“The two of them deserve each other; one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

Billy Martin uttered those words to me and another reporter on July 23, 1978, as we walked through the O’Hare Airport terminal en route to the gate for the Yankees’ chartered flight to Kansas City. The next day Martin tearfully resigned before George Steinbrenner could fire him for insubordination.

Steinbrenner would hire Martin four more times and fire him four times – and would have done it yet another time had Martin not been killed in the crash of his pickup truck 20 years ago Christmas night. But I might have been able to save his job the first time if other reporters hadn’t horned in on what the manager had intended to be a private conversation between him and me.

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Last week I suggested that the Red Sox, with their off-season free-agent acquisitions, were copying the Yankees following their free-agent additions a year ago and World Series championship 10 months later.

I was not suggesting that the Red Sox were wrong for copying the Yankees. Teams in all sports copy winners. By signing John Lackey, the Red Sox have fortified their starting pitching rotation and made themselves very serious contenders to succeed the Yankees as World Series champs.

What I will suggest this week is that the Phillies were in perfect position to assume the same role but inexplicably squandered their opportunity. They had a chance to have Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee in their rotation and passed.

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Jimy Kelly derives no consolation from his place in baseball history. He didn’t know, in fact, that he had a place in baseball history until a friend told him. But he would rather have had a lengthy major league playing career – no, make that a career of any length – and he would rather have a job in baseball now. Kelly, however, neither played in the majors nor works in baseball.

What, then, is his place in baseball history? Signed by the Toronto Blue Jays in February 1984 when he was only 13 years old, Kelly was responsible for the owners’ decision to change the age-eligibility rule in December 1984. Under what some called the Jimy Kelly rule, a player had to be 16 years old for a team to sign him, and he had to turn 17 during his first professional season.

“He didn’t know about it; I told him,” said a friend, Jose Campbell. “I said, ‘Do you know there’s a rule under your name?’”

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