A.J. Burnett was in civvies at this point. It was 12:58 a.m. Sunday, and his children, A.J. Jr. and Ashton, were somehow still scurrying at his feet several hours past bedtime.
But that wasn’t the group being referenced.
“These guys …” as the father figure of the Pirates’ clubhouse in more ways than one tried to continue. “These guys have what it takes. That’s what everyone just saw.”
What everyone just saw was “a baseball classic,” in the words of Jared Hughes.
It was “a night to remember,” as Andrew McCutchen offered with uncharacteristic drama.
It was “Oh my God! Oh my God!” as Steve Blass exclaimed from the broadcast booth.
It was two teenagers, much deeper into the night/morning, sprinting back and forth on General Robinson Street while waving a Jolly Roger and shouting “LET’S GO BUCS!”
Around the bases with Andrew McCutchen in the 14th inning. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY
It was Cutch coming through with the greatest clutch moment of his MVP career, crushing a two-run home run in the 14th inning to finally, finally drive a stake through those omnipresent Cardinals, 6-5, before the delirious remnants of the original crowd of 37,318.
“It was magic,” Starling Marte would say, looking squarely across the way at Cutch buttoning up. “That moment … that man … it’s magic.”
____________________
For the better part of five hours, it was more manic than magic.
Vic Carapazza, the home plate umpire, was so astonishingly awful that when one of the Pirates later called him ‘brutal,’ that wound up being among the most generous adjectives I’d hear in my informal survey. His strike zone was gauged through a kaleidoscope, he couldn’t tell a foul tip from a swing and a miss — repeatedly, amazingly! — and because of the latter, he petulantly tossed Francisco Cervelli with the first foul word flung his way after Burnett should have struck out Mark Reynolds in the second inning.
Reynolds launched the next pitch to Pluto, resulting first in Cervelli’s ejection, then Clint Hurdle’s in defense of his catcher.
Carapazzo’s work was a sickening enough display that, even though the outcome wasn’t directly affected, the Pittsburgh chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America — of which I’m a member, for full disclosure — arranged for a rare pool interview with the crew chief. That was Larry Vanover and, although he didn’t permit being quoted, his response amounted to this: Cervelli was ejected for foul language, and no one heard a foul tip.
Hey, thanks for that.
Hurdle almost invariably passes on criticizing umps, but not this one as it related to Cervelli: “He’s upset. Let him go. For me, that’s no game awareness. He said he said something personal? You know what, we’re professionals. He heard a foul tip? There was no foul tip.”
So there it was, quite literally, right off the bat: The Pirates were down, and the Cardinals had caught a break. Same old script, whether here or at Busch, whether in July or October.
Except that this time, the Pirates kept playing. And playing. And playing.
____________________
Burnett would give up three runs through five innings, but in the Pirates’ half of the fifth, he got one of those back, in the first of the evening’s many stunners, with his first home run in a decade. A muscle-flexing special, no less, well up into the bleachers:
The crowd rediscovered the playoff-level energy that had been felt earlier.
His teammates, too, apparently.
“I thought A.J.’s homer was bigger than mine,” Cutch would say, somewhat wryly.
Just as important, Burnett battled through the early bumps and found the seventh.
Still, St. Louis was up, 3-1, in the eighth, and the Cardinals, in addition to being the Cardinals, had been 44-1 when leading after seven. This was their territory.
Until the Pirates, piece by piece, punch for punch, started poaching some of it as their own.
I brought this up with Hurdle afterward, once he’d already called this game “a great example of the grit and determination and the so-what-now-what mentality you need.” I asked if his team has had a long learning curve with that trait, including against this particular opponent: “It has been a learning curve. It has. You learn in this game that there are things you can control, and things you can’t. You’ve just got to keep playing the game and take care of each other. I think you saw some of that tonight.”
“Fifteen-round prizefight. That’s what this was,” Vance Worley would say, his sleeveless shirt showing those monster biceps that rendered the imagery all the more real. “And I think it really started in the eighth.”
Cutch walked, took second on an errant pickoff play — it was hard to tell if the cosmos shook before or after, considering how rarely the Cardinals mess up — then sprinted home when Jung Ho Kang, who’s been flexing his own biceps ever since Josh Harrison went down, singled to right.
“Man down, man up,” came the Hurdle-ism.
Talk about overcoming: Pedro Alvarez committed his 14th error earlier, one that cost the Pirates a run. And he’s been down offensively, too, for the better part of his career, especially against lefties. But he stepped up next and lashed an RBI single to tie, 3-3.
This kept right on going, too.
In the 10th, Reynolds went into orbit a second time, this off 26-year-old rookie Deolis Guerra because Mark Melancon was unavailable, to put St. Louis back up by a run. But Kang tripled, thanks in part to his increasingly daring — yet smart — baserunning, and Chris Stewart smacked a tying single through a drawn-in infield.
