PIRATES

One step forward, a few steps back.

Most anytime the Pittsburgh Baseball Club's moved in any positive direction the past decade, I feel safe in summarizing, it's been muddied within minutes. A modest winning streak gets followed by a monstrous losing streak, the standard position's assumed in the Central cellar, and soon enough the troops are mobilized for the next Bob Nutting protest.

This, my friends, is different.

I wrote it from Bradenton. I wrote it from New York. I'll write it again here and now, this after spending my Sunday at PNC Park to cover the Pirates' hard-nosed, heartening 1-0 shutout of the Reds that sealed a three-game sweep of an opponent that'd entered the weekend atop the division, and this after having lost a season-worst five straight.

Good stuff: Braxton Ashcraft, quickly separating himself from the non-Paul-Skenes, non-Mitch-Keller portion of the rotation, rebounded in a big way from his only subpar start to put up 7 2/3 scoreless innings and earn a standing ovation from the 16,642 on hand. Gregory Soto, summoned an inning early by Don Kelly to no small amount of angst from the citizens given that Ashcraft's pitch count was only 82, stranded a runner at third base and would finish off the afternoon's pitching. And Oneil Cruz followed a Konnor Griffin double and Jake Mangum's pinch-hit walk, all after two outs, with this clutch delivery in the bottom half:

Not sure I recognize Cruz anymore. That's a two-strike, letter-high four-seamer he'd crack the other way ... without swinging out of his shoes.

And speaking of one step forward, a few steps back, check out the final out:

That video doesn't show it, but suffice it to say Mangum gave half the place a heart attack by initially breaking IN on that deep fly off the bat of Sal Stewart.

I couldn't help but do the ribbing in that regard.

To which he'd respond with a broad smile: “Eh, I had it. I wasn’t worried."

Why should he be?

Why should any of them?

Listen, it's still egregiously early for any cosmic analysis. The Pirates are now 19-16 and, as I see it, that amounts to little more than the following. They're in last place, but also a whopping game and a half back of the second-place Cardinals and even within easy view of the now-first-place Cubs:

DK PITTSBURGH SPORTS

Which is all well and good, but it doesn't tell the tale that resilience does, as several players would tell me afterward in one-on-one talks ...

Mangum: "That’s how you respond. You lose four in a row to a good St. Louis team, but then you come back and sweep another really good team."

Brandon Lowe: "It's an incredible ... mindset, you might say. It's a will to want to do something great in this clubhouse. It doesn't matter if we're down 11 or up 11 like we were this weekend, guys aren't selling their at-bats, pitchers aren't selling their outings. I mean, it stinks that we lost five in a row, but I'd much rather have those bad stretches now than later in the year."

Henry Davis: "I think we just know we're a good team. It's not an attainable goal to win 162, although that's the approach we have to take every day. And I think, even the fight in those five losses, that's very important. Just the consistency of the effort we've put forth. Knowing that we're a good team, that'll result in wins."

Bryan Reynolds: "It's great. Bad series. Answered. Very well. Got it done the first two games of this series, then this was the tough one. And the tough games are what make the good teams."

Yeah, he got some ribbing, too. I get maybe a couple usable quotes out of him with each lunar cycle, but I'll be damned if that wasn't one of them.

The tangibles matter even more, of course, and they're getting entrenched, as well: The Pirates are last in the Central but, amusingly, they're also 10th out of 30 teams in Major League Baseball's overall standings. As if to support that, they're sixth in run differential at plus-31. Offensively, they're third in runs (180) sixth in batting average (.253), fifth in on-base percentage (.339), eighth in OPS (.732), seventh in steals (30), even 12th in home runs (38) after barely hitting any in 2025. On the mound, they're seventh in ERA (3.72) and WHIP (1.23), fifth in opponents' batting average (.222) and -- get this -- No. 1 in strikeouts (330).

That come with a fluky feel for anyone?

How about individually among the everyday types? Do Lowe or Ryan O'Hearn feel that way? Or the revivals of Cruz and Reynolds? Or Griffin bursting a bit more with each day, now 15 for his past 37 -- that's a .405 average for any Ted Williams fans out there -- with two home runs, two doubles and a triple in his past 10 games? Or the resurrection of Nick Gonzales, now batting .328 and clearly not content to hand third base back to Jared Triolo?

It's far from perfect, and let's not pretend otherwise: Davis and Joey Bart can't sit sub-Mendoza all summer, no matter how effectively they catch. Marcell Ozuna's .553 OPS can't rank 171st out of 181 qualified hitters in the majors, as it does while I'm typing this. There can be more bop from first base than Spencer Horwitz's six extra-base hits in 116 plate appearances.

Apart from the offense, consistency's needed from the other two young starters, Bubba Chandler and Carmen Mlodzinski, almost all of the middle relief and, occasionally, the defense and other fundamentals, too.

But compared to a year ago?

My goodness, imagine what a long losing streak would've done then.

Wait, no imagination required: Those Pirates lost their first seven games of May, got Derek Shelton fired on merit, would still lose a bunch more from there, and the rinse-repeat effect ran its predictably sad course through September.

I mentioned this to Gonzales.

"Not this time," he'd reply. "Not this team."