pitches up to that point. As David points out, he was a little lucky in that regard, but who knows what might have happened had he stayed in. However, if your pitching from the third slot in the rotation only gives up two runs, than I think scrutiny for the loss belongs elsewhere as that seems to me to be a solid overall outing. If I were to downgrade Hurdle, I would prefer it to be due to offensive decisions gone awry.

I don't want to fall into a trap of trying to dig for every minute bad decision of Hurdle's unfairly due to bias I already had going into the evaluation. There's a danger I might err too far the other way in trying to be fair, however, so I still appreciate your input here.