Column: One more step isn’t asking too much

The view from the Kentucky edge of the Ohio River on a sunny Sunday afternoon. — DEJAN KOVACEVIC

BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC

CINCINNATI — It’s been a dozen years since a babyfaced Francisco Liriano was flown from his native Dominican Republic into the Giants’ spring fold in Arizona, but it might as well have been yesterday to hear him tell it.

The searing heat was familiar, but not much else. He knew none of the faces, he no longer had his family or friends, and worst of all, he no longer could understand much of anything he heard around him. Such was his English, and such was the sorry state of Major League Baseball’s educational programs for Hispanics, both of which have improved immensely in the interim.

“I went hungry,” Liriano was telling me a couple of weeks ago in Bradenton.

I genuinely wasn’t sure if he was joking, but before I could ask he continued: “No, I’m serious. “When you come here like that, and you don’t know how to ask for anything, and you’re proud, and you don’t want people to make fun of you … if I didn’t have food right in front of me, I didn’t want to go ask for it. I’d stay hungry.”

It’s safe to say the Liriano family table offers a healthy spread these days. He’s entering his 10th season in the majors, he has at times been recognized as an elite pitcher in the game and, oh, yeah, he’s cleared $20 million to this point of his career, with another $39 million coming from the three-year contract he signed this offseason to stay with the Pirates.

That’ll cover a translator or two and the tip.

And yet, even in that real-world context, even for a man who went from nothing to everything in the span of a decade, that isn’t what motivates Liriano. It isn’t why he stayed with Pittsburgh despite having tested free agency and hearing other offers.

“I want to win,” Liriano said. “I’ve been pitching for a few years now. I’ve been with some good teams. I want to win a championship. That’s what I want. This team can do that. We have the talent. We have the heart. Now we have to do it.”

Spoken like a man with a wholly new hunger.

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He has plenty of company.

At 4:10 p.m. Monday, Liriano and the 129th edition of the Pittsburgh Baseball Club will take to the Great American Ball Park grass against the Reds to begin a summer’s journey that, to hear these Pirates in a strikingly singular voice, can end only one way to their satisfaction.

Like this …

Or like this …

Or this …

“We’re not playing for second place. We’re not playing for the wild card. We’ve been there, done that,” Jordy Mercer, the shortstop, was saying. “The goal is to win the division. The goal is to win the World Series. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned the last couple of years, you’ve got a lot better chance of winning it all by winning the division.”

And can they do that?

“Oh, absolutely.”

That’s the part that got to me most over both trips to Bradenton this spring. It wasn’t the stated goal. That’s only a logical next step, as Mercer just illustrated, especially after the epic deflation of expending so much energy in 2014, only to have it blown up in the span of a couple of hours by Madison Bumgarner. And besides, the Pirates and their following both have matured well beyond the gosh-wow stage of reading, hearing or even creating their own lofty expectations.

They aren’t cute and cuddly anymore. They’re contenders.

And now, more than at any point since Skinny Barry Bonds‘ Pirates of the early 1990s, they carry that with a real confidence.

One morning when I shared with Mark Melancon, that ESPN writer Buster Olney had predicted the Pirates would beat the Mariners in the World Series, the ice-veined closer came right back with: “Seattle? Really? I don’t see that.”

I think he was messing with me. Not sure.

Regardless, that individual ESPN prediction was the outlier, as you can see here …

Yep, second. Again.

And in almost every case, it was the Cardinals first. Again.

The Pirates and Cardinals might not have a full-fledged rivalry, but the Pirates are very sure of their nemesis. St. Louis won the division in 2013, then KO’d the Pirates in the the decisive Game 5 of playoffs. St. Louis almost did it again last fall when sweeping the Pirates in early September, except that the Pirates beat pretty much everyone else to qualify.

Those Bonds Pirates had their Mets to overcome. The late 1970s Pirates had their Phillies. The early 1970s Pirates had their Reds.

And now …

“It isn’t about the Cardinals. It can’t just be about the Cardinals,” Neil Walker, the second baseman, said. “You know the Reds and Brewers will still be there. The Cubs did a ton of things in the offseason, so they’ll be better.”

But …

“But yeah, we know the Cardinals and their history, including against us, and we know that’s something that’s got to change if we’re going to get to our goal.”

