Kovacevic: Hurdle, players go old-school for hitting advice

Clint Hurdle made a reference Sunday to an 'old-school' approach his Pirates are taking toward hitting.

Before he'd explain it, my first thought was how this offense, through nine games, has put up 58 runs, including the 5-0 rout of the Reds on this Sunday at PNC Park. That's the franchise's highest run total through the first nine games of any season since 1923, a lineup loaded with three eventual Hall of Famers: Pie Traynor, Max Carey and Kiki Cuyler.

That, my friends, is old-school.

But no, that wasn't the manager's meaning. He was referring instead to how this offense, which ranks behind only the surprising Braves in most Major League Baseball rankings ...

... has become focused far less on the standard video studies that consume so much of the modern player's day, and far more on simply helping each other out.

"Watch the guy hit in front of you," was how Hurdle began the explanation. "I think we're doing a better job of watching the game, watching each other. We're spending more time in the dugout in conversation instead of running to the video to check out individual swings. Because there was a day when you didn't have a video to run to watch your last at-bat. You'd talk to somebody. You shared information. You trusted somebody else's input."

He smiled a bit there.

"Our guys are maybe trying to old-school it a little bit. Video still comes into play. It's still helpful. But them sharing information among themselves ... that's good."

Oh, it's been better than good:

That's Gregory Polanco and Corey Dickerson both taking Cincinnati's promising Tyler Mahle for a tour of the Clemente Wall in the fifth inning. And wrapped around and within those were a Josh Harrison single, a Starling Marte double to the Notch, and a Josh Bell RBI rope.

Here's betting none of the above wind up in Cooperstown — the one guy who had a chance around here got shipped to San Francisco, you might have heard — but there's plenty to be said for chain-reaction offense.

I wanted to find out more about this process Hurdle described.

"It's a sense of support within your team," Bell told me, elaborating on a discussion we'd begun having last week in Detroit. "You don't feel like you're on an island out there during an at-bat. I mean, sure, it's just you up there in the box. But you feel like you have the rest of the squad right behind you. Watching. Hanging on the edge of the dugout. And then, when it's done and you need something, you go and talk to somebody."

He cited, on this Sunday, spending extensive time with Harrison and Sean Rodriguez between at-bats.

"I told them how I was feeling, how I thought my approach was working, what I needed to do better. And I feel like it's going to be an ongoing conversation. Now, they might say five different things. Maybe I'll take one of those. Or none. But it's the conversation that helps."

Has it led directly to any of his success through a .324/.400/.441 start?

"Honestly, I can't point to one single thing. But I'm sure it has."

I asked Dickerson something similar, if his home run off Mahle had been set up in any way by Polanco's earlier the same inning, and he was equally honest:

It was time to uncover specifics. And one voice rises above all when it comes to that sort of thing in this clubhouse.

"Man ... " Rodriguez started out, in that especially engaging tone he's got. "You talk to people in this game ... with all the video and electronics and everything else you can use for hitting ... hitting's mostly about feel."

Feel, the man said.

"It's feel. I've said this a million times, but this game's about throwing, catching and hitting, correct?"

No doubt.

"And that's all done with our hands. The body does the work. The body's got to be in position to adapt, but that's still mostly feel. So when JB came over, we wanted to hear what he was feeling. I'll do the same thing after an at-bat. And then from there, you try to figure out what you want to feel. Maybe I don't feel like I'm getting my foot down. OK, then, maybe I need to get a little more under my legs to get the foot down. Or I feel like I'm late. Maybe I need to start sooner."

Fine, but why is this new?

"Those are things that should typically be happening in the clubhouse. You should be bouncing things off each other. We're out there watching each other. And there's no better hitting coaches than ourselves. Jeff Branson and Jeff Livesey, those guys are working hard, but they're not out there facing that pitcher. They're not out there trying to pick up that guy's delivery or release point."

Ultimately, his advice for Bell?

"I told him, I'm not trying to say any of whatever I'm telling you will work. But if you keep looking for that feeling, if you want to find that, we're here to help you find it."

• Give it up for Hurdle regarding the above. For an old-timer, he never stops being open to new concepts, even if they're old concepts. What's more, he's never been afraid to buck the guys over his head.