Stewart pumped his fist with every stride down the baseline.
“What a feeling,” he’d say. “But the funny thing is, there was still so much more.”
None of which would have mattered had Guerra not shaken off Reynolds’ home run to turn in three otherwise uneventful innings.
“Know what that is? Scars,” Hughes said. “Some guys, when they’re in the minors a long time before getting up here, they’ve already been through it all. They’ve been through the worst. So they’ll take a situation like that and deal with it better than most.”
Guerra, on a stool in the adjacent stall, overheard and smiled.
Sean Rodriguez falls backward to catch Mark Reynolds’ bullet in the 12th inning. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY
Reynolds nearly nicked Guerra again in the 12th, but this rocket only made it to, oh, Venus, and Sean Rodriguez made a whirling, spinning, shoulder-blades-to-the-track splat catch.
That about sum it up?
“I don’t know, man,” Rodriguez said. “All I know is everything hurts.”
____________________
The worst was yet to come. As was the best, obviously.
Worley skated through the 13th, but the top of the St. Louis order pecked away for another go-ahead run in the 14th on Jhonny Peralta’s one-out RBI single.
“Ever notice how when the Cardinals are in close games late, it’s always their main guys who come up?” Charlie Morton asked. “Every time.”
That’s not true, of course, but the sentiment is a beauty. That must be how it feels.
But two other critical events occurred in this top half: Worley retired his final two batters, and the crowd went right back to going completely unglued at Carapazza because, just before Peralta’s hit, there was another close foul tip call that went St. Louis’ way.
Those left in attendance — I’d estimate 25,000 — became as angry as I’ve seen from a baseball crowd in Pittsburgh since fans infamously littered Three Rivers Stadium with giveaway flags in 1995.
“It was unbelievable how that was,” Stewart said. “I mean, they were so behind us, and I think that showed it more than anything. They were as mad as we were.”
So was this one a tip or not?
Most Pirates felt Carapazza got that one right, but Stewart, who was closest, wouldn’t say.
“Maybe. I’m not sure. And you know what? Who cares now?”
He beamed ear to ear.
____________________
Stewart’s a pretty serious guy. He’s one of those you could never picture as a child, if only because you couldn’t attach all the necessary playful expressions.
Well, this was it. This wasn’t a smile. This was Christmas morning and PlayStation 4 and a sweet new bike and a prom date all rolled into one. I could barely recognize the man.
And Cutch … wow, just watch this for yourself:
I get it. I do. I’m a reporter, and I’m impartial and ice-cold and all that other stuff. But I’m also born and raised. And I’ve been following baseball in Pittsburgh in some capacity since early childhood, from listening to Bob Prince with my grandfather on his transistor to my dad taking me to Three Rivers to marvel at John Candelaria vs. Nolan Ryan.
Nothing topped the bottom of the 14th.
No, not the Blackout, either. The wild-card victory over the Reds two years ago was more of a resurrection. It was more important, clearly, given the one-and-done format. But it didn’t have this back-and-forth, this fire, all this adversity at every turn.
It didn’t involve the Arch nemesis.
I brought this up with Blass, too, before this series began, asking him which was the team those great Pirates of the 1970s had to overcome. Because everybody’s got one.
“Those Reds,” Blass came right back, and I willfully omitted a colorful adjective there. He meant the Big Red Machine. “They were that team. They were the ones we knew we had to get past, that there was no other way to get to where we wanted.”
Decades later, the man snapped off every syllable.
Andrew McCutchen meets shaving cream, courtesy of A.J. Burnett. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY
That’s where these Pirates are. They ended the Streak. They had their blackout. Cueto dropped the ball. Russ took him deep. Weirdo jumped off the Clemente Bridge.
And then they lost in 2013. To the Cardinals.
And then they lost in 2014. To Madison Bumgarner and the Giants, but really to the Cardinals for being the only team who could beat them in an otherwise spectacular September, thus relegating them to a detonation date with a human dynamo.
That’s what’s got to change in this scenario: The Pirates have to beat the Cardinals.
Maybe not every game. Maybe not in the finale tonight. But they have to beat them, both on the field and in the intangible sense, to achieve the next level.
Neil Walker, who told me he’s “sick of losing to the Cardinals,” singled to open the 14th.
Cutch came up next and … oh, OK, go ahead and watch it all over again:
Know what I think really happened as a result of this?
“We won the game that St. Louis always wins,” Jordy Mercer said. “We scratched and clawed and kept fighting and pushing, and as many times as you thought, ‘Oh, there go the Cardinals again,’ we ended up winning. We did.”
This is a fun insight into how multiple columns are written simultaneously in-game so that the bulk of the writing is complete before the last out, regardless of the outcome.
July 12, 2015
Column: Do you believe in beating St. Louis?
by Dejan Kovacevic • Columns • Pirates
“It’s a special group.”
A.J. Burnett was in civvies at this point. It was 12:58 a.m. Sunday, and his children, A.J. Jr. and Ashton, were somehow still scurrying at his feet several hours past bedtime.
But that wasn’t the group being referenced.
“These guys …” as the father figure of the Pirates’ clubhouse in more ways than one tried to continue. “These guys have what it takes. That’s what everyone just saw.”
What everyone just saw was “a baseball classic,” in the words of Jared Hughes.
It was “a night to remember,” as Andrew McCutchen offered with uncharacteristic drama.
It was “Oh my God! Oh my God!” as Steve Blass exclaimed from the broadcast booth.
It was two teenagers, much deeper into the night/morning, sprinting back and forth on General Robinson Street while waving a Jolly Roger and shouting “LET’S GO BUCS!”
It was this …
Around the bases with Andrew McCutchen in the 14th inning. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY
It was Cutch coming through with the greatest clutch moment of his MVP career, crushing a two-run home run in the 14th inning to finally, finally drive a stake through those omnipresent Cardinals, 6-5, before the delirious remnants of the original crowd of 37,318.
“It was magic,” Starling Marte would say, looking squarely across the way at Cutch buttoning up. “That moment … that man … it’s magic.”
____________________
For the better part of five hours, it was more manic than magic.
Vic Carapazza, the home plate umpire, was so astonishingly awful that when one of the Pirates later called him ‘brutal,’ that wound up being among the most generous adjectives I’d hear in my informal survey. His strike zone was gauged through a kaleidoscope, he couldn’t tell a foul tip from a swing and a miss — repeatedly, amazingly! — and because of the latter, he petulantly tossed Francisco Cervelli with the first foul word flung his way after Burnett should have struck out Mark Reynolds in the second inning.
Reynolds launched the next pitch to Pluto, resulting first in Cervelli’s ejection, then Clint Hurdle’s in defense of his catcher.
Carapazzo’s work was a sickening enough display that, even though the outcome wasn’t directly affected, the Pittsburgh chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America — of which I’m a member, for full disclosure — arranged for a rare pool interview with the crew chief. That was Larry Vanover and, although he didn’t permit being quoted, his response amounted to this: Cervelli was ejected for foul language, and no one heard a foul tip.
Hey, thanks for that.
Hurdle almost invariably passes on criticizing umps, but not this one as it related to Cervelli: “He’s upset. Let him go. For me, that’s no game awareness. He said he said something personal? You know what, we’re professionals. He heard a foul tip? There was no foul tip.”
Except that this time, the Pirates kept playing. And playing. And playing.
____________________
Burnett would give up three runs through five innings, but in the Pirates’ half of the fifth, he got one of those back, in the first of the evening’s many stunners, with his first home run in a decade. A muscle-flexing special, no less, well up into the bleachers:
The crowd rediscovered the playoff-level energy that had been felt earlier.
His teammates, too, apparently.
“I thought A.J.’s homer was bigger than mine,” Cutch would say, somewhat wryly.
Just as important, Burnett battled through the early bumps and found the seventh.
Still, St. Louis was up, 3-1, in the eighth, and the Cardinals, in addition to being the Cardinals, had been 44-1 when leading after seven. This was their territory.
Until the Pirates, piece by piece, punch for punch, started poaching some of it as their own.
I brought this up with Hurdle afterward, once he’d already called this game “a great example of the grit and determination and the so-what-now-what mentality you need.” I asked if his team has had a long learning curve with that trait, including against this particular opponent: “It has been a learning curve. It has. You learn in this game that there are things you can control, and things you can’t. You’ve just got to keep playing the game and take care of each other. I think you saw some of that tonight.”
“Fifteen-round prizefight. That’s what this was,” Vance Worley would say, his sleeveless shirt showing those monster biceps that rendered the imagery all the more real. “And I think it really started in the eighth.”
Cutch walked, took second on an errant pickoff play — it was hard to tell if the cosmos shook before or after, considering how rarely the Cardinals mess up — then sprinted home when Jung Ho Kang, who’s been flexing his own biceps ever since Josh Harrison went down, singled to right.
“Man down, man up,” came the Hurdle-ism.
Talk about overcoming: Pedro Alvarez committed his 14th error earlier, one that cost the Pirates a run. And he’s been down offensively, too, for the better part of his career, especially against lefties. But he stepped up next and lashed an RBI single to tie, 3-3.
This kept right on going, too.
In the 10th, Reynolds went into orbit a second time, this off 26-year-old rookie Deolis Guerra because Mark Melancon was unavailable, to put St. Louis back up by a run. But Kang tripled, thanks in part to his increasingly daring — yet smart — baserunning, and Chris Stewart smacked a tying single through a drawn-in infield.
Stewart pumped his fist with every stride down the baseline.
“What a feeling,” he’d say. “But the funny thing is, there was still so much more.”
None of which would have mattered had Guerra not shaken off Reynolds’ home run to turn in three otherwise uneventful innings.
“Know what that is? Scars,” Hughes said. “Some guys, when they’re in the minors a long time before getting up here, they’ve already been through it all. They’ve been through the worst. So they’ll take a situation like that and deal with it better than most.”
Guerra, on a stool in the adjacent stall, overheard and smiled.
Sean Rodriguez falls backward to catch Mark Reynolds’ bullet in the 12th inning. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY
Reynolds nearly nicked Guerra again in the 12th, but this rocket only made it to, oh, Venus, and Sean Rodriguez made a whirling, spinning, shoulder-blades-to-the-track splat catch.
That about sum it up?
“I don’t know, man,” Rodriguez said. “All I know is everything hurts.”
____________________
The worst was yet to come. As was the best, obviously.
Worley skated through the 13th, but the top of the St. Louis order pecked away for another go-ahead run in the 14th on Jhonny Peralta’s one-out RBI single.
“Ever notice how when the Cardinals are in close games late, it’s always their main guys who come up?” Charlie Morton asked. “Every time.”
That’s not true, of course, but the sentiment is a beauty. That must be how it feels.
But two other critical events occurred in this top half: Worley retired his final two batters, and the crowd went right back to going completely unglued at Carapazza because, just before Peralta’s hit, there was another close foul tip call that went St. Louis’ way.
Those left in attendance — I’d estimate 25,000 — became as angry as I’ve seen from a baseball crowd in Pittsburgh since fans infamously littered Three Rivers Stadium with giveaway flags in 1995.
“It was unbelievable how that was,” Stewart said. “I mean, they were so behind us, and I think that showed it more than anything. They were as mad as we were.”
So was this one a tip or not?
Most Pirates felt Carapazza got that one right, but Stewart, who was closest, wouldn’t say.
“Maybe. I’m not sure. And you know what? Who cares now?”
He beamed ear to ear.
____________________
Stewart’s a pretty serious guy. He’s one of those you could never picture as a child, if only because you couldn’t attach all the necessary playful expressions.
Well, this was it. This wasn’t a smile. This was Christmas morning and PlayStation 4 and a sweet new bike and a prom date all rolled into one. I could barely recognize the man.
And Cutch … wow, just watch this for yourself:
I get it. I do. I’m a reporter, and I’m impartial and ice-cold and all that other stuff. But I’m also born and raised. And I’ve been following baseball in Pittsburgh in some capacity since early childhood, from listening to Bob Prince with my grandfather on his transistor to my dad taking me to Three Rivers to marvel at John Candelaria vs. Nolan Ryan.
Nothing topped the bottom of the 14th.
No, not the Blackout, either. The wild-card victory over the Reds two years ago was more of a resurrection. It was more important, clearly, given the one-and-done format. But it didn’t have this back-and-forth, this fire, all this adversity at every turn.
It didn’t involve the Arch nemesis.
I brought this up with Blass, too, before this series began, asking him which was the team those great Pirates of the 1970s had to overcome. Because everybody’s got one.
“Those Reds,” Blass came right back, and I willfully omitted a colorful adjective there. He meant the Big Red Machine. “They were that team. They were the ones we knew we had to get past, that there was no other way to get to where we wanted.”
Decades later, the man snapped off every syllable.
Andrew McCutchen meets shaving cream, courtesy of A.J. Burnett. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY
That’s where these Pirates are. They ended the Streak. They had their blackout. Cueto dropped the ball. Russ took him deep. Weirdo jumped off the Clemente Bridge.
And then they lost in 2013. To the Cardinals.
And then they lost in 2014. To Madison Bumgarner and the Giants, but really to the Cardinals for being the only team who could beat them in an otherwise spectacular September, thus relegating them to a detonation date with a human dynamo.
That’s what’s got to change in this scenario: The Pirates have to beat the Cardinals.
Maybe not every game. Maybe not in the finale tonight. But they have to beat them, both on the field and in the intangible sense, to achieve the next level.
Neil Walker, who told me he’s “sick of losing to the Cardinals,” singled to open the 14th.
Cutch came up next and … oh, OK, go ahead and watch it all over again:
Know what I think really happened as a result of this?
“We won the game that St. Louis always wins,” Jordy Mercer said. “We scratched and clawed and kept fighting and pushing, and as many times as you thought, ‘Oh, there go the Cardinals again,’ we ended up winning. We did.”
The kid tapped his chest as he spoke.
That happened.
.