Kovacevic: Rising above all this wreckage takes a special spirit

"We've got to fight for the guys who are hurt. That's what everybody's saying in here right now. Play for the guy who can't play. Pick him up."

Felipe Vazquez told me that.

Nearly four hours after the Pirates and Athletics had taken the field at PNC Park, nearly 400 pitches after the first had been thrown, Starling Marte's three-run launch into the visitors' bullpen in the 13th inning brought a 5-3 victory that felt every bit as vital as it was fun.

The fun was evident to everyone among the couple thousand hardy souls who stuck it out and to our Matt Sunday at field level ...

... but the vitality, the urgency, that's what Vazquez was talking about. And he apparently wasn't alone, from what I'd gathered. Beginning at the top of the clubhouse structure with Clint Hurdle, down through the coaches and to the team's internal leadership, the same message is being repeated: Identify a player, potentially a friend, who's hurt. Play for that player.

I brought this up with Adam Frazier, as well:

The list of candidates is unfortunately, unimaginably long. Nine players are currently on Major League Baseball's Injured List. Seventeen in all have spent time there. That includes the entire everyday outfield of Corey Dickerson, Gregory Polanco and Marte, a major injury to Erik Gonzalez at shortstop, rotating injuries to all three catchers and now two-fifths of the rotation in Jameson Taillon and Chris Archer, plus back-end reliever Keone Kela.

And yet, after taking these two of three from Oakland, the Pirates somehow have their heads above water at 16-15, three games behind the first-place Cubs.

I loved how Neal Huntington worded it before the game, and it's worth reading every syllable of this: "Look at what this club's gone through. We haven't had an at-bat from our regular left fielder. Our right fielder missed a month. The guy we signed to take our right fielder's place hasn't played. Our starting shortstop has a broken collarbone. We've had at least one catcher on the IL all year long. We've got two regulars hitting under .175. We've got three relievers we were really counting on with ERAs over 5.00. We've blown a bunch of late leads. We lost eight in a row. That's a recipe for a 10-20 team ... And we're sitting here at .500. We've already faced a ton of adversity, but this club continues to fight."

I don't see eye-to-eye with the man on much, but I'll be damned if he isn't dead-on about that.

Here's Hurdle on the same, also worth all the syllables: "We don't feel sorry for ourselves. There's not a person in there who does. The league doesn't care. The game doesn't care. One of the best quotes I ever heard from anybody was from Lou Holtz, who said, 'Ninety percent of the people don't care, and the other 10 percent are glad it happened.' It's true! You play, man! They can beat people, and they know they can beat people. Our guys have been very gritty."

After a breath, he added, "We're a game over .500. With everything we've traveled through in these 31 games."

We'll see what, if anything, it means.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the ravaged rotation will be reduced to sending out Steven Brault and Nick Kingham -- neither of them effective in relief, neither of them sufficiently stretched -- to face the Rangers. After that, it's four games in St. Louis, followed by seven more games in Phoenix and San Diego.

Maybe this was nothing more than a delaying of the disaster.

But it's probably worth appreciating that they've avoided being dead and buried already, allowing for the possibility that enough players -- Taillon and Archer, in particular -- can return in time to restore some equilibrium. Because with the rotation intact, as we've seen, it's a pretty competitive team overall.

• Oh, almost forgot: I asked Vazquez to which player he was playing for.

"Me?" he came back. "I gotta play for the whole crew!"

Of course. The closer. How perfect.

• Marte's a damned good baseball player. Very few things about Pittsburgh sports fans tick me off. One that definitely does is how Marte seems to get defined almost entirely by his most recent brain cramp, as opposed to what he actually produces. He's got a career .283/.338/.442 slash with a 30-steal average, Gold Glove defense and an arm to match.

Yeah, he was served up a dead-red meatball by Fernando Rodney on that home run ...

... but he dealt with that meatball as mercilessly as any good baseball player would. It's OK to rise above the riff-raff and offer a little credit for that.

• If the riff-raff give you grief on that, retort with this: With Marte in the lineup, the Pirates are 15-6 and average 4.0 runs per game. Without him, they're 1-9 and average 2.6 runs. Thanks to editor Bob Maddamma for that gem.

• More credit where due: The offense will take all the highlights because of the 13th, and that's fine. Frazier's RBI single to right-center right before Marte's heroics -- "About time, right?" as he'd admit after going 2 for 6 -- shouldn't be forgotten, either.

But this offense also fell completely silent for six full no-hit innings before that 13th, and the matching eggs went up from -- in order -- Kyle Crick, Vazquez, Francisco Liriano (two) and newcomer Tyler Lyons before the latter found control trouble in the top of the 13th. That, on top of Jordan Lyles' "fantastic" 6 2/3 innings of a run and five hits, to borrow Hurdle's description, pointed yet again to the pitching.

The bats went a collective 8 for 43 with a dozen strikeouts, and a whole lot of that happened in frighteningly short order.

"We had some quick at-bats," Hurdle acknowledged. "I thought our pitch selection was a little over-aggressive."

That's a worry. The Pirates are seeing 3.83 pitches per plate appearance, seventh-fewest in the majors.

• Fifth-starter battles in spring training don't matter, remember?

Heck, I might have written that a million times myself over the years.

Well, Lyles, who beat out Brault and Kingham in a battle that I repeatedly referred to as being irrelevant, currently has a rotation-best 2.20 ERA, more than half a run better than Joe Musgrove's suddenly inflated 2.78. And this marked the fourth time in six starts he held the opponent to one or zero runs.

Good for him and those who evaluated him well.

• Any hitter at any level of baseball will attest that they're at their best when swinging to all fields. Well, check out this pic I snapped of Oakland's shift before Josh Bell's at-bat in the second:

Then check out what Bell did with that:

I showed Bell the above still, and he laughed before playfully spouting out, "Analytics!"

He'd wind up 1 for 5, and he's 9 for 26 in a six-game hitting streak. He's going to be OK, this guy.

• Bryan Reynolds didn't start against Oakland right-hander Frankie Montas and so, once he flied out to left as a pinch-hitter in the seventh, his career-opening 11-game hitting streak was over.

Hey, it was fun.

It also was immensely immaterial.

Reynolds had started four in a row, six of the past seven, so sitting for a day in favor of Melky Cabrera, who now has a 10-game hitting streak of his own and a .344 average that's fifth-best in the majors, hardly was revolutionary. Same goes for playing Gregory Polanco, who needs to get going. Moreover, left-handed batters have hit 31 points higher against Montas over the past two seasons than right-handed batters.

Wherever sap and sentimentality might rank on any manager's priority list in writing up a lineup, one would hope it's really, really low.

• Cabrera and Liriano might have been spring afterthoughts for most, but they're among the principal reasons this team hasn't perished yet.

• Apropos of nothing, if I were Huntington, this is precisely how I'd answer a question about Tyler Glasnow's emerging dominance for the Rays and the Archer trade overall:

I mean, what's he expected to say?

"Look, we can't draft, we can't develop and, on those crazy-rare occasions when a couple prospects are so good that even our brutal pipeline can't ruin them, it's really no big deal if we cough ... oh, three of those guys up for one veteran starter that the smartest team in baseball deemed expendable. So buzz off, all right?"

• What do baseball players do on a day off like the one Monday?

Maybe they all think as deeply as Trevor Williams:

My entire life I thought velociraptors were big boys but they were really the size of turkeys. That makes them 1000x more terrifying.

— Trevor Williams (@MeLlamoTrevor) May 6, 2019

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY