Emotions do funny things with the human mind. We often get easily wrapped up in whatever we are doing and allow our devotion to bias what we are looking at. It is the cornerstone of human nature and the backbone of religion, politics and baseball. We draw conclusions and then make the facts fit them, wrap them up all nice and neat and store them to use later when presented with contrary evidence. Life it much easier when you already have the answers, and nobody wants to be caught with their pants down, do they?
What does this have to do with blame? Absolutely everything. When things don't go right, fingers start pointing. It wasn't MY political decision, it wasn't MY religion doctrine, it wasn't MY baseball instinct that failed us. It was HIS! point point double point
So, after another excrutiating loss (when 40% of your losses are by 1 run, it feels like they are all excrutiating), fingers are extended and we need to have a scape goat. Who would have thunk that the Department of Justice would be a microcosm of life? Right now, everyone is pointing and Michael Bourn. It's his fault, right?
Unfortunately for Mike, he made the LAST mistake, and that tends to be the one that people focus on. It is easier to ignore all the other mistakes during the game when your mistake ends up being the final out. Sure, it wasn't a big mistake and probably wouldn't happen again if you replayed that AB 100 times, but, blame doesn't care about odds. Blame cares about focus.
And now the focus is on you Bourn. Should you have stolen second? Maybe, maybe not. The end result didn't matter since Howard had a pitch to hit and smoked it. Odds are you would have gotten doubled off of first there instead of second had you not stolen. Should you have been running on a 3-2 pitch there? Probably not since you should be able to score anyway and being at third means much less with 2 outs. Does that mean this is all your fault? Absolutely not. We don't even know if you would have scored even if Howard had walked OR you not have gotten doubled off.
Where does the blame lie then? How about the rest of the team who couldn't put up one run in the previous 8 innings. 1 run in those prior 24 outs and we may not be talking about this right now. Yeah, Johnson was good, but his era isn't 0.00. Blame looks for instances, but truely having knowledge knows that it isn't an instance that lost the game, it was everything put together. But does that make us feel better? No way. Pointing at Michael Bourn makes us feel better. It is all his fault.
Ah, it's like we never lost the game now...