April 13, 2015
Column: Of bricks, bonds and serious ball
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Corey Hart crushes a two-run home run to the bleachers in the seventh inning Monday. — GETTY
BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC
A good baseball team is built on bricks.
A great one’s got the mortar, too.
For all else that can be culled from the Pittsburgh Baseball Club’s 129th home opener, from Josh Harrison homering on the very first pitch to Gerrit Cole’s six-plus shutdown innings, to Jared Hughes’ game-changing double-play grounder, to insurance blasts by Pedro Alvarez and Corey Hart, to Mark Melancon finally righting himself for the final out, this 5-4 tipping of the previously unbeaten Tigers was precisely what Clint Hurdle called it afterward: “A great day for baseball on the North Shore, for the Pirates and for our fans.”
You wouldn’t find a soul among the PNC Park regular-season record crowd of 39,933 to dispute it.
Sure, it’s one of 162, as was the real opener in Cincinnati. But this little slice still felt like it was sprinkled with something special, a sensation not felt in these parts for far too long.
And it didn’t take much canvassing of the clubhouse to find it.
“It’s confidence,” Tony Watson was telling me. “It’s belief in ourselves. It’s belief from our fans. You could feel that right from the first pitch.”
Literally, in Harrison’s case.
“It’s a good team, but it’s got a chance to be a great team,” Harrison said. “And that’s because we know we go 25 deep, and we’ve got each other’s backs. That’s huge.”
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Tony Sanchez drapes his arm around Jung-Ho Kang before the Korean rookie’s first batting practice at PNC. — GETTY
Melancon bought motorized scooters for everyone and had them delivered, before the game, right to each player’s stall, each with the player’s name and uniform emblazoned on the platform. Most will use them to cover the long postgame trek through PNC Park’s corridors to their parking garage. Some, like Sanchez, commuted all the way back to his pad in the Strip.
“That’s how this room is,” Sanchez said before stepping on his scooter and speeding away like a 6-year-old.
It’s the mortar.
It’s Andrew McCutchen, the most gifted of the group, saying, “There’s a lot of talent here, but the biggest thing is that we’ve got depth and we stick together. That’s how I see it.”
It’s Harrison, being asked his favorite moment, replying not with his opening salvo but with “Melancon’s strike three. Loved it. We won the game.”
It’s the difference between winning and really winning.
It does begin with the bricks, though, and the Pirates got plenty from those guys on this day.
Cole needs to be the brick in the rotation for the biggest, broadest aspirations to be realized this summer, and he certainly pitched that way: He one-hit Detroit’s dynamic lineup through six innings, including eight strikeouts, and was chased in the seventh when he was both fatigued and squeezed by home plate umpire Bob Davidson.
The latter did little to mar the effort.
“Against that lineup, it’s impressive,” Hurdle said.
The other manager sounded equally impressed.
“He’s got tremendous velocity and movement, plus a good, hard slider that looks like a fastball coming in,” the Tigers’ Brad Ausmus, a former catcher, said down the hall. “He’s tough. He was probably the best we’ve seen all year, for sure. He looks like the type of guy you’d love to have on your staff.”
The game’s greatest hitter wouldn’t doubt it. Miguel Cabrera is batting .517 with nine RBIs through Detroit’s 6-1 start, and that included a single through the right side off Cole in the seventh. But in the previous at-bat, Cole claimed a 10-pitch duel that sent a series of biting four-seam and two-seam fastballs that Cabrera — in a rare show of awkwardness in the box — could only foul off while falling forward. Strike three came on the at-bat’s only slider, an unfair offering that Cabrera missed by a mile and Francisco Cervelli ably blocked.
“We just pounded him low,” Cole said. “I’m not going to lie: That felt good.”
What had to feel even better was Hughes’ bailout.
Hurdle pulled Cole with bases loaded and nobody out, but the crowd still stood and roared with an ovation as he came off, one sign of how far baseball passion and knowledge have come in this town over the past handful of seasons. But there was unmistakable tension, too, once Hughes completed his ritual sprint and took the ball.
“There’s one thing you want there,” Hurdle said. “Ground ball. That’s it.”
First pitch to Nick Castellanos was a biting sinker, and Castellanos bit: 6-4-3.
A run scored, but Hughes pumped his fist emphatically into his glove.
“They know I’m throwing strikes there, so I’ve just to keep it down,” he said.
Hughes came at Alex Avila with a first-pitch sinker, too, then climbed the ladder with a four-seam that brought a popup and the afternoon’s exclamation point. The place fairly shook.
“Oh, trust me, I felt that,” Hughes said with a wide smile. “We all feed off these fans.”
“That guy,” Sanchez said of Hughes, “doesn’t get nearly the credit he deserves. I know we’ve got a lot of big arms in the pen, but he has one of the toughest jobs out there, and he’s been done it well.”
Alvarez opened the bottom half of that inning with a liftoff to the seats in right-center, and Hart soon followed suit beyond the Notch.
A.J. Burnett and others were telling me in the earliest days of spring training that Hart could be a major contributor, and his steady showing in Bradenton and 3-for-6 start have only supported that.
“He’s a professional hitter,” Burnett echoed on this day.
Bob Walk was part of the Pirates’ previous run of success, way back in the early 1990s, and he seemed as moved by this concept as anyone.
“You look at this bench right now and, for years, we’d have minor-league fillers or minimum-wage guys there who couldn’t really help you much,” Walk said. “Now, you see guys all over the place. And where that makes you feel good as a baseball team is that, even when things go wrong — and they’ll always go wrong at some point — you never have that sense that it’ll get away from you.”
Case in point: Swept in Cincinnati, 3-1 since.
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Fans stream over the Clemente Bridge for the Pirates’ opener. — GETTY
Russell Martin is gone, of course, but he’s been replaced, at least potentially, by superior depth. Cervelli and Sanchez both have performed well above anything seen from last season’s backup, Chris Stewart. Maybe that will compensate, to a degree.
Alvarez is “looking like a man on a mission,” Hurdle said after yet again applauding his first baseman for moving across the diamond without complaint and, to date, without incident. But even if he sputters, Hart looks like a far better bet to help than Gaby Sanchez ever was.
Sean Rodriguez is a super-utilityman with contending experience in Tampa Bay. The only player with a similar tool kit last season was Harrison, and he wasn’t replaced once he graduated.
It’s hard to know what to expect from Jung-Ho Kang and Andrew Lambo, but there is upside.
And the bullpen, for the curious amount of heat it’s taken from the fan base in the opening week, actually lines up to be really, really good.
As Hurdle reiterated, “We see it as a real strength on this club.”
There is depth, all around. Including the rotation, where Casey Sadler showed a promising four-pitch arsenal Sunday in Milwaukee in an emergency outing.
There’s camaraderie, too, to revisit Harrison’s other talking point. Not just between the players and coaches, but between the team and the city. That ‘re-bonding’ Hurdle set as a goal on the day he was hired is now full-fledged. Fans come to the ballpark to watch the games. They’re clapping with two strikes. They’re supporting. They’re believing.
“I can’t say enough about how great it is to play here,” Hughes said.
My own favorite moment of the day came in pregame introductions, when the crowd cheered Hurdle as loudly as McCutchen or anyone else.
“I heard that,” the manager would tell me afterward. “It’s humbling. It really is.”
Yeah, a little mortar going on there, too.
