Personally, I’d rather watch him play and take his lumps than watch a washed up has-been phone it in.

The reason it was such a large crowd is there were a large number of groups, in particular state government groups and elementary schools. Plus it was mom t-shirt night.

The guy sitting behind me noted, after the first hit of the game, that Washburn was a completely different pitcher with men on base. He had breezed through the first and then the first hit led to the floodgates. Point made.

Anyone with any eyes at all realizes that Ibanez is just killing us in left. Anything hit into the corner has the potential for being an inside the park homer. The suggestion someone made to send Clement down, bring up Reed to play left and have Raul become the fulltime DH makes so much sense that I assume McLaren and Bavasi are rehearsing their BS responses to it as this very moment. “We have statistics showing Raul performs worse when he’s the DH.”<—expect to see this comment. Try not to snigger too loudly.

While my gut sense (seeing it in three dimensions though it was obviously a bang-bang thing) was that Ichiro was safe at home, I still don’t understand why he went. If he scores, they definitely walk Beltre and put in a leftie to face Ibanez. If he stays, there’s a slightly larger chance that they give Beltre a nice fat pitch to hit 3-1 (which was the count at the time). When you add in the possibility (as happened) that he’s called out, and look at the bottom five of the lineup, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take the bat out of the hands of the guy who had already driven in three of our four runs with two runners in scoring position.

And if we’ve got to the point where we have no option that includes pinch hitting for Miguel Cairo with two out in the ninth, what have we come to? Is Jamie Burke incapable of picking up a first baseman’s glove? WFB has played first before; is Yuni completely out? There’s gotta be a better option to at least give the fan’s the appearance that you aren’t already playing out the string on May 10.

Down three with 2 innings left you want to get both runners in scoring position if possible. With 3-1 count usually what teams will do if guy on first can run.

There’s no way to justify this. It was 2 outs in the most high-leverage situation in the game, with your best hitter at the plate in a very favorable count. The risk of ending the inning is not worth the benefit of an extra base.