CHICAGO | Sometimes, you just want to know. And so, I stuck around for a while after the game, Kansas City&#8217;s tough 4-2 opening day loss to the Chicago White Sox, because I really wanted to know what the heck Royals manager Trey Hillman was thinking.</p><p>Baseball managers, it seems to me, often get second-guessed unfairly. Baseball is not a fair game. Sometimes, the right decision simply goes wrong. Sometimes, the wrong decision works perfectly. Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson used to talk about the best game he ever managed; it was against the Dodgers in 1975. And his team lost the game. It works that way sometimes.</p><p>But &#8230; nothing about Hillman&#8217;s decision to let reliever Kyle Farnsworth pitch to Chicago slugger Jim Thome made sense to me. Nothing. You certainly know the situation: The Royals led the game 2-1, there were two outs in the eighth inning, there were two White Sox players on base. Hillman had Farnsworth pitch to Thome. And Thome tattooed a 400-foot home run.</p><p>Hillman stood outside the clubhouse after the game &#8212; he might be the only manager in baseball who does not talk to reporters in his office &#8212; and he explained that once he realized that Farnsworth was throwing strikes, he was the right guy to face Thome. I wanted to ask a follow-up question, but I could barely even hear Hillman from where I was standing, and anyway, someone asked something else.</p><p>So, I waited around. There are many reasons to think that Farnsworth was absolutely the <em>wrong</em> guy to face Thome. For one thing, Farnsworth is a right-handed pitcher, and Thome absolutely crushes right-handed pitchers &#8212; has done it his whole career. In his career, he slugs .620 against righties &#8212; that&#8217;s a higher slugging percentage than Barry Bonds or Jimmie Foxx had in their careers. But Thome slugs only .422 against lefties.</p><p>Hillman had a perfectly good lefty reliever, Ron Mahay, all warmed up in the bullpen.</p><p>&#8220;Mahay is not a lefty specialist,&#8221; Hillman explained in his postgame comments. And it is true Mahay is only slightly better against lefties than he is against righties. The Royals, you might recall, did have a true lefty specialist, Jimmy Gobble, who had given up only one hit to Thome in seven at-bats. They released Gobble in large part because Hillman does not like lefty specialists.</p><p>But anyway, Mahay is plenty good against lefty batters (they have hit only .229 against him), and from afar, it just seemed like an obvious move. So I wanted to understand.</p><p>There were other reasons to make the move to Mahay. Farnsworth is a power pitcher, precisely the kind of pitcher Thome loves facing. Farnsworth gives up a lot of home runs (he gave up 15 homers in 60 1/3 innings in 2008). Farnsworth has great stuff, but he has struggled enough in the tight situations in late innings that last year in New York, there were people at Yankee Stadium wearing &#8220;Anyone But Farnsworth&#8221; T-shirts. Farnsworth had given up two hits already (one on a bunt) and started Thome off with two straight balls and, well, you didn&#8217;t have to be Nostradamus to see what was coming.</p><p>Put it this way: When Farnsworth entered the game, I received two e-mails from people who covered Farnsworth in New York. One said: &#8220;What the heck is Hillman doing?&#8221; The other was a more ominous: &#8220;Oh-oh.&#8221;</p><p>So, I sent word to Hillman that I just wanted to ask him a couple of questions, and he sent word back to wait around. And I waited. I chatted with Mark Teahen about his first game as a second baseman (&#8220;I can&#8217;t say it&#8217;s second nature yet,&#8221; he said, &#8220;but I do feel a lot more comfortable.&#8221;) I listened to Farnsworth explain what happened (&#8220;I fell behind, and you can&#8217;t fall behind a good hitter like that,&#8221; he said.) I listened to Gil Meche handle himself like a pro even though he deserved a victory for his brilliant seven-inning performance.