The best pitcher I've ever seen is Pedro Martinez.

Others might have won more games, or had a better year here and there. Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson both might have been better, their greatness coming through the television of my childhood. Roger Clemens certainly has more longevity.

But to see Pedro back there on those Fenway afternoons when the "K" signs hung on the center-field wall like a necklace, was to watch an artist at the height of his powers, a baseball his brush, the strike zone is palette, a frustrated hitter his canvas.

You could call Pedro many things in his Red Sox career. You could call him tempermental, you could call him spoiled, you could call him a star in his own movie, you could call him our own little baseball diva. You could call him all those things and you might even be right.

But you had to call him great, too.

To watch him in those years was to see what pitching is supposed to be all about. He didn't have the greatest velocity, never someone who could rear back and simply throw the ball by everyone time after time, the kind of live arm that inspires baseball awe. He didn't have the size so many other great pitchers have had, the

kind of size that allowed them to pitch for years.

With Pedro, it was always more subtle. A great fastball here. Something else there. Then maybe the same two pitches thrown with slightly different angles, changing the equation. He always seemed to pitch as if the entire history of pitching was in some computer chip imbedded into his brain, always a step ahead, as if it was his ball, his game, his show. To see him in 1999 and 2000 was to see what true greatness was.

His heightened savvy was why he was able to remain an effective pitcher even when it was becoming apparent that his body was starting to betray him. You can make a case that he never was the same after the 2001 season, the year he missed much of the season, only to inexplicably be brought back in September.

That was the first time we started hearing about a frayed rotator cuff, a pitcher's worst nightmare. That was the first time we could see Pedro's mortality, to realize that eventually he was going to pay a big price for all those games when the "K" signs hung on the center-field wall, all the wear and tear on his shoulder, the first time we became aware that there was a clock ticking over Pedro's career.

Now that career is as up in the air as a fly ball over the Green Monster in Fenway.

Now Pedro is out of the playoffs, headed for shoulder surgery and an uncertain future. The best possible projection is that he's out for eight months, until midway next year? The worst? That it's all memories now for Martinez.

Either way, the Sox were right after all.

That was always the fear, of course, that Pedro's shoulder was ultimately going to betray him. It was the reason the Red Sox did not want to give him a lot of years after the 2004 season, starting out with two years, then going to three, eventually seeing him shuffle off to New York when the Mets gave him four.

But the news over the weekend that he's headed for surgery seemed to come out of nowhere. All year there had been ailments, his big toe, a strained calf muscle, hip problems. All little signs that his body was beginning to break down, 34 no longer young when you stand on a pitcher's mound. He finished the year a nondescript 9-8 with an E.R.A. of 4.48.

The Mets' hope was that he would be able to pitch in the playoffs, a big-time pitcher for big-time games, like he was that night at Jacobs Field in Cleveland in 1999 when he came out of the bullpen with a bad back and pitched six great gutsy innings that got the Sox into the ALCS. That hope ended last week with the news Pedro was shutting it down for the season.

Now it's for more than that.

Now it's his career hanging in the balance.

And maybe this is the way it ends now, not with cheers and big-game heroics, but with a shoulder that simply has thrown too many baseballs. There always was a certain fatalism about Pedro, the sense that his career could end at any moment, that he never had the body for the long haul. He had seen his brother Ramon's career go up in smoke. He has to know that, for him, pitching in his mid-30s was always going to be a dance with the baseball devil.

Regardless of what happens after his surgery, I suspect that never again will it be as good for Pedro as it was in those Fenway days. Never again will it be like it once was, back when it was his ball, his game, his show, the best pitcher I ever saw.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340