DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

Neal Huntington sees it. He does.

And I’d have to believe he feels it, too, when his Pirates have a day like Sunday at PNC Park. Where they’re one run, one bloop, one bleeder, one better pitch away, as they were in a 3-2 loss to the Reds. Where that loss snaps a four-game winning streak but also sets the stage for a 10-game road trip that figures to make or break the season.

Just one pitch can make the difference, like the flat sinker Jared Hughes served up for Chris Heisey’s decisive home run in the ninth inning …

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DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

Russell Martin wants to stay.

Not going to lie here: I was not sure about that. Not all the way. Not until more than an hour after the Pirates’ 3-1 throttling of the Cardinals on Wednesday at PNC Park, after Martin had ample time to scrub off six consecutive days of catching big-league ball, a grind unlike any in sports.

Not until Martin told me this: “I love it here. You can see that. Everyone can see that.”

And this: “I’ll listen. Of course I’ll listen. You’d have to be an idiot not to listen.”

He was referring, of course, to a possible contract extension, an issue that looms so large for the Pirates this fall that it’s seen by many — outside and, yes, inside the organization — as nothing less than a wholesale litmus test for Bob Nutting and the front office.

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DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

So, this is how it’s going to be, then?

The 2014 edition of the Pittsburgh Baseball Club isn’t going to back into anything because it, unlike its predecessor, won’t have that choice. It won’t have any 17-games-over-.500 starting point for the pennant race. It won’t have anyone in the rear view mirror, only what’s right there in the windshield.

It’ll have to be the hard way.

It’ll have to be every foot-cracking, rib-smacking injury withstood, every bad bounce shrugged off, every blown lead overcome, every lousy loss showered away.

And all those wonderfully uplifting wins, too.

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DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

What a smooth, systematic and satisfying W that was Monday night at PNC Park, huh? 

Oh, not the game you watched?

Well, bear with me here, because at the fork in the stadium’s tunnel where one goes left for the home clubhouse, right for the visitors, I chose the latter for the first time in a long time in search of a wholly different perspective for what at least feels like a rather tired tale.

You know, the one that ends Cardinals 3, Pirates 2.

“You’ll take any kind of win,” Mike Matheny was saying in the visiting manager’s office, looking like he might just bust out a cigar. “But that’s a good one.”

And so it was, from the opposite perspective.

Oh, we all know what it is from the home perspective by now.

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