The biggest souvenir of the 2013 Red Sox dream season landed in Mani Martinez's mitt.

He still has it.

Martinez is a Red Sox bullpen catcher, so he never actually saw David Ortiz hit the grand slam that saved a season. He was stuck behind the right-field fence, stuck in the Red Sox's bullpen. As Ortiz was crushing the Joaquin Benoit changeup, Martinez was throwing the ball back to Ryan Dempster, who along with Junichi Tazawa was warming up to pitch the ninth inning.

"Then I heard the noise when the ball hit the bat -- BAM!" Martinez remembered. "I saw everyone excited. I saw everyone looking up and looking at me, and I looked up and ... there it was."

There it was, heading right at him. Martinez barely had to move a muscle. The ball landed right in his mitt.

"Mani made a pretty good play," said Brian Abraham, another bullpen catcher who was right next to Martinez, warming up Tazawa.

Come to think of it, he did make a pretty good play, considering that he couldn't see the ball until the last minute, considering the commotion going on all around him, considering that at that moment Torii Hunter was flying into the bullpen right along with the famous baseball.

Martinez saw Hunter land and said he was scared for the Tigers right fielder. But as he was going to check on Hunter, Martinez did one more very smart thing.

He took the famous ball and put it in his pocket.

His plan at the time was to present it to Ortiz. But in the excitement after the game, Ortiz simply signed it and handed it back to Martinez.

"I have it in my house in Fort Myers," Martinez said.

Martinez has worked for the Red Sox for eight years in one of the most anonymous jobs in baseball. He wears a uniform. He has a locker in the Red Sox's clubhouse, home and away. But good luck finding anyone outside the Boston organization who has ever heard his name.

"I'm a normal guy," he said.

A normal guy who ended up catching a very special baseball.

And keeping it.

-- Danny Knobler