And can they do that?

“Absolutely. Why not?”

Sensing the pattern in place?

Clint Hurdle, to his inestimable credit, sensed it — maybe even shaped it — at the outset of of spring training. His first meeting with the players at Pirate City included a cafeteria video session that showed highlights from 2014, one that brought cheers and applause as if all concerned were watching from the left-field bleachers. But when it was done — and the video, like the season, ended rather abruptly — Hurdle left the audience with a single admonition: Second won’t cut it.

“A lot of these players and coaches and Neal Huntington and Frank Coonelly and Bob Nutting have changed this franchise and the expectations that we have and our fans have,” Hurdle would explain several days later. “And that’s wonderful. It’s wonderful that people would have been disappointed if we hadn’t made the playoffs last year. It’s wonderful that we made it. But now we’re moving on. Now we’re looking upward. Now we’re thinking and talking about the next step.”

Understand, this is not the act of a prudent man. Managers and coaches who raise their own bar tend to find trouble sooner rather than later. Better to lower expectations, most would say, than put up with all the disappointment if things don’t go well.

Hurdle is just a bit different. He’s the guy who, on the heels of 20 consecutive losing seasons, blurted out one spring morning that the Pirates would win 95 games. They won 94, then a 95th in the Blackout game that did nothing less than fulfill the manager’s amazingly prescient aim of “re-bonding a city with its baseball team.”

None of that was bombast. He merely stated his beliefs, then watched them realized.

“What I’m sharing going into this season is genuine. I’m not making a prediction or saying we’re going to do this or that,” Hurdle continued about the current team. “I simply feel that we’re good enough. And I feel that way right now.”

His players, as ever, have bought in. And that, as Yogi Berra would offer, takes care of the 90 percent of the game that’s half-mental. They’re now talking about ending what Kent Tekulve always calls “the real streak,” meaning the 35 years that have passed since Teke threw the final out of the 1979 World Series. They’re now talking about how, for all that they’ve achieved, there’s still no banner at PNC of any kind to show for it. “That’s what I want, that banner,” Starling Marte said. They’re now talking about the only-recently-inconceivable concept of a sixth championship, one that would royally restore all the luster that had been lost by this historic franchise.

I put together this sampling of clips from spring interviews to help paint that picture.

The sharpest assessment of all this came from A.J. Burnett, the pitcher who accepted maybe half his market value to return to the Pirates with the openly expressed goal of winning a championship in what he says will be his final season.

“There’s a lot of confidence in here,” Burnett said, motioning with his eyebrows toward the rest of the McKechnie Field clubhouse. “In so many ways, this group has changed even in just the year I was gone. The guys here always wanted to win, and you could see that. Now, they expect to win.”

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Baseball is smarter than you or me. Predict its events at your own peril, because baseball always gets the last word, and it’s rarely what anyone would have forecast.

I’ll take 90-72. And first place.

And I’ll start by looking at the rest of the Central and not being terribly impressed by the Brewers or Reds, both of whom could actually take sizable steps backward. I’ve got little use for any of the grandiose pronouncements being made for the Cubs, as most of that is fuss over a non-participant, Joe Maddon, and one starting pitcher, Jon Lester. That doesn’t take anyone from 73-89 to the playoffs. Also, you know, Cubbie-dom and goats and Bartman and all that.

The Cardinals have earned being favorites. Every time they’re written off, they make everyone look stupid, and that isn’t by accident. The organization’s foundations for success have taken deep root. To boot, this offseason, they raided the cost-cutting Braves for Jason Heyward to bolster an already solid lineup, albeit one that finished last in the majors in home runs in 2014. The pitching, though, is another matter. The rotation features Adam Wainwright and Michael Wacha, both coming off arm injuries, and a bunch of innings-eaters. The bullpen features closer Trevor Rosenthal, who walked 5.4 batters per nine innings, and not much else.

Mystique will only take anyone so far. And the Cardinals are now far enough removed from Tony La Russa and his legendary pitching coach, Dave Duncan, that real problems won’t be as routinely solved as in the past.

Starling Marte batted .338 with two home runs this spring. — GETTY

The Pirates, you already know.

