Someone will come through.
For the better part of two years, I stopped blogging about the Pirates on the weekend. When I started WHYGAVS, it was to do something to give me a break from work and school. Why spend my weekends writing about a baseball team that was tougher to watch than anything I had to do in lab or in class? The traffic indicated that Pirate fans certainly weren’t interested between 5 PM on Friday and 8 AM on Monday, so why should I put extra time into the games?
Someone will come through.
The last couple weeks have been different, though. With the Penguins’ season long over, the Steelers locked out, and the Pirates in contention, everyone is hungry for Pirate news all the time. That includes me. I shuffled my entire weekend around the Red Sox series, and I planned my trip home around being able to get to the game on the Fourth against the Astros. Tonight, I spent the entire evening staring at my phone.
Someone will come through.
As I walked across Chapel Hill tonight, I kept repeating that refrain to myself. Cubs up 1-0? Someone will come through. Cubs up 3-2? McCutchen’s up; he’ll come through. Cubs up 4-3? The Bucs have been coming through all night, someone’s going to come through again.
Here’s the beauty of the 2011 Pirates to this point: In the sixth inning with the Cubs holding a 3-2 lead and Andrew McCutchen at the plate, I thought to myself, “It’s time for ‘Cutch to prove he belongs on the big stage.” He responded with a game-tying solo homer; exactly the way you want a superstar to respond. Good players come through in big situations.
That wasn’t enough for the Pirates tonight, though. The Cubs scratched out another run and another lead at 4-3 in the top of the eighth. In the bottom of the inning, McCutchen had a chance to come up big again, but couldn’t. The rest of the lineup behind him responded, though, and tied the game at four to give Mike McKenry a chance to break things wide open. Since McKenry’s come up, I’ve been jokingly calling him “Scrappy Doo” because of his short stature and the way that the Pirates annoucing crew loves the way he plays despite there being no evidence that he can hit well enough to be a big league ballplayer. Before tonight, the most power he flashed were a few warning track flyouts.
Sometimes, on some teams, the most unlikely guy finds a way to come through. For the Pirates tonight, Mike McKenry broke a 4-4 tie wide open with his first big league home run. It wasn’t just any home run; it was a three-run shot that broke the Pirates’ game wide open and seemed to have the Pirates on a collision course with first place in the National League Central. The Brewers rallied for a comeback of their own tonight to keep that from happening, but it doesn’t cheapen the jolt of excitement that McKenry’s homer delievered.
Someone will come through.
I’m not a superstitious person. I don’t really belive that anyone owes the Pirates or their fans anything, even after everything that the franchise has put us through in the last 18 years. I understand exactly how far we are from the finish line and how many things can go wrong for the Pirates or right for the Brewers, Reds, and Cardinals from here on out. I know that the Pirates being in the place they’re in doesn’t make a whole lot of sense according to the sabermetric concepts that I’ve spent a lot of time writing about and using to evaluate past Pirate teams. In general, I’m a pretty guarded guy; I always consider a lot of options and outcomes before making any kind of decision or opening myself up to anything. Tonight, though, there’s a voice in my head that says that maybe every team has a good player that comes through in big situations, and maybe every team gets lucky every now and again and has a bit player come through in big situations, but when one team gets both of those things in the same night and when that team is the snake-bitten Pittsburgh Pirates that haven’t seen anything go right for them since before I can even really remember, that maybe something is happening that I can’t quite quanitfy or explain and that that’s a good thing.
I don’t know if that’s the case here, but I know that this team has given me the occasion to consider that maybe it is for one night longer, and really, that’s all I’ve ever asked for from a Pirate team.
