Kovacevic: Bell, Pirates show passion, but front office?

"The worst," Josh Bell was recalling for me. "It was maybe my worst swing ever."

Yeah, that was kind of my thought, too.

Which is why I'd brought it up, even though it was a hell of a thing to bring up after the kid had just conjured up some mega-clutch magic in both the ninth and the 10th innings of the Pirates' 7-6 sweep-capper over the Brewers on this Sunday afternoon at PNC Park.

Sorry, but it still seemed important. Maybe even more important given the uplifting context.

"That's the swing that's gotten me in trouble all year," Bell continued. "I go out of my zone ... I go there without any conviction ... and I just kind of ..."

He didn't finish. He didn't need to. I've seen that swing. You've seen it. And he sees it in his nightmares.

This was the ninth inning. The Pirates were down a couple runs. Colin Moran opened with a single off Milwaukee's closer, Corey Knebel. Bell was next. Because Knebel was going for a four-out save, running up his pitch count was at least a partial priority, so, after a called strike, Bell looked at three more pitches. All were fastballs, and all of them missed.

Now, he remembered thinking, was the time to dig in, to wait for that meatball, to really let 'er rip.

And -- oof! -- there he went, out of his shoes, lunging over a pitch well outside.

So with the very next pitch, Knebel and batterymate Erik Kratz again lined up outside, clearly hoping to capitalize on the ugliness they'd just witnessed, and Bell beat them. Badly. Stayed with the pitch, lined it to the opposite field for a rally-sustaining single.

Here are both pitches:

That, as Bell suggested, encapsulated the entirety of his 2018. He's at .261/.342/.396, which looks ... OK. In isolation, anyway. He's got only five home runs, fathoms below his natural power potential, and it's taken a 32-for-99 surge since June 10 -- .323/.391/.469 -- to push the other numbers back up to respectability.

And no, unlike Gregory Polanco, he hadn't been unlucky, owning a .309 batting average on balls in play that's nine points above the basic norm. (Although he definitely was robbed of extra bases earlier on a screamer to deep center.)

This has been about bad decisions, first and foremost. He's almost 26 years old, so it's easy to forget this is his second full season, his first with middle-of-the-order responsibility. He's also outrageously bright, so it's possible he's overthinking. Either way, it's definitely about the decisions.

Thus, the remainder of his season will probably ride on remembering precisely one thing.

"Swing like you mean it, like I did on those last two hits," Bell said. "Get behind the swing, believe in it."

Kind of like this:

That, of course, was the one in the 10th. With bullets of rain coming down, with a simultaneous lightning bolt in the Downtown background and with all the other requisite drama of a five-game sweep of the Brewers, eight wins in the past nine games, the whole deal.

But it at all began, I was betting in broaching the subject, with persisting through that one bad swing.

"Honestly, I think that's right," Bell said. "It reminded me of what I can't do up there. I've got to be aggressive. I've got to be hungry."

Let it eat?

"Let it eat, man."

• Moran scoring from first to win it?

Yeah, a couple thoughts there: One, Joey Cora, for all his other recent failings, was absolutely right to wave him, as Moran represented the winning run. Two, there's zero reason Kratz shouldn't have been charged with an error there. The relay was right on line, and he can't let it get through him.

• Bell will be a leader on this team before long. He's got the makeup and, again, he's got the smarts.

But don't doubt for a second who's the leader right now.

"It's everyone," Starling Marte was telling me after this game, forming a finger-touching clasp with both hands to accentuate the point. "It's a unit. It's not one guy. It's our whole group. We're all leading each other."

That, he explained, was why he and Gregory Polanco stood side-by-side in answering reporters' questions Saturday after they hit back-to-back home runs in both ends of the doubleheader sweep. They wanted to send a message.

"We're here," Marte said. "We're leaders, too."

This is all damned impressive, I've got to tell you. I covered these guys out on the recent West Coast trip, where they wound up getting creamed by the Dodgers, including a 17-run abomination, only to come home and concede another 17 to the Phillies. Then, they had their general manager go public with a pronouncement that he wouldn't add to the roster unless they had a really big week.

And they responded like this?

Wow.

Takes me back to something Polanco told me out in Los Angeles, as the players were packing their bags for the long flight home.

"We're going to be fine," he said. "It's a good team. We're a good team. We know that. The Dodgers were hot. You saw them. We'll be OK."

I reminded him of this Sunday.

"Told you," he came back with a smile. "I love this team."

• I brought up the leadership thing with Moran, too. You know, Mr. Quiet.

"I'll tell you this: There are some good people in here," Moran said. "Lots of them."

• I'm bringing this up, in part, because maybe the most likely player to be traded at the looming July 31 deadline was the author of this game's biggest hit: David Freese. And with Sean Rodriguez -- mercifully -- out of the picture for now, that void won't feel nearly as dire if the kids can take care of themselves.

• Clint Hurdle, like all managers and coaches, can do dumb things.

I hated, for example, his leaving Joe Musgrove out for the eighth inning, especially after Christian Yelich hit a sharp single and Jesus Aguilar walked to open it up. That's when Hurdle should have gone to the mound, not Ray Searage. And that's not hindsight. It's how I felt at the time, seeing Musgrove's pitch count at 95.

And for sure, Hurdle should have at least had someone up in the pen. No one stirred until Searage's deliberate time-wasting stroll.

That was lousy.

I asked Hurdle about his decision, which resulted in Brett Phillips' bases-loaded triple that should, by all rights, have been the day's dagger.

"Joe's pitch count, I thought, was manageable," Hurdle replied. "He wasn't over 100. There were some pitches there in the eighth, I thought, that could have been strikes in certain sequences, and he didn't get them. That could have flipped some at-bats. And Phillips, he'd faced three times and had success."

That part of the argument's fair. Phillips had been 0 for 3 with two comebackers and a K.

Musgrove, a bona fide rabid competitor, wanted Part IV.

"We didn't see many good swings," Musgrove said, "so the plan was to try and throw him something with a bend on it early and maybe get a take or a bad swing on it and maybe go back to what we'd beaten him with. Out of the hand, it felt good. The spin was there. But it kind of hung up in there and never really broke."

Nope. The slider stayed up, and Phillips pounced.

"He put a good swing on it," Musgrove continued. "It's fun. I played with Phillips with the Astros for awhile. Me and him are real good friends. We had a friendly battle all day. I got him a couple times, but he ended up getting me when it counted."

That is fun, actually. But that doesn't make the manager's call correct, regardless of result. The game was on the line there, and Musgrove had done more than his share to win it. The bullpen was well short of full strength but still would have been the better option.

• That said, my goodness, one would think Hurdle never has a thing to do with any winning if reading/listening to the fan base, not least of which were those in attendance booing him after finally taking the ball from Musgrove.

News flash:  It works both ways.

The only manager/coach in this town who gets credited with wins is Mike Sullivan, and that's only because his rose remains fresh. For everyone else, it's the Steelers winning 13 games and Mike Tomlin losing all four of their losses. With the Pirates, it's become little different, as best as I can gauge: The team wins, and the manager loses.

There are so, so, so many more layers to professional team sports than to identify one individual and shake a fist.

• The fist-shaking around here is almost always more prudently reserved for the front office, at least from this perspective, and it'll be fascinating to see how Neal Huntington and those above him respond to all this sudden winning.

Predictably, Huntington wouldn't touch his stance of a week earlier that these few days would be pivotal in determining whether or not he'll be a buyer at the deadline, saying in response to a question on that subject, "We’re built around guys that have the ability to be here beyond this year. And so that’s a good thing. We want to win this year, and we want to win next year. We’ll continue to look to do what we think is the right thing to do for this organization. It makes it better if we continue to play well. It makes it easier if we continue to go on 9-1 stretches, if we can continue that. It also makes it easier if we’re on a 1-9 stretch, but just not as much fun.”

I wasn't sure what to cull from that, so I asked what he'd be seeking if, in fact, he were to become a buyer:

• I'm not saying the Pirates should add. I'm not there yet, based on the current circumstances.

But I am saying it's silly to hold this conversation in mid-July when those items Huntington cited for me above were all available -- and affordable -- over the winter had the front office not pinched every penny, whacked payroll by $20 million and pocketed that extra $50 million royalty check.

There are symptoms and causes. We waste way too much time on symptoms with this team.

• Austin Meadows was demoted because of his Super-2 status. Not for any other reason. There isn't even a rational debate to be had about this. And Huntington's attempted deflection -- that the Pirates are "looking to win every day" -- then tossing in the promotion of Jordan Luplow and his good recent work against lefties as evidence of that ... wow.

The Pirates saw five lefties in six days through San Diego and Los Angeles. Luplow wasn't a priority then. He's only one now because the minor-league season ends after August, and Meadows needs to accrue more time to avoid Super-2.

• In fairness, Huntington isn't the one who should be answering Super-2 questions any more than Hurdle is. That decision's made over his head, by Bob Nutting and Frank Coonelly, and they aren't doing interviews.

• Imagine if these guys were one-tenth -- no, one-billionth -- as invested as those on the field.

• Of the 17,583 paid tickets in circulation for this game -- that's how Major League Baseball announces attendance in all 30 stadiums  --  no more than 11,000 or 12,000 were in the house. And maybe a quarter of that remained for Bell's big hit.

But that's how this goes, yes, even in a great stretch of winning.

I've been writing this all spring and summer, and I'll keep repeating in hopes it resonates: Tickets for professional sporting events are sold in the offseason, not during the season. They're sold through season tickets and group sales. Individual game tickets account for a small percentage of overall sales, and actual game-day sales account for an infinitesimally small percentage.

So no, the winning streak was never going to have an effect. That's not how it works, not in Pittsburgh, not anywhere.

Tell a friend.

• Let's not forget this was a first-place opponent upon arrival, albeit now one that seemed devastated after losing all five here and seven of eight on the road trip leading into the break. As the great Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel penned in the row right behind me, "This was by far the Brewers' worst loss of the season. Nothing else is close. Brutal with capital B. If there is going to be a more crushing loss than this in the second half, hide the women and children because you won’t want to see it."

“This one stings today,” Milwaukee's manager, Craig Counsell, told reporters. “It’s going to sting on the flight home. It’s the kind of loss that stays with you a little bit."

• Time to go. Moran's rounding third all over again, and someone's got to flip the hourglass.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY