Kovacevic: These Pirates determined to drown out doubters

DETROIT -- The ball boomed off Gregory Polanco's barrel with so much velocity, so much ... volume, that its echoes might still be bouncing off Motown's many skyscrapers visible through the open outfield of Comerica Park.

How loud?

"Oh, loud. So loud," Jordy Mercer would tell me. "I mean, what a sound."

This sentiment would echo, too. I canvassed the Pirates' room following their outrageous, once-overturned 13-10, 13-inning outlasting of the Tigers on this, the franchise's 132nd opening day, and each player was unwittingly one-upping the other with superlatives for Polanco's three-run blast that finally sealed it.

"Are you kidding?" Josh Harrison came back. "I was the guy on first base, and I didn't even look up. I just needed to hear it."

"Loud," Josh Bell answered at a nearby stall. "Loud and enjoyable."

On potentially countless levels, but let's stay in the moment for a minute.

Alex Wilson, dragged into 3 2/3 innings of long relief for Detroit, found his first mess after two outs in the 13th, Adam Frazier and J-Hay each swatting singles through the hole at short. Up came Polanco, fresh off a fine spring that followed trimming a few pounds to try to return to "those 14 days when he looked liked he invented the game," as Clint Hurdle would later describe Polanco's stirring rookie debut in 2014. And because he'd already gone 2 for 4 with a double and a walk on this day, Wilson would be nuts to be aggressive. He needed only an out.

Ball one.

Ball two.

Ball three.

And then ...

... off it went, a flat 92-mph sinker inbound, then a 110-mph missile outbound. Major League Baseball's tracker shows that bruised ball traveled ... eh, a fairly modest 412 feet, but that doesn't take into account where it might have landed had there not been structures in the way.

Or even if it landed.

"It landed," Polanco would tell me with a wry smile. "They called. It just landed."

Wait, was that a little strut from Polanco?

"Oh, yeah, he's got some of that," J-Hay would later explain. "He can have a little bit of an edge to him."

Edge?

____________________

This was a bad baseball game, if we're all being honest. But these Pirates brought, I dare say, a badass attitude.

They did so through all five hours, 27 minutes.

They did it through Ivan Nova spraying early and having to escape bases-loaded, nobody-out not once but twice. Through some sloppy defense on both the infield and outfield corners. Through a bullpen blowup by newcomer Michael Feliz. Through another of those by, of all people, Felipe Rivero. Then through the Tigers leaping, cheering and doing everything but dancing off the field when it looked like they had it won in the 10th.

Oops.

They just kept running up more runs, they eventually turned a couple plays in the field, and Steven Brault, the second-to-last man standing in the pen, closed up the circus with three scoreless innings.

I loved Hurdle's response when I asked what he appreciated most, even amid all the bad:

Did you catch that?

"Big fight," the manager called it. "We just kept at it, kept at it ... we kept forcing the issue."

That's persistence. That's "resiliency," per Mercer.

But if we're all still being honest, this season will take more on the intangible level. Maybe an edge of some sort.

Brault, his torso caked with tattoos, is something of an authority on badass-ery, and he absolutely embraced it when I put forth to him that this team, maybe more than any other edition in recent years, could benefit from operating with an edge.

Pull up a chair for this one:

"You know, it's kind of weird ... I was thinking about this, actually," he began in trademark Brault-ese. "I came into this game, I'm a guy who's started all his career, and I think, 'I'm in here to keep my team in this game.' Right? But this ... I came into a situation where I realize, 'Oh (excrement), the only way I'm going to keep my team in this game is to give up zero freaking runs.' "

Which he did. Three zeroes. Two hits. The Tigers never took another sniff. Edgy stuff.

Could that catch on across the board?

"I think so," Brault came back with a slight raise of the voice. "I think it shows you, first of all, that we're a team that still needs to grow. We can do better. Our pitching staff is young. We all have flaws. But we're going to figure it out. We want to win. All we want to do is win."

