5 victory in Fenway. There was the Red Sox' stirring, emotional Game 6 triumph, in which Boston overcame a 6-4 seventh-inning deficit and notched a 9-6 win, staving off elimination and setting up Game 7.
It was the fourth time in the postseason that the Sox had won an elimination game, having taken three straight from Oakland in the A.L. Division Series in winning a spot in the ALCS.
Along the way in the postseason there was great relief pitching from Mike Timlin, Alan Embree and Scott Williamson, and clutch homers by Jason Varitek, Walker and Nixon.
And then there was Game 7 in the Bronx. A 4-0 lead, and ex-Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens off to the showers in the fourth inning, a victim of homers by Nixon and Millar. A 5-2 advantage in the eighth. It was all there for the Sox. The World Series date with the Florida Marlins was looming. Walker, the Sox' defensively challenged second baseman, was even making spectacular plays, for goodness sakes.
But, of course, it didn't happen.
Some will blame a silly curse, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the fat, flat knuckleball Wakefield put on a tee for Boone.
Most have blamed it on Little. Of course, second-guessing goes with the territory. But the passion for the Red Sox around here magnifies that propensity a thousandfold. There were times during the regular season when Little commented, a tad sarcastically, about how many good managers there were in Boston after poor results following one of his moves.
Pressure? It comes in a different form in the baseball business.
Mother Nature doesn't put the pressure on him in Boston, the way she might have in his cotton-farming days in Texas. The Red Sox fans do.
And it hasn't been any fun being Grady Little, manager of the Boston Red Sox, since the devastating setback in Game 7 of the ALCS.
