ST. LOUIS, Oct. 26 -- Things are happening that shouldn't happen, not on this stage, not in the World Series, and certainly not for the benefit of the perpetually cursed Boston Red Sox. But they keep happening -- strange things, unprecedented things, inexplicable things -- and the signs all point to the same unavoidable conclusion: This Red Sox team is the one. This is their time. This -- oh, sweet merciful heaven -- is the year.
On Tuesday night in Game 3 of the World Series, the latest extraordinary thing happened to the Red Sox. The St. Louis Cardinals reached across the Busch Stadium diamond and handed Boston a victory, which it graciously accepted. And now, following a 4-1 win that gave them a three-games-to-none lead, the Red Sox are one win from their first World Series title in 86 years.
Pedro Martinez shuts down St. Louis over seven innings as the Red Sox top the Cardinals, 4-1, for a commanding 3-0 lead in the World Series.
(AP)
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The man who placed the franchise on history's precipice was none other than Pedro Martinez, the enigmatic Red Sox star, who turned in a landmark performance in the first World Series start of his career. Martinez, loser of six of his previous seven starts, tossed seven scoreless innings, retiring the final 14 batters he faced.
The Red Sox have won seven straight postseason games and can win the World Series -- and transport all of New England into unfathomable rapture -- on Wednesday night in Game 4, when Derek Lowe faces St. Louis's Jason Marquis.
No team -- with the possible exception of the New York Yankees -- is as tangibly aware as the Red Sox that a 3-0 lead in a best-of-seven series is not insurmountable. The Red Sox trailed the Yankees by that margin in the American League Championship Series, only to reel off four straight wins to win the pennant and become the first team in baseball history to pull off such a feat.
"It shows," Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa said, "that it's possible."
But while the Red Sox -- with their loosey-goosey flair and their lightning-strike offense -- seemed as well-suited as any to pulling off the monumental task, it is nearly impossible to imagine them pulling the reverse, and actually losing such a lead.
Especially not to a team such as the Cardinals, who won 105 games this season, but who have not led for a single inning in the World Series and who, at times, cannot even seem to run the bases properly or throw strikes to the opposing pitcher.
The Cardinals' formidable trio of sluggers -- Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds -- are hitting a combined .152 with one RBI among them in the Series.
On Tuesday night, it was as if all the Red Sox' awful history has been turned upside down and inverted.
The Cardinals' stunning base-running blunders in the first and third innings -- which cost them an immeasurable number of runs -- were Johnny Pesky's 1946 blunder in reverse.
Martinez, with a performance that evoked the days when he was this overpowering all the time, was the inversion of Bob Gibson, doing to the Cardinals what Gibson did to the Red Sox in 1967.
"Just to see the way [the Cardinals] swung the bats against him," said Red Sox center fielder Johnny Damon, "you could tell they didn't really know what was coming."
The only thing lacking was a ground ball trickling between the opposing first baseman's legs.