He paused, apparently realizing he hadn't fully answered my question.

"That edge ... we have it. People will see that, too."

"It's coming. It's in here," Bell replied to the same. "You'll see."

"We know it. We know what's in here," J-Hay said. "We think other teams in the National League know it, too. It just might not be everybody, but that's fine. They'll see it."

Sounds strikingly similar right down the line. Which made me wonder exactly how much they've been discussing this stuff among themselves and, far more important, what might be the origin point. Edges that are manufactured don't come with much shelf life.

And then, thanks to one veteran, I might have found out.

"We're all a little ticked off," this player told me. "We hear how we're going to lose so many games, 100 games ... we even hear it from Pittsburgh."

I mentioned the losses of Andrew McCutchen and Gerrit Cole and how those are broadly expected to devastate the coming season. I wasn't prepared for what followed.

"Yes! Yes, that!" he exclaimed. "Those are great players, great teammates. We miss them. But we have some players still here, you know? We can still play."

____________________

They'll have to play a lot better, as Hurdle, Brault and others noted and as the hard evidence painfully suggested. The Pirates could build up the edginess of peak-era Steven Seagal, and they'll still stink if they regularly cough up 10 runs, boot the ball and run the bases like Little Leaguers.

Nova needs to lead the rotation, and he needs to do so via fastball command, his signature. That wasn't there for him Friday, and that's unsettling.

"I'll be fine," he assured me.

It's unfair to judge Feliz after one flop, but it's beyond safe to say Rivero will be fine, too. His arm was flying open some, continuing a spring issue, but he might be a video session away.

"Today, my teammates picked me up," he told me. "Tomorrow, I pick them up."

I was assured regarding the defense, too, first by Hurdle saying, "We're going to be a good team defensively. This was one game." Then there was this from Mercer:

Eh. Sorry, not buying that yet. As I'd written in my season preview column, this will be a stronger-than-most-think hitting team and a poorer-than-most-realize defensive team. And Friday underscored all of that.

If Colin Moran, another of the Cole acquisitions, can play big-league third base, it sure didn't show on this day. His feet froze in turning one semi-routine bouncer into a double in the second, and he whiffed on a way-routine grounder for an error in the third.

This was his 17th game in the majors. That did show.

Polanco botched a looping fly in right, then bobbled the pickup. Bell has gradually, tirelessly improved at first base, with real results, but it's still no shock when he comes up empty on a little roller, as he did later that same inning.

Am I missing a corner?

Oh, yeah ... Dickerson is anything but a strength in left field, something I've been hearing from scouts since his acquisition. JaCoby Jones' single that resulted in the controversial non-ending in the 10th should have been caught had he approached it properly from shallow positioning, but he let it fall in front of him. From there, Nicholas Castellanos should have been out by a Michigan mile at the plate, but the throw was stunningly soft and several feet off-line, forcing Francisco Cervelli to lunge athletically once in each direction and, of course, get help from the replay officials in New York.

Hurdle generously called that throw "in the vicinity."

There's work to be done along the white lines.

There's work to be done on those white lines, too, though I can't conceive of a cure for Polanco senselessly drifting off third base in the eighth inning as the potential go-ahead run, a dead duck after Dickerson's soft lineout into a drawn-in infield. Or for Marte trotting most of the way to first on his triple in the ninth, then finally revving it up once he saw it would be fair.

Those two can drive anyone nuts, but they also can do things others can't.

And oh, definitely count Polanco among those with the edge. He hates being second to anyone, even on his own team, and he hates the label he's now -- fairly -- earned for not staying healthy. Don't let the soft smile fool you:

Look, this game wasn't the norm for anything or anyone. As Mercer worded it, "It's crazy that all of this happened and it was just Game 1."

There's work to be done over the next 161.

I like the energy. I really like this potential edge. But it's got to graduate to what matters most.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY