11:45 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Sometimes it seems as if it's always about Pedro.

Maybe that's the price we pay for greatness. The price we pay for having a great pitcher in our midst these past several years, the price we pay for being able to have an up-close-and-personal look at Pedro Martinez in his prime, one of the truly gifted pitchers of his generation.

So we forgive him his trespasses, just as the Red Sox always have. He wants to report late for spring training? No problem. He wants to skip out early for the All-Star break and go home to the Dominican Republic for a few days? That was no problem, either. He decides to "shut it down?" He shuts it down. He has a reputation throughout the game as a bit of a head-hunter, someone who would throw at his own grandmother if she got too close to the plate? We deflect it, make excuses for him.

No surprise, really.

Isn't that what the Red Sox have been doing since the days of Ted Williams, coddling their stars, enabling them? Hasn't this always been the story with Pedro? Rank has it's privileges, especially with the Red Sox, and Pedro always has understood that.

So we have Grady Little letting him go too long in the seventh game of the ALCS last year in Yankee Stadium, watching him unravel in the eighth inning even though everyone knows Pedro's been a seven-inning pitcher for a while now. Friday night we had Terry Francona do the same thing against the Yankees, déja vu all over again, as Yogi used to say.

Why?

Who knows.

Maybe it's this simple: Pedro always has done what he wants to do, and managers tread carefully around him. As though Sox management has always known that Martinez is both

temperamental and petulant, and it's not in their best interests to fight with him. Nothing else makes any sense.

The problem now is he's no longer a great pitcher. He's still very good, of course. Still someone anyone would want, considering the dearth of quality starting pitchers in the game. Still someone with a definable presence, a certain cachet. Still someone you want to see with the ball in his hand. Yet no longer truly great. Not like he was.

That's what was so troubling about his postgame comments Friday night, when he said the Yankees were his daddy and wished they would disappear, sounding as if the Yankees were lodged squarely between his ears. And if we should not take those words as though they're carved in stone, watching Pedro was like sneaking into a therapy session, a primal scream of frustration.

Running through everything was the self doubt, the sense that the world Pedro had constructed for himself is starting to shake at the foundation, like some beach house that no longer can handle the hurricane winds. This was someone whose confidence always had run off him as easily as sweat?

This was Pedro?

Didn't seem to be.

Yet maybe this is the new Pedro, a once great pitcher who now lives in a more complicated reality. Gone are the days when he was all but unhittable. Gone are the days when he didn't need to get by on guile and experience, those days when the magic in his right arm was more than enough. He will be 33 at the end of October, and there have been a lot of pitches, a lot of big games, a lot of baseball summers. He will be 33 and he swims in uncharted waters now, even on those days when he gets people out.

I suspect this is at the heart of his frustration, the realization that he is not as dominant as he once was, and how does he function with this realization? Especially given the fact he will be a free agent when the season ends, his future as up in the air as an infield pop up. Especially when a lack of success means big dollars slipping away. I suspect his frustration transcends the Yankees. Sometimes an athlete's toughest opponent is his own doubt.

Is it any wonder he's frustated?

Yet the last thing the Red Sox need right now is a distracted Martinez. He is the public face of this team, no question about it. Curt Schilling may be the best pitcher on the staff, and Manny Ramirez might be the best hitter, but Pedro has been here for seven years now, the most identifiable of all the Red Sox. This is the man who has to beat the Yankees if these two teams happen to meet in the ALCS?.

It makes you wonder.

But here we are staring at the postseason and one of the question marks has become the emotional state of Martinez, this man who has been so good for so long here, this man who the Sox need to be at his most focused if they're going to go far in this postseason.

One again, it's all about Pedro.

Hasn't it always been?