It's easy to believe in these Pirates, really.
Just depends on the day.
If it's Rowdy Tellez raising Nick Gonzales way up into the evening's fireworks:
JOE SARGENT / GETTY
If it's Andrew McCutchen reaching up for the bill of his batting helmet upon touching 'em all for maybe the billionth time in this place:
JUSTIN BERL / GETTY
If it's uplifting outcomes in uplifting settings with uplifting reactions all around, then it's a breeze to believe. Because of course it is. It's faith that's being rewarded right in front of everyone's eyes. The most convenient kind.
But on days like this one, a 6-0 rotten egg laid at the Phillies' feet Sunday afternoon at PNC Park, one that stomped out a six-game winning streak and stalled a sweep of Major League Baseball's best-by-a-mile team ... yeah, all of the above can be a challenge, even a chore.
"We played well against the best team in baseball," Derek Shelton would reply when I brought this up afterward. "I mean, we didn’t play great today, but to come back the first night and then to do what we did yesterday ... you want to win every game but to win two of three against that team, overall, I thought we played well on the weekend."
He's right. On both counts. Played well Friday and Saturday, not so much Sunday: The Phillies nicked Marco Gonzales for a couple early runs, Oneil Cruz committed a couple ugly errors, and the offense might as well have regressed to April/May status with six stinking hits, all singles.
Blah.
Whatever.
As I'd mentioned to Bryan Reynolds that they might want to just flush away this game, he monotoned back, "What game?"
Exactly.
But there was also this, my friends, and I'm not about to let it be buried:
Joshua Palacios. What a CATCH! pic.twitter.com/DvWTK9GcAn
— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) July 21, 2024
My goodness.
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It takes a lot to leave me speechless after covering this franchise for 20 years now, most of it in this stadium. But that's ... if not the best catch I've seen here, then definitely among the most dangerous.
Do me a favor, please: Don't skip that video. Because nothing I'm about to write will add up without it.
All done?
OK, see what I mean now?
If not, I'll make this simple: Palacios is sprinting back toward the North Side Notch at full speed. He's doing so at a rate that presumes he'll safely bypass the bullpen gate that juts out there. Even though nothing about his early trajectory suggested that he would. If anything, it appeared in watching it live that he'd been ready to blow through that part of the fence to track Kyle Schwarber's ball that'd been belted well into the Notch.
Instead, he bumped the fence, sustained his speed and still got under the ball.
"Unbelievable," Reynolds would tell me. "I can't figure out how he got that."
And on the SportsNet Pittsburgh broadcast, as I'd hear later upon loading up the replay, Kevin Young would rave, "He must've had a GPS tracker on. I have no idea how he missed that gate. The degree of difficulty in that ..."
To which Greg Brown would interject, "You really can't describe how great a play that was."
No, you really can't. Unless you've witnessed -- as with Reynolds, Young, Brown and maybe a few more of us, at most -- who've seen a bunch of ball here and had never seen that route run that way by a center fielder. If only because, most commonly, in a precedent that'd been set long ago, every left fielder from Brian Giles to Reggie Sanders to Jason Bay to Starling Marte and onward has been responsible for that specific line toward the Notch.
But Reynolds had been positioned too far away for this pitch to Schwarber, so and it was either going to be a double or what actually took place.
I rattled off some of this for Palacios.
"Wow, really?" he'd beam back. "Honestly, I hadn't thought about it that way, but it makes sense the way you're explaining it."
To which I asked him to explain his mindset, bringing another big smile.
"I was going back, and I picked up the wall early, but the ball was really flying, so I didn’t have much time to look and I kinda just trusted my instincts and feel."
Allow me to interject, please: The replay shows he never looked after the initial set. Not once.
"I just felt like the wall was on one side and wasn’t on the other," he'd continue. "So I caught it and kinda had an idea where the wall was to try and, like, 360 out the way without jamming myself in there."
I knew the answer to the next question, but asked anyway: Why?
"Dude, I am gonna lay down the line for our pitchers any day out there. I’m going to do whatever it takes to win a game. So any chance that I have out there, I'm going to try and take it."
Mm-hm.
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Palacios was promoted on the Fourth of July. Since then, the Pirates are 9-4, they've hit better than they had all summer, they've overcome injuries and other adversity and, as a result, they're over .500 after the All-Star break -- 50-49 -- for the first time in six years, and they're a half-game out of a National League wild card spot:
MLB
Coincidence?
Sure, to an extent. Keeping this real, Palacios went 0 for 3 on this day, 1 for 10 in the series, and his streakiness continues to precede him. But over the 13 games since his arrival, he's slashing .237/.356/.421 with two home runs, five RBIs, a double and seven walks.
That's a nice jolt. And if rewinding back through this late-bloomer's baseball life, he's always been about that jolt. In that, when he's come up big, he's come up huge. There've already been a couple such instances this month.
And yet, I'd posit, respectfully, that he's meant as much off the field. And I won't apologize for saying why: This dugout, this clubhouse ... it wasn't dead before he got here, but neither was it all that alive. Not just after losses, either. Even after wins, everything felt somewhat routine, home or road, upset or no, fantastic finish or no. The EKG would barely budge.
