01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead.

Let the celebration begin, right?

Grady Little is done as the Red Sox manager, the worst kept secret in baseball finally coming true. No matter that he was gone as soon as he failed to take out a cooked Pedro Martinez in the bottom of the eighth in Game 7 of the ALCS, the inning where the Yankees came back to tie the game and write another chapter in Red Sox postseason infamy. No matter that he's been twisting in the wind ever since, like some old sign that had no chance of surviving the gale. No matter that it's been apparent for a while now that Grady wasn't going to grow any older as the Red Sox manager.

We now officially have our scapegoat.

And maybe this is really what this bloodletting for the last 10 days or so had been.

For we do need our scapegoats.

Not just in sports, either. Scapegoats are perfect. They are simplistic, and they focus everyone's wrath on one target. Most of all, they're convenient, take complicated issues and make them easy to understand, something with all the substance of a TV sound bite. The economy's in the toilet? It's all Bush's fault. The culture's gone to hell in a handbasket? It's all the liberal's fault.

The Red Sox lost to the Yankees?

Bring me Grady Little's head.

No matter that Pedro could not do what 23-year-old Josh Beckett did on three days' rest, even though Pedro wants to be paid like he's the best pitcher in the game. Or that Nomar went south in the playoffs. No matter that if Theo Epstein hadn't over-valued Casey Fossum, the Sox might have had Bartolo Colon and finished ahead of the Yankees and Game 7 would have been in Fenway Park and maybe it all turns out different. Ditto if Epstein had re-signed Oogie Urbina.

And no matter that so much of sports is based on mere happenstance, the vagaries of the game. Especially baseball, where even the great teams lose 40 percent of the time, and the line between success and failure can be as thin as a homeless cat. Or if Jorge Posada's flare hit off Martinez travels a few feet farther, maybe everything changes. But that's baseball. Sometimes Bill Buckner catches the ball, and sometimes the ball rolls through his legs. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and sometimes the difference doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Except in the Red Sox's case, where we all know it was Grady's fault, right?

Maybe it's this simple: we need someone to blame. Some place to put our frustration, our anger, our powerlessness. The Red Sox blew a Game 7 they should have won when Grady didn't go to the pen quick enough, and someone is going to pay, make no mistake about that.

And Grady is perfect for that.

From the beginning, he was all but set up to be the perfect fall guy. We all know that managers are hired to be fired, but Grady was the textbook example. No matter that he won 95 games with a team that didn't have a bullpen for much of the year, or that in his two years as Red Sox manager he both calmed and focused a Sox clubhouse that, in Larry Lucchino's words, was roiling. No matter that he got the Sox to Game 7 of the ALCS, the best Red Sox season in 17 years.

He never had either the résumé or the presence to withstand what happened in Game 7. Not even close. Because so much of this is perception. Joe Torre loses a World Series game with the woeful Jeff Weaver on the mound while Mariano Rivera sits in the bullpen, and Torre skates. Grady Little hangs too long with the supposed best pitcher in the game and he becomes the ultimate baseball nitwit.

Don't misunderstand.

This is not to say Little should have been brought back. The fact the Sox did not exercise the option on his contract during the year said Grady no longer was their managerial choice, that he probably had to take this team to the World Series to keep his job. The incredible furor over Grady's role in the Game 7 loss means the Sox would have had huge public relations problems if they had done so, for Sox fans wanted Grady's head and nothing else was going to satisfy them.

And maybe the job of Red Sox manager has become impossible. Too many decisions to be made, and all of them too public. Too many decisions to be made, and all of them examined as if protozoa under a microscope. Maybe being the Red Sox manager has merely become the lightning rod for 85 years of frustration, and there's no escaping that. So if the Red Sox don't win the World Series, then it's just another lost year and someone's going to pay for it or else.

This year it's Grady Little, and yesterday was the official exorcism.

The perfect scapegoat.

But what happens now when the Red Sox no longer have Grady to kick around anymore?