We had moderate hopes for Tugboat Wilkinson in his Major League debut, just because his nickname and carriage merge so harmoniously. But because the San Francisco Giants clearly hate all of you, we didn't get nearly enough tug, or boat.
Wilkinson, whose real name is Matt, is only the second Tugboat in Major League history after Thurman Munson, and he comes by his nickname with the fullest honesty. He is listed at 6-foot-1, 250 pounds, and has the front porch to suggest that the second number may be only an estimate, but that's not the hook. It's not even the fact that his best pitch has the 1934-styled nickname "invisiball."
Frankly, though, it's all of it. The name, the frame, the game—he's perfect because he's so not any of that. And because he only got to pitch the first two innings of Wednesday night's game, which the Giants won, 1-0, you are right to feel cheated. The game demanded all the Tugboat we could get, and what we got was two nearly clean innings and 25 pitches that ran the gamut from 78.7 mph to 91, the speed at which Jacob Misiorowski exchanges a scuffed ball for a good one.
Even if we knew ahead of time that Tugboat was barely going to get out of the harbor, he is everything baseball isn't any more, and as such deserved a longer debut. Even if the Giants are trying to be careful with the pitcher they traded for in May, hilariously enough from Cleveland, two innings seems like a bit of a cheat. In fact, his family, who came from Vancouver to see his first big moment and had to endure only a fisted single from Angel Martinez in the second inning, barely got settled before his night ended. It is, next to Eury Perez's abortive perfect game against West Sacto a month ago, the most deflating moment of the entire season. Not for him, of course.
Understand here that nicknames like Tugboat don't happen any more. The fact that Wilkinson was given that name as a tee-baller and therefore too young to pay someone to phony up an ID for him, and that it fit even then, nearly leans into fat-shaming. Nearly, that is, because it stuck with his approval, so if there's no shame felt, well … that's between him, his youth coach, his parents and the ghost of Thurman Munson.
In addition, players with his generous frame almost never see the majors any more. Even Bartolo Colon, the last unabashedly massive player in the game, did not have such a centrally located girth band. And yet Wilkinson makes it all work as part of his living, breathing time-machine stylistics.
More than even that, he gets out without overwhelming anyone with power. Unlike most lefthanders, let alone most pitchers who aren't blessed with Miz-level velocity, he throws his fastball as his out pitch rather than as the setup to a king-hell changeup or curve. He is unashamed and seemingly indefatigable.
At least that's what we want to him to be, not because we are enamored of the Giants but because we are enamored of Tugboat and his decades-old … well, everything. In fact, the agreed-upon scoring rules prevented him from being credited with the win because he fell three innings short of the minimum. As a result, Adrian Houser, who has 44 career wins and doesn't really need one, got the decision that dramaturgy almost insisted go to Tugboat. Rather, he is roughly scheduled to pitch again Tuesday at home against Cincinnati's much more prototypically contemporary right-hander Chase Burns, who has been so good in such a brief time—two years, one All-Star Game—that he just signed a seven-year, $105 million deal with the typically flint-walleted Reds.
This should be Tugboat's future as well, if there are gods worth the bother. But he won't get the bag if he's only pitching two innings every five days. He deserves more and better than what he's currently getting, because he's Tugboat, because he's magnificently unkempt, and because he's defying the approved norms of modern everyone's-shaped-like-an-inverted-V baseball. In fact, we are naming him Comrade McKinney's new favorite player without consulting her because we know what's best for her, for him and for all of us. You're welcome.