• Speaking of that one erstwhile potential Hall of Famer ...

... that was Andrew McCutchen in full Clutch Cutch mode there for his welcome-to-San Francisco moment Saturday night, capping a career-best six-hit output with a 14th-inning three-run home run to push the Giants over the rival Dodgers. He'd been off to a familiar-looking 2-for-24 start, but those always get balanced out before long.

Great players do great things.

• Meanwhile in Houston, Gerrit Cole just set the Astros' record for strikeouts in the first two games of a season with 22, as he rung up 11 in each. Within those, he recorded a career-best 21 swinging strikes in the first, 19 in the second, both staggering figures in any context.

Consider this an educated guess that not a soul in Texas has been advising him to pitch to contact. Especially not after A.J. Hinch, the Astros' manager, told reporters after that second start: "I think his swings and misses are coming from close-to-perfect execution above the barrel where he needs to live."

Maybe the Astros will be wrong about that over time, but I can attest after having covered Cole's entire tenure in Pittsburgh that I never once heard anyone associated with the Pirates speak about him needing to miss barrels high.

• Is it possible the Pirates have a couple of breakout stars still here?

A few thoughts on that out loud:

• I've also got a full column on Jameson Taillon's one-hitter.

• Hey, the bullpen looked fine to me Sunday. Why all the complaints?

• No, seriously, give it up for the Pirates. I mean that.

They're 7-2 partly because seven of those games came against the bad Tigers and the possibly worse Reds. And still to come this month, they'll get the Marlins, Phillies, then another series with the Tigers. So it's possible that, even after a full month of ball, we'll have no really good gauge on what this team will be.

But wins are wins. The Reds had so tormented the Pirates the past two summers that Neal Huntington would make one of the most ridiculous remarks of his tenure — "If we invert our record against two teams this year, we're a game and a half out" — to try to erase that.

Well, they beat the Reds. Took three of four. And they swept through the opening weekend in Detroit, then beat a Minnesota team fresh off an American League wild-card berth.

The argument can't run both directions: Either don't blame a team for losing to a lousy opponent, or praise them for a victory.

• I asked Huntington early Sunday if he might considering bringing back Joe Musgrove from that worrisome shoulder injury as a reliever, even if just in transition:

That's a fair stance, sticking by Musgrove as a starter, even if the buildup to return — as Huntington acknowledged — will be more arduous. But data is data: In 2017 with Houston, Musgrove made 14 starts and put up a 6.12 ERA while opponents batted .312. In 23 relief appearances, he had a 1.44 ERA, 0.86 WHIP and .196 opponents' batting average. Which is why the Astros used him only out of the pen when winning the World Series.

Maybe there's something to that.

• Then again, Huntington clearly isn't ready yet to accept that relief help will be needed, sooner rather than later.

“You’d like for guys to be effective right away," he said. "We’ve got some guys who have been, and we’ve got some guys who are scuffling. We believe that this bullpen, as a group, can be effective.”

That view I don't share at all. That's just covering for spending $0 in free agency on the cheapest commodity available.

• The paid attendance — and in Major League Baseball, that's counted by all teams as tickets in circulation, not actual turnstile count — for the Pirates' four games with the Reds was a total of 45,929. That's an average of 11,482.

I could tell you that the Sunday paid attendance of 11,251 was a for-real 3,000 or 4,000 at the very most, or I could just show you this pic I took during the first inning to judge for yourself:

It'll be fascinating to see if that changes should the Pirates keep competing as they have. But I don't think it will.

One of the most common misperceptions among fans, even those intensely knowledgeable about sports, is that conditions like weather or a recent streak can meaningfully impact baseball attendance. Anyone in the business of sports — meaning business operations — will attest that it's all about season-ticket and group sales. And those occur almost entirely in the offseason, which, in the case of the Pirates, was an unmitigated disaster.

On those occasions that a team performance has a dramatic or surprising uptick, those same sports business people will attest that there's a two-week lag on when crowd size gets affected. So if we see any effect of a 7-2 start, it'll be later this month.

Or not at all.

• Look, whichever way this goes, when the Pirates take to the frozen tundra of Wrigley Field this afternoon, their flag will be the one flapping atop the Central Division pole. By two whole games over the home team.

That's pretty cool.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY