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Whopper of the Week: Grady LittleNo, really, it was smart to keep Martinez on the mound.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Oct. 17, 2003, at 3:23 PM ET

"He had enough in his tank to finish off [Yankee switch-hitter Jorge] Posada."

—Red Sox manager Grady Little, explaining why, in the seventh game of the American League Championship series, he let pitcher Pedro Martinez blow a three-run lead before relieving him in the eighth inning. Quoted in "Blame Grady" by Eric Wilbur in the Oct. 17 Boston Globe.

"Yankees 6, Red Sox 5."

—Final score in the game, which went to 11 innings. Martinez was relieved after Posada knocked in the two runs that tied it up. The Yankees will play the Florida Marlins in the World Series.

Got a whopper? Send it to chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
Sept. 16, 2003: John Ashcroft
Sept. 5, 2003: Christy Whitman
Aug. 29, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
Aug. 22, 2003: Arianna Huffington
Aug. 8, 2003: Howard Dean
July 25, 2003: Condoleezza Rice
July 18, 2003: President Bush
July 10, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
June 27, 2003: Remembering Strom
June 20, 2003: Billy Bulger
May 30, 2003: Ari Fleischer
May 23, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
May 19, 2003: Un-Whopper: Ari Fleischer Tells Truth!
May 2, 2003: Peggy Cooper Cafritz
April 17, 2003: Eason Jordan
March 7, 2003: John Kerry
Feb. 28, 2003: Ari Fleischer
Feb. 14, 2003: Bill O'Reilly
Feb. 7, 2003: Saddam Hussein
Jan. 31, 2003: Karl Rove
Jan. 23, 2003: Bill Frist
Jan. 17, 2003: Naji Sabri
Jan. 10, 2003: Rod Paige

(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2002 and here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)

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