CLEVELAND -- Ke’Bryan Hayes felt lost at the plate.
Or at least that’s what he was saying in the dugout Friday night, per Joe Musgrove’s retelling.
Safe to say not a lot of people were buying it, seeing how had been swinging the bat since being promoted to the majors at the beginning of the month. But if he felt lost Friday, he was unequivocally back where he wanted to be Saturday night at Progressive Field in the Pirates’ 8-0 win over the Indians.
He batted five times.
He took five swings.
He got five hits.
“He’s a really fun player,” Musgrove said. “I’m really glad he’s on our side.”
Hayes had three doubles, two singles and three runs scored. It was the first time a Pirates rookie had five hits since Neil Walker in 2010.
The last Pirate to go 5-for-5 with three extra-base knocks in a game in their first season in the majors? You have to go back to 1955.
It was Roberto Clemente.
“Five hits in a game, man,” Derek Shelton said. “There's not a lot of guys who can do that. And to do it as a rookie, 20 games into his big league career, that's pretty cool."
And there wasn’t a cheap one in the bunch. Baseball Savant qualified four of his hits as hard contact, and three were measured at 102 mph or higher.
“Every ball was on the screws,” Shelton said. “I think Pirates fans are going to be excited to watch this guy."
It’s safe to say most Pirates fans who are watching right now are tuning in to see what the third baseman is going to do that night. The same will happen in 2021 and going forward.
Despite being in the majors for less than a month, Hayes has already been elevated to one of the faces of the franchise. For years he had been touted as one of the top, if not the top, position player prospects in the organization.
Now, with the Pirates a day away from completing a season where they will finish with the worst record in baseball, he represents something more than just a top prospect anymore. Maybe even more than just a ball player.
He’s hope.
After a last place finish in what the organization dubbed an evaluation year, the Pirates could trade some of their more recognizable veterans away this offseason to acquire more young talent. Hayes is going to be one of the building blocks in any effort to build towards the future.
It’s a lot to ask of a 23-year-old. He’s up for the challenge.
“I use it as motivation,” Hayes said. “The success that I've had makes me even hungrier to get back home after the season ends and get even better. There are things I still can work on offensively, defensively, running — all those things.”
Hayes has a reserved personality. He doesn’t need to talk just to hear the sound of his own voice. He’ll greet you with a smile, but even as he has taken the majors by storm, there’s almost a hint of shyness when interacting with him.
But make no mistake, he likes the lights, and that’s why Shelton thinks he can perform no matter how many people are watching, zero or tens of thousands.
“This kid’s just going to continue to get better,” Shelton said. “He’s going to be better with people in the stands. He’s going to be better on the big stage.
“You get some of these guys in Cleveland, you get [Javier] Baez, you get [Anthony] Rizzo and you get [Francisco] Lindor – these guys, their internal game clock works differently. Ke’Bryan has that. His game clock works differently. How he goes about what he’s doing on the field is special. It’s not something you can teach. It’s something he has.”
It might not be able to be taught, but perhaps it can be learned. Forget that Hayes’ first month in the majors has been as basically been on an MVP pace. He’s learning, and he’s going to take those lessons from this first month in the majors into the offseason.
“I don’t say too much, but I like to observe,” Hayes said. “I just watch how guys prepare for their game. Guys on our team, what’s their routine like on a day-to-day basis, those types of things. Probably just watching how players have pitched me and things like that.”
Let’s take a look at some of examples of him observing and adapting over the past few weeks.
In the first inning Saturday, Indians’ starter Aaron Civale offered Hayes a high fastball on an 0-1 count. It was a purpose pitch, hoping that Hayes would either swing through it or get underneath it. Hayes took it. Later in the at-bat, Civale went back to the exact spot with a heater again. This time, Hayes recognized it and drove it down the line in right for a double.
Or how about in the field. On Thursday, he made a play down the line to rob David Bote of a hit:
It was a great showing of his athleticism, but that play was half baseball smarts too. Hayes had noticed Bote had been ahead of pitches all day, pulling them foul. He figured that if he did put a ball in play, it would probably be down the line, so he took two steps closer to the line than where the defensive alignment card said he should play.
If Hayes doesn’t take those two steps, that is almost certainly a double for Bote.
The same thing happened during the Pirates last road trip in Kansas City. Hayes was positioned to play deeper at third, but he saw Whit Merrifield take a peek down the third base line. He saw the bunt coming, so he started moving towards home while the pitcher was in the windup. Once Merrifield squared up, Hayes had already built up enough momentum that he was able to bare hand the ball and fire a strike to Josh Bell:
"The kid's spectacular," Bell gushed after that play.
It’s been a recurring theme for Hayes in the field so far.
“When you watch him do something that maybe looks pedestrian that’s really hard, it stands out,” Shelton said.
But the defensive prowess was expected. The offense has been something else. Scouts always thought his bat could develop, but for most of his rise to the majors, Hayes wasn’t a terrific hitter. He was just good at his best and average at his worst.
