And that's why you don't save the closer. And not that Parnell couldn't have blown things apart just as easily ... but supposing someone were to put it to the manager this way: In which situation is it more difficult to succeed and has the greater consequence for allowing a run -- Preventing the home team from scoring and winning from a tied game? OR -- Preventing the home team from scoring and winning in a game where they're trailing? You won't get a straight answer of course, you'll get a run-around about how the situation dictates how pitchers pitch and about comfort zones and all that. The sad part about it all is that all 30 ML managers would give you the same gobbledy-gook. (Joe Maddon might give you smarter-sounding gobbledy-gook but I still think he'd do things the same way) The extra sad part is that, unlike many closers (say like Franco, Looper, Wagner, Rodriguez in our recent past), Parnell was NOT a guy specifically hired to be a closer, so there should be no agreements (unspoken or otherwise) broken, no missed bonus clauses for saves, and no agents calling bemoaning the fact that his guy was used in the dreaded 'Non-Save' situation. He wasn't even the closer until Frank-Frank couldn't recover in time; the job more or less fell into his lap in February. And the the REAL sad part about it all is that the Phils were not only reeling by the 9th inning but had run through their pen at least as bad as we had through ours and were left with just two recent call-ups to man the fort for who knows how many innings. Throw up one more Zero on the board and I definitely liked our chances.