NEW YORK - Pedro Martinez was the losing pitcher, but he wasn’t the reason the Red Sox find themselves in a 0-2 hole against those annoying Yankees. He may, eventually, even be one of the reasons Boston digs itself out of that hole.

And don’t kid yourself into believing the Red Sox are dead and buried. Being down 0-2 isn’t anyone's idea of a good situation. Get in that position and you’ll lose far more seven-game series than you’ll win.

But teams do come back from such deficits. And long experience has taught me that no series reaches a truly desperate stage until one team has three victories. Go down 0-3, and you’re as dead as world Communism. But from 0-2, you can come back.

The Yankees did it in the 1996 World Series against the Braves. The Mets did it in 1986 against the Red Sox. The previous year, the Royals did it against the Cards. Just last year, the Red Sox came back from 0-2 down in a five-game series to beat the A’s in the ALDS.

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But it’s going to take more than pitching for the Red Sox to reach the point where they can say they have any chance at all against New York. If the Red Sox bats — and here comes as statement that demonstrates as firm a grasp of the obvious as you’re likely to find — don’t rouse themselves from their slumber, it won’t matter what Pedro does.

Nor will it matter if Curt Schilling can or can’t pitch again on a right ankle that has a tendon that’s pulled free of its moorings. They say that pitching wins championships, but the reverse is also true: Lack of hitting loses them.

Game 2 was a prime example.

The inimitable Pedro took the mound with 55,000 partisans mockingly imploring him to divulge the identity of his paternal progenitor. It turned out that the Yankees aren’t his Daddy. They’re not even his uncle.

It also turned out that far from being bothered by the symphonic sarcasm, Martinez was honored by it.

“Fifteen years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree without 50 cents for a bus,” he said. And here he was standing on a 10-inch high hill in the middle of a perfectly manicured ball field with tens of thousands of fans thinking of nothing but him.

“It actually made me feel really, really good,” he said. “I realized I was important, because I got the attention of 60,000 people.”

Pretty good for a dirt poor kid without the price of a bus ride.

He pitched well — three runs in five innings, his pitches reaching 97 m.p.h. It wasn’t exactly dominating, but it was everything the Red Sox should be able to ask for against the Yankees.

But John Lieber pitched better.

If you’re a Red Sox fan and you need something to make the bile crawl up your gorge, there it is. Jon Lieber, who didn’t pitch at all last year while he was recovering from Tommy John surgery and who pitched okay but hardly spectacularly this year, made the Red Sox look like the junior varsity at your local high school.

It took Boston seven innings to get one hit off Mike Mussina in Game 1. It took them another seven to get two hits against Lieber. While they did eventually score four on Mussina and seven in Game 1, it wasn’t enough to overcome the 10 the Yankees got. In Game 2, three runs were one more than the Yankees needed to put away Boston, which scratched out just one run.

I’d have to increase by foolishness quotient by a factor of 10 to predict that Boston will continue to perform so pathetically at the plate. One thing we’ve seen already in this series is that you can throw the script we wrote before it started out the nearest window.

The approved scenario for Game 1 saw Schilling shoving the Yankee bats up the Yankee nostrils and the Boston bats hammering the often mediocre Mussina. Didn’t work out that way.

The Game 2 scenario called for Lieber to realize he’s a nobody pitching in the biggest series baseball can give us and fall apart like a grass shack in a hurricane. That didn’t work out, either.

The only things that did go according to script were that the games were played in Yankee Stadium and Mariano Rivera was on the mound at the close of business in each of the Yankee wins.

So now the Yankees are getting deeper into the land of mystery that is their pitching staff. Given what Mussina and Lieber did, though, you’re not going to predict that Kevin Brown is going to implode or that El Duque Hernandez — if he’s the Game 4 starter — is going be as ineffective as he was in September, when the Yankees shut him and his tired right shoulder down.

But you’re also not going to predict that those two will be as lights-out dominating as were Mussina and Lieber. No one, including the Yankees, can keep hitting the lottery every night.

And you can’t believe that the Red Sox hitters are going to continue to return meekly to their dugout after endless successions of pop-ups and feeble ground balls.

All you can believe at this juncture is that they’re going to play Game 3 in Boston on Friday — weather permitting. The Red Sox have recovered from bad losses to the Yankees earlier this year. They’ll have their fans, starving for an end to their suffering. They have their own belief in their own abilities — perhaps a bit tattered about the edges, but still substantially intact.

And they’ll have pitching problems of their own to deal with. And all we know about that is that one of the problems isn’t Pedro Martinez.

Speaking of Schilling’s injury, Martinez said, “If he goes down, I’ll stand up and pitch on short rest. I’ll go to the bullpen. I’ll do anything I can to help us win.”

If the Boston offense can see its way clear to do the same, this may still turn into a series to remember.