With his 5-for-5 night Saturday, Hayes now has a .370 batting average and 1.088 OPS through the first 90 plate appearances of his major-league career.
All five of those hits went to center or right field. During the offseason, Hayes told me about he adapted a new approach at the plate, looking to drive balls to the right-center gap. His mindset was that if he timed up a fastball, he would stay back on it just a bit but could still drive it. If it was a breaking or offspeed pitch, he wouldn’t be too far ahead and he could still pull it.
“One of the things that happens to a lot of young hitters when they come to the big leagues is they to do too much,” Shelton said. “They try to pull the ball. He's just going with his normal stroke and continues to drive ball into center field, right-center field.
“I think that speaks to who he is. I mean, he doesn't get up, he doesn't get down. He just plays."
Hayes also made some adjustments towards the end of spring training with his swing that have paid off greatly, too. In the past, his back leg would skip forward during his stride, causing him to hit more ground balls and make inconsistent hard contact. He and Rick Eckstein identified the tweak shortly before the COVID-19 shutdown.
Hayes used that time away to get his new swing down. The fruits of that labor have been well worth it.
“It feels really good,” Hayes said. “I just feel a lot more free at the plate. I feel like I’m in my backside more, and I’m able to read pitches. Honestly, I don’t even feel like I’m having to swing as hard to hit the ball as hard.”
Continuing to hit like this over a full season is probably too much to ask, but all the batted ball data supports that he is excelling. If this is the trend going forward, the Pirates may have their man at the hot corner for years to come.
Finally. They have been searching for their third baseman of the future for decades now, getting the occasional guy who stuck around for a bit, like Aramis Ramirez or Pedro Alvarez, but mostly having a revolving door at the position.
Hayes is here to stop that, and to try to take the Pirates from worst to first.
“I was drafted [by] Pittsburgh, so to be here long term and maybe one day bring a World Series here would be awesome.”
• The starting pitching just won't let up at the end of the season:
That was Joe Musgrove's 108th and final pitch, bringing Tyler Naquin to a knee for his 10th strikeout of the evening. Eight of them came on breaking pitches, divided evenly among curveballs and sliders.
Musgrove struck out 11 in his previous outing, also relying on his breaking stuff over his fastball. That is a shift from how he pitched his first two years with the Pirates.
“I like to see myself as a fastball pitcher with a good breaking ball, but sometimes you get in situations in the game and you’re flowing," Musgrove said. "Stalls [Jacob Stallings] has done a really good job of mixing up the sequencing. Over my last two starts, I feel like I’ve thrown all my pitches and I’ve gotten the percentages in a good spot, which has allowed me to be unpredictable."
After his last start, Musgrove talked about how he felt he was focusing too much on other people that his output suffered, so he took a step back to see what he is putting into the sport.
So for his final outing, he didn't care about his ERA or any of his stats. He just went out to perform.
By going seven shutout, he will earn his first win of the season.
"It’s nice to sneak out of the season with one win, but at this point I wasn’t all that concerned with getting wins," Musgrove said. "I wanted to go out there and pitch well and put up a quality performance.”
• Over their last 12 games, the Pirates' starters have pitched to a 1.46 ERA, allowing just 12 earned runs over 74 innings pitched.
"It feels like we’re all competing with each other to see who can top one another with their performance," Musgrove said.
About the time this streak began, the starters had a talk. It wasn't a formal sit down or meeting, just discussions. Their goals they had at the beginning of the season weren't going to be met. The team wasn't going the playoffs. Their individual hopes were mostly not going to be met.
"So we shifted gears, and we reset our goals," Musgrove said. "Something realistic, something that we could really accomplish in these last couple weeks, and it was to improve our games mentally, physically, game-planning. Just every aspect of what we’re doing and trying to really improve on it and build something strong going into the offseason, something that we can continue to work on and build for next season.”
• On offense, Jose Osuna, Colin Moran and Bryan Reynolds each went deep.
Reynolds' shot was to the opposite field, over Progressive Field's 19-foot wall. A former hitting coach with the Indians, Shelton knows how tough a shot like that is.
"That's big boy land," Shelton said.
• There were plenty of stretches of bad baseball from the Pirates this year, but they are closing out the season strong, winning four of their last five, getting some terrific starts and even swinging the bat a little better down the stretch.
That's part of the curse of a 60-game season. Shelton and his staff had been looking for teaching points and implementing them, and they're starting to see some improvement as the season comes to an end. He believes if the season was longer, that improvement would continue.
"I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that we would be in the playoffs or win the World Series, but I think our record would indicate that we're getting better," Shelton said pregame.
• Folks, I think this is the last pitch Dovydas Neverauskas is going to throw as a Pirate:
Looks like the end of an era.
• Factoid of the night: Musgrove is the first Pirates pitcher since at least 1901 to make consecutive starts of at least six shutout innings with at least 10 strikeouts in the same season, per Stathead.