Which means you also know that all the everyday positions are set in stone, and that the rotation and bullpen collectively might be as strong as at any point since … man, I’ve got to rewind before the Bonds era for this one, and I’m not qualified.

“Way back,” Bob Walk replied when I sought help on this.

He’s not the best color man in the league for nothing, folks.

Bottom line: It’s a really good team, even considering all the asterisks it currently carries.

The outfield has an MVP in the most valuable position in Andrew McCutchen, plus a second-half-of-2014 MVP in Marte and whatever the baseball gods have decreed Gregory Polanco will become, anything from the next Dave Parker to the next J.J. Davis with a hard lean toward the former.

The infield has Josh Harrison at third, and he will prove everyone wrong all over again. There’s nothing about this team that I believe more firmly than that. It’s also got a solid infield, possibly more given Mercer’s maturation and Walker coming off 23 home runs. And then there’s Pedro Alvarez, who … eh, not today. We’ll see. He had a fine spring..

Behind the plate is where most pundits are panning the Pirates in year-over-year outlooks, and it’s true that Russell Martin’s absence will be felt. No one is pretending otherwise, including Francisco Cervelli and Tony Sanchez, who bluntly stated, “Russ is up here, and everyone else, including us, are a notch down. That’s just how it is.” The offense could come close to balancing out if Cervelli stays healthy — that was an enormous if in his tenure with the Yankees — but the defense has next to no chance. The only plus is that both catchers impress with their work ethic and should improve.

The rotation has variables, and those go beyond Charlie Morton opening on the disabled list and Jeff Locke and Vance Worley pedaling backward in an alleged race for the fifth spot. We’re waiting on the Gerrit Cole breakout. Liriano has up and down years. Burnett is 38. But the pluses here still outweigh the minuses by a broad margin.

That will be doubly true if Cole reaches new heights, as many inside the game anticipate.

“For me, that just means taking the ball every fifth day,” Cole said. “If I can do that, I really believe the rest will take care of itself.”

With his stuff, it should.

The depth isn’t great, even assuming a brief absence from Morton. Brandon Cumpton’s Tommy John surgery wiped out their best emergency option the past two years, and the choices in Indianapolis aren’t as known. That’s a worry under any circumstance, and it’s one Huntington would do well to address, even if means going against the organization’s grain and stocking a 4-A type or two — think Chris Jakubauskas — in the Class AAA rotation at the expense of a prospect.

The bullpen could be wonderful. I can’t right now concoct so much as a negative syllable about Melancon finishing for Tony Watson, Antonio Bastardo and Jared Hughes. Newcomers Radhames Liz and Arquimedes Caminero bring heat in the high 90s, adding possibly even more. Caminero, in particular, was a strikeout machine this spring. And don’t forget John Holdzkom, demoted solely because he had an option. He’ll be back.

As Watson put it, “There’s just a ton of arms and arm strength. It’s a great group.”

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When Watson was a struggling starter in the minors, Huntington met with him, still holding faith in his talent, and challenged him to be ‘great.’ That was the GM’s term.

“We felt Tony had the tools to not only contribute but also excel at this level, and we needed him to think that,” Huntington was recalling last month. “It’s completely to Tony’s credit that he’s become one of the best lefty relievers in baseball, and that he pushed himself to become that.”

Which boomerangs all this right back to the hunger thing.

Watson is a magnificent microcosm for this team, really. When he made it to the majors in 2011, he’d already exceeded any reasonable expectation for a kid who couldn’t get outs in Altoona. And by 2012, he cemented his status with 68 innings and a .198 opponents’ batting average. If that’s all he ever were to achieve, especially being a lefty, he’d have been set for a prosperous career.

No one would have minded if he stayed right where he was, any more than they’d likely mind if the Pirates did that this summer. They’ve already claimed enough hearts and minds just for the stark contrast against the 20 years before.

But Watson kept improving, year after year, to the point that his 2014 brought a 1.63 ERA and 81 strikeouts against 15 walks. He was an All-Star, too.

“I think we have a lot of people on this team who want to be great, and some like Cutch, who already are,” Watson said. “And I think that says a lot about who we are and what we hope to be.”

Right. Division champs.

It’s only one step up. Not asking much of a group that’s already climbed so far.