Martinez impresses Dodgers, Phillies

LOS ANGELES - That Pedro Martinez who dazzled the Dodgers yesterday? Milt Thompson had seen him before.

The Phillies hitting coach, who retired as a player in 1996, had faced the now 37-year-old righthander when he was a young gun in Los Angeles and Montreal.

"That looked real familiar," Thompson said after Martinez threw seven two-hit, shutout innings in an NLCS Game 2 their Phillies eventually would lose, 2-1. "That man knows how to pitch. He was just dominating their hitters."

Over in the victorious L.A. clubhouse, the winners were just as impressed by Martinez's first postseason outing since 2004.

"Our goal was just to try to get him to make a mistake up in the zone and take advantage of that," said Dodgers catcher Russell Martin, who had one of the two singles the Dodgers managed off the Phillies' starter. "He didn't really seem to want to make any today.

"Just the way he was mixing his pitches . . . he wasn't really setting any patterns. Behind in the count, he was able to throw a slider over. He had a good change-up today. And his fastball was sneaky, too. So he just kept throwing his pitches for strikes and that made it tough."

Even Los Angeles manager Joe Torre, whose Yankees had some of their fiercest battles with Martinez's Red Sox, had to tip his sweat-stained blue cap.

"You have to marvel," Torre said. "As much as you always hated anybody with a Red Sox uniform on, you always admired how well he did his job. . . . He was a little bit like [Greg] Maddux . . . Even though he didn't have the velocity he once had, he did a masterful job."

Andre Ethier said the Dodgers kept waiting for an opportunity, but Martinez simply didn't present them with any.

"He had a lot of movement on his ball," Ethier said, "and he made quality pitch after quality pitch and hit his spots pretty much the whole time."

In the Phillies' otherwise somber locker room, the only positive talk, not surprisingly, focused on Martinez's outing.

"He was brilliant out there," said GM Ruben Amaro. "Just absolutely sensational."

"We got so caught up watching him out in the bullpen," said Scott Eyre, "that before we knew it, it was the seventh inning and we had to hydrate and get loose."