Little Comes Back From Low Point

Once again, Grady Little didn’t take Pedro Martinez out of the game. His Dodgers took care of that, with a big sixth inning.

Tuesday was a much-anticipated night at Dodger Stadium. You had Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe pitching and Grady Little sitting in one dugout, so all the memories came drifting back.

And to those, Little added a wrinkle.

This is a man, the first-year Dodgers manager, who has been so vilified in Boston that you would think he had messed up their tea party.

In the recent movie, “Fever Pitch,” Jimmy Fallon plays a lifetime Boston fan who is trying to convince his semi-interested girlfriend, Drew Barrymore, of the importance of fretting and weeping and impeaching the gods over all the injustices that have cursed the Red Sox over the years. Poor Little is right there in the conversation, with the departure of the Bambino to the hated Yankees and Bill Buckner’s misplayed ground ball.

What Little did was allow his ace, Martinez, to stay on the mound when he was in a jam, the Red Sox were leading, 5-2, and were five outs away from winning the American League championship series in the deciding Game 7 of 2003. Little was the manager, Martinez and Lowe were the star pitchers. The Yankees scratched out a couple of runs against Martinez and eventually won on Aaron Boone’s homer in the 11th, off Tim Wakefield.

Little’s managerial non-move became the flash point of more Boston anguish. In popularity polls, he would have finished below the Strangler. He was fired.

Even when the Red Sox picked up Curt Schilling in 2004 and won the World Series, all was not forgiven. Never will be, probably, because this is Boston, where the leading occupation is psychologist and the leading baseball fan location is the couch.

“I know how lots of people feel, always will,” Little said Tuesday night. “On the stage that this happened, it will never go away. But I go to sleep well at night, and I know in my mind that I tried to do the right thing.”

Then he told a story that certainly hasn’t been told much, if at all, and that adds interestingly to this legendary moment.

Little said that, at 2 o’clock the day of Game 7, he took a walk on the diamond with Lowe and asked him a hard question.

“I needed to know if he had anything left, if he could give me an inning of relief that night if I needed it,” Little said.

Lowe, who would go six innings for the Dodgers on Tuesday night and get the win over Martinez, had saved the clinching game out of the bullpen in the previous series against Oakland, but he had also pitched 6 2/3 innings with 98 pitches in a Game 2 loss to the Yankees and 7 1/3 and 119 pitches in a Game 5 loss two days earlier.

“I just wanted to know if there were any bullets left in his arm,” Little said. “I was mostly dreaming.”

So did that, then, place the thought in the back of his head that, with a bullpen that had been pouring gasoline on fires as the playoffs progressed, he might have to stick with Martinez longer than normal?

“Not just the back of my head, the whole brain,” he said.

Nomar Garciaparra was a Red Sox player and in that Game 7. What would he have done?

“Exactly what Grady did,” the Dodgers first baseman said Tuesday night, shortly before he took the first pitch Martinez threw him and hit it over the wall for a two-run homer against the New York Mets. “He went with the best pitcher in the league, the best guy we got. That night, Pedro had that look in his eyes. People forget what the hits were. A couple of broken bats, a ball inches fair.”

Lowe and Martinez are good friends. Little speaks in almost hushed tones about Martinez. All have landed well, separated themselves from whatever clouds accompany their names in Boston over the 2003 failure.

And not only were Little and Lowe able to celebrate a victory, but Little needed only to look to the scoreboard in right field, note that the Yankees had beaten the Red Sox, 2-1, and ponder all those couches getting heavy use tomorrow.

Bill Dwyre can be reached at Bill.Dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/Dwyre.