Maybe this season has dragged on too long, but when Ozzie Guillen called on Scott Linebrink to try to get through the 14th inning alive, it lifted my spirits.
It could have been a defensive mechanism, for all I know; an irony overdose to numb the pain of watching a 3-1 lead evaporate thanks to two grooved Bobby Jenks fastballs.
But that doesn't seem like me. I'm a pretty positive fan. I stuck up for Dewayne Wise at the start of the season when he was booed mercilessly at the leadoff spot. I tried to see something useful in Josh Fields. I started pulling for Scott Podsednik when he started running up in the box, and haven't stopped. Hell, I even found a way to appreciate Jerry Owens, even if not for his baseball skills.
I think I like Linebrink for the certainty of the experience. Whether you approach his performance from a small scale or large one, or whether you read into the numbers or only watch the games, it all makes sense.
It was a bad signing from the start -- so bad, in fact, that "total collapse" was the second-most-likely outcome. Here's how I ranked them, from best bet to worst:
- Steady slide from solid to awful over four years.
- Total collapse before the halfway point.
- Tolerable just about all the way through.
- Actually good for three out of four years, one off year.
- Totally worth it.
And there isn't much back-patting to it, because you couldn't find anybody who thought it was a strong move. Really, there were so many warning signs that if Linebrink even came close to fulfilling his contract, there would be no way to comfortably assess signing a relief pitcher in the forseeable future.
For instance, say Kenny Williams thought it might be a good idea to replace Octavio Dotel by signing Bobby Howry to a four-year, $19 million deal. There would be even more reasons to shoot it down -- Howry's a year older, and he never had the peak that Linebrink did -- but you couldn't go at it guns blazing. You would have to weigh every statement with, "Well, nobody liked the Linebrink signing, and look how that turned out." That wouldn't be fun.
Hey, sometimes Kenny Williams and Don Cooper have no secret insight, and when a pitcher looks like a huge decline candidate, sounds like a huge decline candidate and throws like a huge decline candidate ... well, it's going to get ugly, and fast. There's some comfort in that.
It's also somewhat rewarding to have a good grasp of risk and reward when first-guessing along with the manager. With a rested Linerink, we can say there was roughly a 50-50 chance that he wouldn't get out of the inning, if you balance out his recent awful run (7.19 ERA since the All-Star break) with his more long-term track record.
However... Linebrink wasn't rested. He was pitching on back-to-back days. Even when he was decent in the first half of the season, he was guaranteed to get shelled on zero days' rest. Cumulatively, opposing hitters are Albert Pujols when seeing Linebrink in consecutive games.
And it played out exactly like you'd expect it to. Linebrink dug his own grave by drilling Kenji Johjima -- which took him missing his mark by an entire home plate -- because he pissed away any leverage he had on Ichiro Suzuki. With two outs and a runner on first, he could work around Ichiro and take his chances with the runner in scoring position.
But he couldn't put the winning run on third with one out, because that would be suicide. As lethal as Ichiro has been against the Sox with runners in scoring position (.358 lifetime average), he had to take his chances.
Problem was, with everything we know about Ichiro and Linebrink in this particular situation, it required a lot of luck for Linebrink to escape, and he couldn't find any. Reason won the day.
Sometimes, that's nice, because most prolonged slumps are hopeless pits of despair. There's no satisfaction in seeing Jermaine Dye turn every hittable pitch into a harmless medium-range fly, or watching Alex Rios pound everything into the ground on the left side. We know -- or at least figure -- that they're better than the combined 0-for-12 they pulled off on Thursday evening, but I'll be damned if I know when and how they're going to turn it around.
With Linebrink, it's different. Deductive reasoning has panned out in nearly every step of the way. Maybe next season, Linebrink will get past his shoulder issues from 2008 completely, and he'll be your run-of-the-mill bullpen arm with good weeks and bad. Then we'll actually have a reason to be frustrated. In the meantime, it's nice to feel smart after years of Williams making me feel dumb.
