SAN DIEGO – I'd seen these Pirates before, with that extra skip to their step, that swagger.
They were a whole lot of fun for the better part of April and May, remember?
"We're capable," Josh Harrison was telling me late Friday night, not long after a 6-3 putdown of the Padres at Petco Park. "We know how we can play. We're feeling that. We are."
No one wants to hear this, I know. I'm not sure I do, either. Winning three of four, including the series just taken in New York, doesn't just look like nothing against the 10-24 nosedive that preceded it. It actually is nothing. It's hollow both in the standings and even toward the future, since as many as a handful of these players could be sold off for parts over the coming month.
At the same time ... you know, good baseball is good baseball. And any reemergence from six weeks of the opposite can't possibly be a bad thing.
I'll get to the bigger-ticket items in a bit — Joe Musgrove's seven zeroes in his hometown return, Gregory Polanco's clutch two-run double, Felipe Vazquez's overwhelming save — but indulge me, please, in a few from the bargain bin:
That's Josh Bell up there on first base after singling in the game's second at-bat. He matters. He's a big part of the franchise's future, and one reason for that is that he thinks the game into orbit. As seen above, when J-Hay plops that looper into open grass in right-center, Bell's on his horse from contact. And the giddy-up never lets up, as he blazes a hard turn around second to take the extra 90 feet.
"Bell saw all of that," Clint Hurdle would remark later, unsolicited.
What Hurdle couldn't remark was that San Diego's outfielders, while fast, have a frustrating habit of letting balls fall. In this case, the right fielder, Travis Jankowski, was a mile back and broke too late. Bell processed both in the moment.
"I knew he had a long way to go," Bell told me. "I just made up my mind I was going for it. I was confident I'd make it."
He did. And a passed ball would bring him home.
That's good baseball. On the Pirates' part, anyway.
This was good baseball, too, in the bottom half:
They'll miss that guy if he's gone.
Oh, and then there's this bunt single by Gregory Polanco that was the buzz of the clubhouse afterward:
That was in the second inning, posterizing the Padres' shift, and he'd follow that the next inning with a two-run double pulled to the right field corner that put the Pirates up, 5-0.
That was good baseball.
It was everywhere.
Starling Marte roped a single up the middle on a down-and-in pinpoint strike from San Diego lefty Eric Lauer that the old Marte would have chopped over harmlessly. This version, so much more patient, stayed back, stayed on the pitch and drove it.
Jordy Mercer saw a Lauer fastball up and over in the fourth and launched it 420 feet to the deepest part of Major League Baseball's most unforgiving field, later shrugging that off with, "I hit a fastball." That's what a good player does with those.
They'll miss that guy if he's gone, as well.
David Freese and Musgrove combined for a play that ... well, that one was so absurd it deserves its own article:
And Vazquez, summoned for an unnecessary save solely because all of the relievers in front of him — this time Edgar Santana — can't do their collective job, flashed some of his finest form of the summer in fanning Eric Hosmer and Wil Myers to finish it.
Hosmer went down on an unfair sequence of fastballs he couldn't touch, one of them 100 mph per the Petco gun, followed by that ferocious slider that had been Vazquez' trademark last summer but not so much this one.
Is it back?
"I wouldn't say it's back," Vazquez told me. "I would say my mechanics are back to normal, and all of my pitches are better."
OK, but that slider was the special one. It's Aroldis Chapman-devastating when coupled with fastball command. And that's to say nothing of the backdoor changeup that got Myers to lunge for the 27th out.
"It was good," Vazquez fairly beamed. "This was good."
Damned right it was.
And maybe it mattered, too, in its own way.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCORE, STANDINGS, VIDEOMusgrove pitched ... maybe not as well as his line, as he'd concede having made mistakes that the Padres flat-out missed. But performing in front of dozens of family and friends — many of whom were crowded outside the clubhouse waiting to congratulate him afterward — comes with its own challenges for a youngster, and he more than rose up.
Especially in stranding his final two runners in the seventh by getting a popup and a 5-4-3 double play that brought a fist-pump so animated I had to ask about it:
Love the fire he's got. And that he's a complete player, born to be in the National League. Full arsenal of pitches, the first true cutter the Pirates' rotation has seen in forever, adept with the bat, fleet of foot and ... hey, again, go read the full article on that sequence with Freese.
"Dude's a gamer, man," Bell would say.
Musgrove matters.
Bell matters, too. His two hits, including an RBI double struck with such authority that it chopped 15 feet away from the plate and somehow soared 30 feet over the third baseman's head — "What was that?" Jameson Taillon would playfully jab from the next stall — is now on a .314 surge (16 for 51) over the past two weeks, and his 41 RBIs top the team.
You'd better believe he matters.
Same with Polanco, contrary to rampant misperception just a few weeks ago. Two more hits for him, and the Pirates' best-by-a-mile hitter this month has now reached base a remarkable 20 times in his past 36 plate appearances, going 13 for 28 with two home runs, two doubles and eight walks.
Hurdle sounded almost defiant when I brought up Polanco's bounceback, as he'd been the one pushing him back out there again and again despite heavy public blowback.
"I can't worry about that," Hurdle replied. "Guys like that are hard to replace, hard to find."
Polanco matters. Still.
So does competing, actually. Regardless of how July plays out from the roster standpoint, the core group, even if it's left strikingly young, will need to cling to that same competitive level — from April, from most of May — to mature into whatever this front office will allow them to become someday.
I asked Hurdle about that, and his answer came with an initial hesitation that, as you'll hear, I respectfully challenged:
Catch that last line?
"We just need to keep playing," the man said, "like we've got nothing to lose."
Loved it. Go nuts. Have fun. Get better.