Brief and to the Point ...
Whatever fatalism might have followed the Pirates home from their 10-day road trip doesn't appear to have made it onto their overnight charter out of Chicago.
If anything, based on my brief visit to PNC Park on Monday afternoon, before the 8-5 beating of the Braves by night, I found this group to be as engaged and enthusiastic as at any point since they reported to spring training or, for that matter, all through the past three years.
"We're feeling great right now as a team," Jordy Mercer was saying with a near-incredulous tone that I'd even ask. "If you look at our situation, where we are as a team, how much better we can still play ... I'd think it's hard to complain about anything."
That's when I mentioned that whatever local sporting sentiment hasn't been invested in the Penguins the past few weeks has gone toward burying the 2016 Pirates before the summer's in full swing.
"Wow, OK. All I can say is that's not how it is in here. We're a pretty confident bunch in here. There's a lot of season left."
The most upbeat player of all, not surprisingly, saw it the same way.
"I'm always feeling good, brother," Francisco Cervelli would say, that bright smile overpowering the actual words. "And I feel so, so good about everything with this team. Maybe everything hasn't been perfect. But there's so much talent in here, and now our pitching is coming around. We're going to be right there. To me, that's exciting."
Maybe some will shake off that sign from the catcher. Not me.
The Pirates are 20-17, but let's not pretend that's what this is about. It's about being 1-5 against the Cubs, it's about being 7 1/2 games behind the Cubs, and it's about being consigned to another one-and-done wild card.
The Cubs are 27-9. They're off to a start that's beyond sensational. They probably won't be caught. But they almost certainly won't finish with anything approaching a .750 winning percentage, if only because that just doesn't happen. Baseball is the cruelest of leveling tools. Even if performance doesn't wane, injuries happen, suspensions happen. They'll come back down, sooner rather than later.
That's not a prediction. It's common sense.
And never mind precedent. We are still talking about the greatest failure of a franchise in the annals of professional sports. History doesn't have to define us, but it also doesn't rewrite itself in six weeks.
Look at it this way: The Pirates are 7 1/2 back with 4 1/2 months to play. If they make up a mere 1 1/2 games per month -- per month! -- they're right there.
Unfathomable, right?
Clint Hurdle is a master at punctuating discussions like these, so I'll leave this with his wonderful answer when I asked if Sunday's rather thorough victory at Wrigley Field might have been more important than the usual game.
"I think it could represent more outside the clubhouse," he began. "If you’re not in the vacuum, you don’t feel these guys. You don’t hear these guys every day. It’s not like we were wiped out, even though we lost five games to them. If you have a team that their depth of confidence is five games, you have no business hanging around. I do believe what we’ve been able to do collectively together over the years, you get mad or you get sad. They’re not sad. They’re not a sad group. We had an opportunity. We got one last shot at ‘em at Wrigley. I think we showed there was no hangover from the prior five games."
• Add Alen Hanson, freshly promoted and fairly beaming in the Pirates' clubhouse Monday, to the long list of Rene Gayo finds out of Latin America. This is how a team wins Baseball America Organization of the Year despite a half-decade of disastrous drafting. The draftees get everyone excited in A-ball. Gayo's kids get to the bigs. Big difference.
• In Tony Watson's past eight appearances, a span of 8 2/3 innings, he's been charged with one run, six hits and two walks while striking out seven. I'm really worried about him, based on a couple of outings earlier in April.
That sound fair?
• Anytime there's a temptation to blame the bullpen for anything at all, run toward the numbers: The Pirates are 16-5 when the starter goes six-plus innings, 4-12 when he doesn't. The Pirates are 16-0 when leading after six, 16-0 when leading after seven, 17-0 when leading after eight.
It's about the starters, for better or worse.
• It's almost admirable, at this stage, that the only one of the Pirates' everyday players hitting below .276 is Andrew McCutchen at .243. Heck, three of the four bench guys are at .279 or higher, the only exception being sparingly used Chris Stewart at .241. My glass is half-full on that one.
• Jose Bautista got punched in the face Sunday. Regardless of why -- and here's guessing his infamous bat flip from the playoffs threw the first punch -- this offers an opportune time to point out that Major League Baseball is now the only sport that barely punishes bench-clearing brawls. Even the neanderthal NHL hasn't seen one since 1987, between the Bruins and Nordiques:
• Which do you think hurt Bautista more, that punch or being told by the Pirates' current management that he wasn't as good as Andy LaRoche?
• Maybe now that Brandon Boykin was cut loose by the Panthers before even making it to training camp, we'll all have a better feel for why the Steelers wouldn't play him until he was pretty much the last living option. Carnell Lake was the one who didn't want him on the field, and he just got a strong second to the motion.
That said, it looks less excusable than ever that Kevin Colbert and Mike Tomlin sent the Eagles a fifth-round draft pick to get him last summer.
• Pitt is set to formally reintroduce the old script logo for all sports, this through a press conference Wednesday. Although it was outright silly to blame the disappearance of the script for various football and basketball failures in recent years -- right up there with blaming Heinz Field for being all of 3.1 miles off campus -- the return will be welcome.
The pattern is everywhere, including right here: If you want to be a program respected for tradition, then start by respecting that tradition. The Steelers remain the only NFL team with a logo on just one side of the helmet. The Penguins are going back to Pittsburgh gold next year. And the Pirates, the oldest of all, have made a wonderful push to revert to old logos and traditions under Frank Coonelly's leadership.
In Pitt's case, the script is it.
• One hockey note this week, aside from what's in the Game 2 column: The Lightning's policy of forbidding fans from wearing opposing sweaters in certain high-visibility parts of Amalie Arena is so infantile, so insecure, so incomprehensibly backward that ... well, it's no wonder the NHL hasn't stepped in to stop it.
