How is Kris Wilson like Captain E.J. Smith?

         Mike Sherry calls me at work last Friday.  Must have been about 4:30.  “Have you talked to my brother today?”  “Yeah.”  “When did you talk to him?”  “About 11:30 this morning.  I called him to see what time Mike Rumble left his apartment this morning.  He told me it was a moot question, because Mike Rumble was still there, standing about five feet away from him.  “So you haven’t talked to him in the last five minutes, like I have?”  “No.”  “Well, apparently Mike Rumble went with Tony to his appointment in Brooklyn, and the two of them just called me.  Now they’re about to get on the Cyclone at Coney Island.”  “You have to be kidding me.”  “Not kidding.  They had to hang up because they were about to get on the ride.  They’re going to call me back in like fifteen minutes.”  “That might be the single greatest thing I have ever heard in my life.  I couldn’t possibly be more jealous.”  “That’s what I’m saying.”  Later on Tony told me that things got a little precarious after the rides, because apparently the two of them decided to eat about six hot dogs and two large cheese fries at Nathan’s beforehand.  Mike Rumble looked like he was going to lose it a few times.  Now that’s what I call a Friday.

         But on to the topic at hand.  The Yanks won another series, and go into the break after a successful road series in which they picked up a game on Boston.  Acc sent me a text message tonight praising the White Sox for showing some balls while the Yanks showed none.  I’m going to stop short of doing that, for this reason.  The White Sox have got to do a better job than that if they expect me to take them seriously.  Losing two of three at home and then needing 19 innings and two huge bailouts to salvage the third game is not going to cut it.  But of course, the national media will promptly give them a pass and pretend it never happened.  Again.  Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.  The White Sox are a good story.  The Tigers are a better one.  Neither one of those teams has been able to beat the Yankees or Red Sox this year, despite the fact that they were playing at their own home parks.  But the Yankees and Red Sox are old news.  Everybody is looking for something fresh. 

        That’s not to say that the Yanks and Sox aren’t a good story.  Both of those teams have interesting stories to tell this year.  The Sox overhauled their team to start the season, and have received four miracles for their efforts.  Mike Lowell, Kevin Youkilis, Mark Loretta, and Jonathan Papelbon are all completely off the charts that the Red Sox had set for them this year.   So how does this story end?  Do the Red Sox ride another half of baseball injury-free and continue to have four guys playing out of their minds?  Or do they come back down to Earth a bit?  The BPS has been killing them a bit for not being able to beat good teams.  They took down the Mets at home, but in hindsight I think that said more about the Mets than it did the Red Sox.  After all; the Mets at the halfway point, for all of the accolades that they have been showered with, have a worse record than the Red Sox and are exactly even with the Yankees in the loss column.  So I kind of wrote that one off.  But then they took it to the White Sox in Chicago.  That one is more impressive to me.  So I have to give them their due.  But if they have any injuries in the second half, or if their miracles desist, they’re in trouble.

        They’re in trouble, of course, because this Yankee team is tough, resilient, and can beat anybody.  They haven’t lost a series in a month.  They’ve only lost two since the middle of May.  But absolutely nobody is talking about them (outside of Boston).  The Yankees, yawn, are such old, old news.  True, perhaps, but it’s also true that nobody wants to play the Yankees.  Nor should they.  Two interesting things I heard over the weekend.  The first was on Baseball Tonight, when one of the commentators was asked who was going to win the AL East.  It was a slam-dunk “Red Sox” question, because those guys are always such boring front-runners.  The same guys who were screaming “Anyone who thinks these Orioles aren’t for real is kidding himself!” at last year’s All-Star break, because they’re all too candy-*ss to say anything that might buzz kill a good story.  This time, however, the guy hedged.  His reply: “Tough to say.  I want to see what moves the Yankees make.”  I was shocked.  The other was today on a national radio show, when somebody was asked who the AL manager of the year is at the halfway mark.  The guy acknowledged that the easy answer was Jim Leyland, but he felt if you look at the big picture, the Yankees have been mercilessly decimated by injuries, and yet Joe Torre has them within striking distance of a Red Sox team that has dealt with no adversity and surprise after pleasant surprise.  Interesting argument.  Now if I was a Red Sox fan, I would certainly be sick of hearing how the Yankees have had to deal with so many injuries, and how they have been so valiant with such a depleted team, etc.  But the truth is the truth.  You can’t tell the story of the AL East in the first half without that story front and center.  It’s the story so far.

        Which brings me to the question submitted in the title of the post.  Captain Edward J. Smith, of course, was the captain of the ill-fated Titanic.  By most accounts, the Captain had a harrowing choice to make on that fateful night of April 15, 1912.  He knew the iceberg was going to be close, and he could do one of two things.  He could ram it head on, which would have damaged the boat considerably, but would have kept the air-tight compartments out of harm’s way.  The ship would certainly not have sunk, and probably no one would have been hurt, but the Captain would have suffered certain disgrace and humiliation.  The other option was to gamble.  He could swing the ship around as tight as he could, and hopefully miss the iceberg altogether, and sail off without a dent to the ship or his reputation.  The risk was that he would miss and slit the entire side of the ship, compromising the air-tight chambers and possibly sinking the ship.  Economists and statisticians will recognize it, most likely, as a kind of cross between game theory and probability theory.  The Captain did not choose wisely.

        Stripping away the dire implications (not trying to make light of a tragic event), or any implications outside of a few obsessive baseball fans, Kris Wilson also had a fateful choice to make today.  You’ll never hear him say it, and this will never be a part of his explanations or commentary on his performance.  But it’s conceivable that you can boil the game down to one decision.  The BPS has mentioned in the past that one of the consequences of having so many kids come up to fill roles is that they are inevitably going to have a “produce quickly” mentality.  The old saying in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico was that you couldn’t walk your way off the island; you had to hit your way off.  The same goes for the Major leagues, in a way.  If a guy is going to get called up, he’s not going to get enough attention if he takes a lot of pitches and walks his way around.  Maybe that’s changing a bit, post-Moneyball, but you have to believe these guys are up there to hit.  And sometimes what’s good for Melky, Andy Phillips, Kevin Thompson, Terence Long, or Aaron Guile, isn’t always good for the Yanks.  The team would very often rather have the patience.  Often you see these guys leap at a 3-1 pitch with guys on, because they figure they’re getting a fastball, a chance to grab some ribbies and some headlines.  Sometimes, the team needs the walk.  So today, Kris Wilson was having a bit of a rough outing.  His first two innings were dicey, although he hadn’t allowed any runs.  And he had gotten two outs in the third, but had allowed two base runners with Aubrey Huff coming to the plate.  Huff can hit.  Wilson got him to 0-2, but then Huff was all over him.  Taking the balls off the plate and fouling off the tough ones.  Battled him to a full count.  So Wilson had a choice.  He could continue to throw balls off the plate and risk walking him, or he could try and throw the ball straight over the plate and hope he hit it at somebody.  The odds are always in favor of a batter doing just that, after all.  The risk of the first option was that if he walked him, he would be walking the bases loaded in the bottom half of an inning in which the Yanks scored five runs.  That would significantly blemish his already tarnished performance.  There was even a chance Torre would give him the hook.  If he took the second option and got Huff without any damage, it wouldn’t look nearly as bad for him.  We’ll never know if that’s what was going through his head.  Ballplayers would never admit to putting their own interests before that of the team.  But it happens.  In my opinion, Wilson chose poorly.  It cost us.

        One half in the books.  I think Mike Rumble spoke for all of us when he said, “It’s a roller-coaster.  How bad can it be?”  That all depends on how much you just ate at Nathan’s….