Including the playoffs, he had caught 1,133 innings in 137 games, roughly 20,000 pitches. He met for dozens of hours with Larry Rothschild, the Yankees’ pitching coach, and pitchers in scouting meetings, pored over days of scouting tapes and spent more than 100 hours in the knee-taxing catcher’s crouch.

There had been a dozen collisions at home plate; hot, sweaty days in Baltimore and Kansas City; extra innings in Washington and Boston; day games after night games in Toronto and St. Petersburg; long flights; little sleep; and a tense final month when the outcome of the regular season seemed to hang on every game, each at-bat and every pitch.

And then the playoffs.

It would take more than one night of sleep to recover from all that. And indeed, the next day the pain set in. For weeks, if not months, Martin had ignored all the bruises, scrapes, aches and sprains. He had used adrenaline and excitement to suppress the mounting fatigue and exhaustion. But on the morning of Oct. 19, that all changed.

“You name it, it ached,” he said. “I could barely lift my legs, they felt so heavy. Heavy, heavy legs. I guess I had just refused to think about it while we were playing. Once it all ends, you finally allow your body to feel it.”

Martin got his things together and dragged himself down into the lobby of the hotel. It was strangely quiet there, and on the bus ride to the airport, too. An impending free agent, Martin looked around at his teammates gathered there. He considered them his brothers. He asked himself: “Is this the last time we will be teammates? Is this the last time I’ll see this guy, or that guy?”

“I looked around and I didn’t know. Would they be here? Would I? It was so different. We had been together since Feb. 15, my 30th birthday, and now it was just over.”