"I was totally taking care of [Guthrie]. I wanted him to be a good pitcher. I didn't want to blow him out," Perlozzo said. "I had the back end of my bullpen with a five-run lead and one out. How could you make a mistake there?"
The two relievers imploded, Boston scored six runs in the ninth for the comeback victory, and from that point, Perlozzo's every move was scrutinized until he was fired five weeks later. It was the toughest, loneliest period of his life.
"I felt like there was no out, and I felt like I was all by myself," he said.
During that time, the same players who celebrated his hiring groused privately about his decisions and declined to support him publicly. That stung, Perlozzo said, but he no longer dwells on it.
"I think you can only get yourself in trouble by thinking about those kind of things," said Perlozzo, who says he would like to manage again. "I'm not going to point to somebody else. I'll point to myself. Maybe there are things I could have done better."
When he was fired, there was no sense of relief that life under a microscope was over. He felt only inconsolable loss.
"There were so many people counting on me from my hometown and home state, I felt like I let them down," Perlozzo said. "If you let yourself down, that's one thing. But I felt like I had the load of the state on me that I was trying to carry, and I let them down."
He said he no longer feels that way, not after receiving countless letters and phone calls of support from friends. But one of his oldest buddies, former Orioles bench coach Lee Elia, said he's not sure Perlozzo will ever fully recover from that firing.
"It's a very difficult thing because your thirst for success for that organization is so strong," said Elia, now a Mariners special assistant. "When it doesn't materialize in the short time when you are there, I could feel for him."
Elia, a Philadelphia native, was fired by his hometown Phillies in 1988 after he spent two seasons as their manager.
"I don't think it ever leaves you. I don't think it will ever leave Sammy, either," Elia said. "But he is a professional, and he will move on and he will have success again."
Ten days after his dismissal from the Orioles, Seattle manager John McLaren offered Perlozzo a job on his staff. Perlozzo declined because it was too soon, the wound too fresh.
