Don’t Write Off Martinez Yet

Pedro Martinez will be 33 later this month and a free agent after seven mostly glorious seasons in Boston, and the game will decide what is left in the gangly right arm that wrought such unusual force and grace.

The numbers that once held him to standards of historical brilliance now say he is very good and slipping, age and wear creeping, no matter how game his intentions, how he pouts and resists. He stood Wednesday night amid his baseball middle age, in his fourth postseason, having lost four consecutive starts to end his regular season, if not uncertainty, then curiosity, circling.

He was, well, Pedro, in many ways. He was very good, if not always as precise as he once was. Again, the standards are his.

In the Red Sox’s 8-3 victory over the Angels, in a series that goes to Boston for Friday’s Game 3 and threatens not to return to Anaheim, Martinez was still standing in the seventh inning, still well into the mid-90s with his velocity, still all grit and poise.

Afterward, he said he’d actually been gaining power in recent starts, the reason, he said, for his sudden failure to command the strike zone, and that he never doubted he would regain something like his former sharpness.

“Thank God,” he said, “I turned it around and I competed better.”

When he forced David Eckstein to fly to left field for the second out of the seventh inning, when Eckstein had taken him to 12 pitches on eight foul balls, Martinez loved the matchup, loved the competition. He actually whipped Eckstein with his glove when Eckstein trundled past the mound, the ball on its way back from Manny Ramirez as he did.

And when Chone Figgins struck out on a searing fastball to end the inning, to end Martinez’s evening, Martinez pumped his fists and pointed to the sky. He reached the dugout and touched the hand of every teammate, having won by allowing three runs and six hits in his seven innings, two runs on Vladimir Guerrero’s single in the fifth.

“I felt well enough to say I can do anything in any game,” Martinez said. “I just struggled at the end of the regular season. I know for a fact postseason games can get your adrenaline flowing, that they are totally different.”

An inning earlier, still throwing hard sliders, Martinez nodded to his catcher, Jason Varitek, confirming that the ball still jumped from his hand when he asked it to.

A three-time Cy Young Award winner who, undersized, had lasted a dozen years in the big leagues by not giving an inch, Martinez had shocked the game two weeks ago when he called the New York Yankees, “my daddy.” In those final four starts, two against the Yankees, he’d given up 20 runs in 23 1/3 innings.

While there were rampant suspicions this week that Martinez’s occasionally balky right shoulder was sore again, perhaps very sore, the Red Sox believed Martinez had regained something in his final pitches of his final start and raved about Martinez’s bullpen session last weekend in Baltimore.

Martinez sought to downplay rumors of a rift between him and Curt Schilling, or that he’d been upset Schilling -- and not he -- had been awarded the Game 1 start against the Angels.

“We get along really well,” he said, almost pleading. “Please don’t try to break that up.

“You know, it actually took a little of the pressure off me to see him go out and pitch like that.”

So Martinez and the Angels’ Bartolo Colon went into the middle innings, Colon fresh into a new contract and pitching to earn it, Martinez hoping for one more fat deal out of someone. There is speculation that, even now, Martinez could command four years at something close to $15 million per.

Colon had basically abandoned his off-speed pitches on short rest in Oakland on Friday night and continued along those lines against the Red Sox, throwing his fastball to the corners, and off them.

Martinez pitched from 75 mph to 96 mph, around the plate, arcing curveballs and shadowy changeups setting up rising fastballs and diving sliders, and back.

He waited through 24 pitches by Colon in the first inning and 30 more in the second, then walked Troy Glaus to lead off the bottom of the second inning. Jeff DaVanon pushed a soft single to left field.

Rookie Dallas McPherson, whose long-ish swing and short-ish experience might have been no match for the Martinez of past seasons, however, survived for four pitches and then got just enough of a high changeup to loop a single to left field and score Glaus.

It might have been worse for Martinez, but Jose Molina, continuing the Angels’ sudden bent toward fundamental failures, one-hopped his sacrifice bunt back to Martinez, who forced DaVanon at third, killing the Angel momentum.

Given a second shot at McPherson with Darin Erstad on base two innings later, Martinez struck him out on four pitches, the last of which Varitek turned into a double play, throwing out a stealing Erstad.

Martinez threw his fastball consistently into the mid-90s, so if his right shoulder was as sore as some think it is, he pitched through it again.

“A lot of people doubted the man,” Varitek said. “And I don’t doubt that man.”