Brian Wilson is a MAN

Brian Wilson is awesome. I think you can usually tell a lot about a person from their face. And by looking at Brian Wilson's face, there's no way he's not awesome. So this is just going to be a post reflecting on how cool he is. His last outing wasn't so good, but that makes this the perfect time to write about him. If Friday's game made you a little down on Brian WIlson, it shouldn't have. With the exception of that game a couple others, Wilson has been pretty dominant.

First, let's look at Wilson's not so good outings. There was the save opportunity against the Phillies where two perfectly placed bloop singles and a double down the line brought in two runs to tie the game. You can't really blame this one on Wilson. Those bloop singles were some of the cheapest and flukiest hits you'll ever see, and I don't care if flukiest is not a word because it definitely applies here. There was the game against the Pirates when Wilson gave up a game-tying home run to Delwyn Young, who had at that point hit only 1 homer on the season. We'll just call that an unfortunate event. It happens to the best of the best. And of course there was the previously mentioned game two nights ago when the Red Sox were getting hit after hit after hit until Wilson got Darnell McDonald to groundout with the bases loaded to end the game. That was just not good at all, but it didn't cost the Giants the game, so it's okay. But that's pretty much it, besides a couple of fluke hits and one bad game, everything else has been dominant.

When I looked at Wilson's WHIP I was a little surprised at how high it is. Right now it's at 1.313, but before Friday's game (4 H, 2 BB in 1.1 IP), which we can assume was just an anomaly for Wilson, it was 1.174. So far all of the stress it seems like WIlson causes, it really hasn't been that bad, as his WHIP is better than those of guys like Heath Bell and Jonathan Papelbon. And I'm just going with my gut, but it seems like Wilson gets a strikeout (44 Ks in 32 IP) whenever he needs it, so the walks and hits don't hurt him. And if you're not satisfied with his WHIP, all you need to do is look at how reliable he has been. His save percentage of 91% is 2nd in the NL only to Ryan Franklin who has only 15 saves to Wilson's 21. And you have to mention his endurance. Wilson has been an absolute horse, eight times coming in during the 8th to get a 4, 5, or 6 out save. Closers just don't do that very much anymore. I don't care how he does it but if the job gets done 91% of the time and he can come in and get a long save anytime, especially with our bullpen struggles of late, that's extremely valuable.

I'm sure we'd all love for him to keep the stress level down in the 9th; I know several times he's almost given me a heart attack. But maybe that's not how Brian Wilson works. You can tell the guy loves being the closer and lives for pressure situations. So far he's shown that with the exception of a couple of performances, all he does is get the job done. And that's all you can ask for.