"It’s just some Silver Bullets, a couple bottles of baby powder and some Irish Spring all sprinkled on you."
That was Nick Burdi's description of how he was doused in the Pirates' clubhouse following their riveting 8-6 reversal/rally over the Brewers on this Tuesday night at PNC Park. And to clarify for those who couldn't process what a sanitized celebration looks like amid a pandemic, those ingredients are Coors Light, Johnson & Johnson and ... well, you got the soap part.
Hey, gotta keep it clean ... if not necessarily palatable.
"It’s not that fun," Burdi concluded, "but you get through it."
Sure do. And it's that much easier when the bullets being fired before the Bullets are ringing up triple-digits on the radar gun, as Burdi did in recording his first big-league save after 27 years on this planet, seven years as a professional, three arm surgeries and countless long days of rehab.
Particularly after the awful sight of his crumpling, clutching his arm and crying on this same mound a year ago, fearing that an arm injury would end his career, this had to be all kinds of special.
"This is one of those moments where, you know, it’s been six years in the making," Burdi added, referring to turning pro in 2014 out of Louisville. "Three surgeries later, finally got the first one. So it was definitely exciting.”
Good for him.
No, good for all of them. Only in baseball can a script as miserable as Monday's be magically flipped within 24 hours. Four-run rally one night for the bad guys, four-run rally the next night for the good guys, followed by Adam Frazier ripping the seams of this two-run rocket:
Exit velocity: 100 mph.
Not unlike Burdi's 98.1 mph heat to lure Lorenzo Cain into the game-ending 4-6-3:
On this still-natal season, Burdi's faced seven batters, fanned four of them, walked just the leadoff man in this one and ... basically just blown people away.
Oh, and all of that's been in the ninth inning, with both appearances putting a bow on both of his team's victories, including Sunday in St. Louis.
When I prodded Derek Shelton at Busch Stadium about being tempted to try Burdi at closer, despite his having 15 total big-league appearances to the back of his card, Shelton appeared to cringe a bit before responding, "I’m thinking he’s got really good stuff. And I’m excited that he’s continuing to pitch for us and he’s healthy, yeah. I’m very happy with that.”
I understood that completely. Burdi's got the injury history, which is the primary reason he'd been deemed unavailable for Monday's loss which easily could've been a win had he pitched. Also, Shelton's already named a closer in Keone Kela, who's being held out as a coronavirus precaution and who wrote on his Instagram account Tuesday that he expects to be back soon. And, if anything, with the Pirates losing Kela, plus now Kyle Crick and Clay Holmes going on the Injury List earlier in the day, the more back-end contributors he'll have, the happier he'll be.
I again prodded Shelton on this night about Burdi closing, this time by asking if Burdi can at least benefit from being in these ninth-inning, protect-the-lead settings.
"Yeah, it’s good for him," as about as far as Shelton would go. "Anytime you can get the last three outs of a game, and you learn to get the last three outs of a game, it’s an important step forward."
All right, I followed up: What he's going to do, in general, with so little relief in sight?
"DK, I can’t tell you what I’m going to do, because that would ruin it. It would ruin the questions for you. But I think it’s one of those situations where we’re going to have to see what we have available every night and pick the right situations for guys. And I think we’re going to see some guys rise to occasions in certain spots. Tonight, we saw Geoff Hartlieb rise to an occasion. We saw Nick get his first big-league save. Anytime you’re checking boxes off of firsts, it’s a pretty cool thing."
That was that. But then, he can't answer a situation that's currently got no answer.
Other than maybe every other game in the ninth inning.
• No, really, what's he got?
Not to be the downer after this great big upper, but Hartlieb and Miguel Del Pozo were brought up Tuesday from the satellite camp in Altoona to replace Crick and Holmes, sharing a mound on the same day they'd shared a ride across Route 22. Hartlieb, as Shelton noted, fared fine, with two scoreless innings and a strikeout. Del Pozo was a disaster, facing four batters and walking three of them while giving up a hit to the other. Dude threw 16 pitches, 12 of them balls.
I'll hold off on re-burying Hartlieb, though his 2019 probably should've sufficed in that regard. But Del Pozo's been bad through Bradenton, through summer camp and now this. He ought to be sent back to Altoona without unpacking.
Who else is there?
Among actual relievers rather than piggybacking starters, we're talking Richard Rodriguez, Michael Feliz, Robbie Erlin, Chris Stratton, Nik Turley and for-the-love-all-that-is-holy Dovydas Neverauskas. Hoping for that crew to hold a lead is akin to lugging extra hydrogen tanks onto the Hindenburg.
Ben Cherington's not about to make some significant move -- heck, is any GM anywhere making moves in this strange season? -- which means Shelton and Oscar Marin will have to make this work.
Sorry, my friends, but that isn't about to happen. Rodriguez has the ability to right himself, and Stratton's shown signs but ... my goodness.
• I do have one suggestion: Get Blake Cederlind back up here from Altoona.
The Pirates are fortunate to have not one but two younger flamethrowers, and they've both got a ton to gain from the experience in the bigs this year. Mess around with service time however it's needed, but let's see Cederlind progress. It sure won't happen in some satellite camp.
• Crick went down with a lat strain in the right shoulder, this after conspicuously lacking both velocity and control both here and in St. Louis and, really, back to the exhibitions against the Indians.
Should the Pirates have suspected something was amiss?
Well, sure. And I'm betting they did. But this is a season like no other and, as I was predicting months ago, pitchers were going to be more susceptible to injuries than athletes at any position in any sport because of the highly specific preparation involved in what they do.
• I get a lot of predictions wrong. I'll also nail one occasionally ...
This is it. Bryan Reynolds' big night here. #DKPS #Pirates pic.twitter.com/ArNgEXJbUo
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) July 28, 2020
Bryan Reynolds joined the many unwanted curves thrown at us by 2020 in opening his season 0 for 13, so the hidden vigorish factor alone made the call fairly routine. But then, he drops a single into shallow left in his opening at-bat to slide off the schneid, then doubled to deep right in his next to help build the initial 2-0 lead.
And then he outdid that in the field:
The Brewers had two aboard in the eighth off Hartlieb, poised to break the 6-6 tie. With one out and Ryan Braun 90 feet from plating the go-ahead run, Avisail Garcia skied one to medium left-center. Maybe too shallow to send the 36-year-old DH, but he did so, anyway, and Reynolds' throw to John Ryan Murphy was ... I hadn't seen one that strong, that accurate from him before.
I asked if it was among his best in the bigs.
"Yeah, I'd say it's one of my better ones up here," he replied. "I just tried to get behind it, and it kind of carried on me a little bit, so I didn't get behind it as much as I would've liked. I was able to make a kind of in-between hop, and Murph scooped it well and put a good tag on it."
Craig Counsell, Milwaukee's manager, defended his third base coach, Ed Sedar, by praising Reynolds: "He made a perfect throw, and that's the only throw that gets him."
Next half-inning, Frazier made sure it changed the game.
• Reynolds' slow start has nothing -- in scope or stature -- with Christian Yelich opening his season 1 for 22, including 0 for 4 with two Ks on this night. Get a good look because the National League's best player won't stay in that cellar for long.
• On the eve of the season, Derek Holland challenged Pittsburgh fans to "keep telling us that you think we suck," referring to the rotation, as he described such cynicism as inspiring all of the starters.
One had better pitch well after any such declaration, and Holland definitely did: 5 2/3 innings, two runs -- both on a Keston Hiura blast beyond the Notch in the sixth to tie, 2-2 -- with one other hit and three other hard-hit balls. Add in five Ks, and that's as good as any of the Pirates' starters to date save Mitch Keller's showing Sunday in St. Louis.
"We needed a good start out of him," Shelton said of Holland. "Veteran guy that knows what to do. Really executed his game plan."
"Overall, I thought we did a good job of working in and out, up and down, changing guys’ eye level and attacking," Holland said, including Murphy's game-calling. "I thought it was outstanding."
• Bashing the bullpen's appropriate, but the starters have been OK. Now all the way through one turn, the cumulative ERA of Holland, Keller, Joe Musgrove, Trevor Williams and Steven Brault is 3.86, which is 10th-best in Major League Baseball. Factor in the two piggyback starters, JT Brubaker and Chad Kuhl, and that improves to 3.14.
(It's pi, actually, for you math nerds, as it's 22 innings divided by seven earned runs.)
So there, that's pi in everyone's face who doubted the rotation. Or something.
• Before I let you go, I snapped these three pics before the first pitch, primarily to prove for the zillionth time that there's no place like this anywhere:
PNC Park, Tuesday evening. - DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPSMy goodness, we're lucky to have it.
• Series finale's tonight, 7:05 p.m., with Joe Musgrove vs. Brandon Woodruff. Alex Stumpf and I will double it up, and Reynolds will keep on lighting it up. He and the cosmos have some balancing to continue.
In the interim, here's my podcast about the Pirates' tanking, the Marlins' mess and more: