It’s one of the great baseball paradoxes that the most important part of a slugfest is what the pitchers are doing, and the most important part of a pitcher’s duel is what the hitters are doing – or not doing. Last night’s classic matchup between Pedro Martinez and Jon Lieber proved the point.

If you want to know how each one of the Yankee hitters is performing right now, you could do worse than to just look at whether or not Martinez worked them in the strike zone. Through Alex Rodriguez’s first three at-bats, for instance, Martinez threw 13 balls out of the strike zone, and just two in it. (Rodriguez managed, somehow, to strike out in his second at-bat.)

Hideki Matsui saw 11 balls out of the strike zone and six in it from Martinez, and for Jorge Posada the proportion was 12 and six. Those are the hitters who quietly drove the Yankees last night. Martinez wanted to give them nothing, and he gave it to them, at the cost of wearing down after only five innings in a game the Red Sox desperately needed to win.

A similar breakdown for the Boston hitters is equally revealing. Before Johnny Damon worked Lieber for 17 pitches in the top of the sixth inning, not a single Boston hitter had seen more than five pitches. In 10 different at-bats to that point, Lieber had thrown three or fewer pitches.

All this is despite Lieber being no more strike-happy than Martinez. In one stretch, he had thrown 10 of 12 pitches out of the zone; in the third inning, he faced only four hitters despite throwing just three strikes. It took him a mere 40 pitches to get through the first 18 hitters he faced, and 69 to get through the first six innings. It took Martinez 113 to do the same.

It was hardly any surprise when Martinez gave up an RBI single to Gary Sheffield in the first and a 2-run home run to John Olerud in the sixth inning. Over the last three years, he has been at his worst through his first 15 pitches – when he gives up a .760 OPS – and after 105 pitches, giving up a .700 OPS in 94 at-bats from pitches 106-120.The man takes a long time to warm up, and he can’t throw more than 100 pitches.

The Yankees have had far more success against Martinez than any other team because they understand this and have a lineup disciplined and deep enough to exploit it. They attack early, wait him out once he gathers himself, and are thus able to wear him out quickly. Once he tires, they pounce.

The surprise in this game wasn’t Martinez, it was Lieber. And his performance was largely due to an unrecognizably tense Boston lineup. This is the last group of batters one would expect to spend a whole game getting themselves out, but that’s what happened last night.

The Red Sox looked like a team of nervous September call-ups last night, edgily jumping at borderline pitches. Boston hitters made nine fly outs against Lieber, one of the most extreme groundball pitchers in the majors. They were undercutting the ball, jumping too quickly in front of pitches too early in at-bats, and walking back to the dugout after flying out to center field rather than standing in hitting with a 2-1 count.

Saying this, though, shouldn’t diminish Lieber’s performance in the least. To his credit, he saw that the Red Sox were going to swing at anything he threw up to the plate, and made sure to pitch to them accordingly. He threw great pitches throughout the game, keeping the ball just up enough to make it worth swinging at and never hitting the fat part of the plate where a good swing could put the ball in the stands. Along with Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera, he’s been the most important Yankee this October, and it’s a great thing to see.

The question now is whether the Red Sox can come back from this, and I don’t see any way they can. Before last night’s game, even with Curt Schilling’s dubious status, I thought that this series was likely to go seven games. I figured Martinez was a near-lock to beat Lieber, and I saw no real difference between the Kevin Brown/Javier Vazquez duo the Yankees will be putting on the mound in Fenway and Boston’s Bronson Arroyo and Tim Wakefield.

That logic still holds – there’s very little chance of the Yankees sweeping this series – but having beaten Schilling and Martinez, the Yankees can now lose three and still win the pennant. In just two games, they’ve shown that they can beat the Red Sox with base hits and starting pitching, home runs and relief. To boot, Terry Francona is starting to look suspiciously similar to Grady Little. The Yankees have had their problems this year, but right now they’re starting to look like the best team in baseball.