Kovacevic: All-around base-Brault player finally shows in bigs

MILWAUKEE -- Upon watching Steven Brault get splattered all over the Gulf Coast in Grapefruit ball this spring, I came up with an awfully unfair term for the kid: Jeff Locke Lite.

Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's not like I shared it with anyone.

Until now, anyway.

But it's OK now, because on this Monday night at Miller Park, Brault just might have morphed, ever so slightly, into something more by mowing down the Brewers -- six scoreless innings, one hit, countless broken bats and other innocent contact -- in the Pirates' 7-0 romp.



"This was a fun game to watch," Clint Hurdle would beam. "I think we all enjoyed it. He competed. On both sides of the ball."

Both sides?

Oh, right, there were also stroked hits by Brault in the fifth and sixth, the latter a two-run single:





Quite a night. And maybe a chance, in addition to making a memory, of wiping away some sour ones.

Because the only label less flattering than the one I'd concocted for Brault is the one that any 25-year-old prospect fears the most: 4-A. As in, he crushes it in Class AAA but can't cut it in the majors. Like a Chad Hermansen. Or Pedro Alvarez. Or, in the current wave, Tyler Glasnow.

Brault, who came to the Pirates in the 2015 trade that sent Travis Snider to the Orioles, just finished an overwhelming season with Indianapolis, being named International League Pitcher of the Year -- the first Pirate prospect so honored since Zach Duke a dozen years ago -- by doing the following in his 20 starts: 1.94 ERA (first in the league), .199 opponents' batting average (second), 1.07 WHIP (fourth) and 109 strikeouts (12th).

So he can walk on water like Hermansen, right?

Well, no. If anything, it was more like that time that Lloyd McClendon was asked to evaluate Hermansen's progress at the big-league level and blithely replied, "He doesn't look as defeated when he strikes out." Because Brault bombed pretty much every time out with the parent Pirates this summer: 15 runs and 28 hits in 18 2/3 innings spread over seven appearances. Even when he finally got his first start of 2017 a week ago against the Cubs, they smacked him around for eight hits in five innings.

And then, this.

Ray Searage told me afterward that he'd had a long talk in the afternoon with Brault and Elias Diaz, urging them both to pound the zone, to not fear the Milwaukee lineup, the Brewers being in contention or the hitter-friendly fences, to basically find results as fast as possible.

Or, as Searage put it to Brault, per his recollection, "Just believe in yourself. Be the best version of you. Be what you were down there."

The battery took it to heart, and Brault wound up with his first big-league win, which he visibly embraced with even more than his standard hyper-energy:

So THIS just qualified as my lone brush with greatness in 2017 ... pic.twitter.com/7wbUtnXL6R

— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) September 12, 2017

PIRATES