That doesn't have to be a criticism, believe it or not. Not all personalities are alike. No one's ever transforming Reynolds into Mr. Rah-Rah, for instance. It's just not how he's wired. Same goes for Ke'Bryan Hayes. Mitch Keller. David Bednar. Even Cutch, who's always been one to keep his cool in all environments. And at the management level, the day-to-day tone's set by the eternally even-keeled Shelton, whereas the only emotion that might ever occur within the flat-line front office at 115 Federal would emanate from a Google doc well executed.
This team needed some swagger, as I'd been writing for months. It needed a bit of bombast. It needed to have that expressed.
This team needed Palacios' vocal, visible fire, his energy and enthusiasm, as much as anything else he'd offer.
"I kinda just try to do that everywhere I go," he'd tell me. "I can probably credit how I was raised, like, my family, we never give up. When adversity hits, you just keep competing. So I just try to go out there and do that."
I've met mom and dad, Richard and Lianne. He's not lying. The apple didn't fall far.
But it's not just genetics. It's been one knockdown after another for Palacios, who's uncomfortably old at age 28 to be talked about as if he still hasn't scraped his own ceiling, who's now spent parts of eight seasons -- and 1,933 at-bats -- in the minors. He'd made a promising initial impression in Pittsburgh last season -- 91 games, 10 home runs, 40 RBIs, .692 OPS -- and had been in legit line to contend for the starting right field job his past spring until ...
OK, he doesn't want to elaborate on this, but suffice it to say, as he'd tell me, it took several months to recover from a lengthy illness and that, each time he thought he was fine, he'd be right back in bed. It wasn't until May that he was all the way back to uninterrupted ball.
"The uncertainty's what can kill you," he'd say of that period. "It helped though because I took some lessons from it. Just lock in on the discipline of what you can control today, let go of the things you can’t control. And now that I’m back, just try to be as grateful as possible. Like, we have tough days like this ..."
This lousy loss, he meant.
"But just be grateful and enjoy it and get back after it tomorrow. Tomorrow is a new day, new pitchers, and new things can happen. It’s more about gratitude. I’ve always tried to be grateful of just having the opportunity to play professional baseball, big-league baseball, and live my dream. But yeah, having all that time and with baseball being taken away and constantly not knowing when we were going to get back and trying to get back, I appreciate it more."
That's when he glanced across toward the corner of the clubhouse where best buds Paul Skenes and Jared Jones have stalls.
Big-time light-up. Even by his standard.
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"We have a nasty team here," he'd tell me. "We have guys here who are super-talented. These pitchers, the things they can do. We’ve made some crazy comebacks this year. So, when we talk about how I fit in or make a difference, I mean I’m just trying to be myself. But that goes both ways. I think these guys get me going, with the things they can do, with the way we're out there competing."
He cited the rotation. Keller. Skenes. Jones. The others.
"That's the name of the game. You can do anything if you have pitching, and we have an absolutely phenomenal talent there. And for years to come. That makes it exciting to come to the ball park every day. For me, personally, when I see what those guys can do and where they can take us, I’m looking for ways to make myself better and try to level myself up so I can contribute to what these guys are doing. I want to take advantage of this opportunity. It's not always that you have a team that has this kind of talent and an ability to go to the playoffs."
Playoffs?
"Oh, absolutely. I have 100% genuine belief. I'll say it right here: We are a playoff team. There are always going to be ups and downs in a long season. But with the talent that we have here, there’s no reason why we don’t make the playoffs."
That. That's what I'm talking about.
Who else is speaking stuff like this?
It sure isn't Ben Cherington, who earlier this same day tied himself into an analytical pretzel with this gem, when asked on his weekly radio show if the team's recent tear moved him related to the July 30 trade deadline: "We were preparing to be in a position to try to add to the team, to try to help the team get better. That was what our preparation has been going back several weeks now and we felt like we could do that, and that was the goal. The preparation and the goals haven't changed, but it is true, of course the wins matter because it clarifies where you are. Certainly, the better we play over the next week will continue to clarify that. What it clarifies is the math, basically. It does help the math look better when we win and that helps clarify, 'OK, this opportunity or this potential acquisition really could make sense,' whereas if the math is not as good or not looking as good, well then, in some cases it's harder to justify things. We still have more to learn, but it's kind of a tale of two things: It hasn't changed our outlook on the team, it hasn't changed our preparation or goals, but the wins do matter in the sense that they clarify for us specific decisions or opportunities that either might make sense or might not make sense."
Sorry, but some quotes are so ponderous they don't deserve to be condensed.
Leave the GM to contemplate what does or doesn't "make sense." Leave the GM to enter all the data involved in needing a bat or two through the super-sonic-ultra-quantum-physics-orator. Or, to paraphrase my personal favorite passage from this one, leave the GM to dance across the Sixth Street Bridge celebrating that "the wins do matter in the sense that they clarify for us specific decisions."
I'll always prefer the types who see enough value in "the wins" that they'll rocket at Mach 5 toward unforgiving metal gates to try to get one.
• Yet another reminder that everyone's invited to our 10th anniversary celebration Tuesday at the Downtown HQ/shop, 12-6 p.m.! We'd love to see you!
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