ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For a Pittsburgh Pirates fan born in the 1990s, childhood was an endless series of wasted times. David Bednar, a Pittsburgh kid who grew up to be closer to the team, never believed in a winner until his freshman year at Lafayette College in 2013. That’s when Andrew McCutchen reversed decades of despair.
“It’s such a big sports city, and he really brought up what he’s done for baseball and the city of Pittsburgh,” Bednar said, here beside his locker before a game against the Tampa Bay Rays. “Now he’s back — and it’s so cool.”
McCutchen, 36, won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award in that enchanting 2013 season that capped off with a win over Cincinnati in wild-card play. The baseball field lit up on the Allegheny River. The fans wore black, as did the players. The stands pulsed so wildly that a Red pitcher dropped the ball right there on the mound, too shaken to even make a pitch.
McCutchen hoped it would last forever. He had signed a long-term contract and bought a house in the suburbs. He would carry the Pirates to two more wild-card games and win the award for community service in baseball, named for Roberto Clemente, the Pirates’ hallowed outfielder. McCutchen was a worthy heir, on and off the field — and then he was gone.
Ahead of the 2018 season, the thrifty Pirates traded McCutchen, their highest-paid player, to San Francisco and sent him on a never-ending journey like so many others in mid-career: the Giants, the Yankees, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Milwaukee Brewers.
McCutchen never wanted that future for himself. He tried not to look back on the team he once led.
“I couldn’t really follow them just because at the time I was spiritual, almost in a way forced to go somewhere that wasn’t asked,” said McCutchen, who kept the home and raised his family there. “I didn’t ask to be traded; There was never a time when I said I wanted to be. Frankly, for that to happen in this form, it was really difficult to pay attention to what the pirates were doing.”
Most of the time, they lost, falling back to exactly where McCutchen found them a rookie in 2009: inconsequential. In the five years that McCutchen was away, the Pirates lost 121 more games than they won and always finished last or second-to-bottom in the NL Central.
Last season the Pirates went 62-100. But they signed their third baseman, Ke’Bryan Hayes, on an eight-year, $70 million contract extension. They saw promise from other young players — pitchers Roansy Contreras and Mitch Keller, shortstop Oneil Cruz and outfielder Jack Suwinski. They knew they had a superstar in Bryan Reynolds, an outfielder they got in exchange for McCutchen.
“There was a lot of confidence in this team,” said Steve Sanders, the team’s assistant general manager, “a lot of confidence that we were better than our record showed.”
To signal an organizational shift from build-up to victory, the Pirates looked for stabilizers: Ji-Man Choi, Austin Hedges and Carlos Santana for the lineup, Rich Hill, Vince Velasquez and Jarlín García for the pitching team. These signings were low risk (about $27 million total, all on one-year contracts), but the capper was McCutchen, who texted the owner, Bob Nutting, of his interest in returning. They worked out a one-year, $5 million deal.
“In that book that I wrote in my head, I always wanted to go back to Pittsburgh,” said McCutchen, who had six home runs and an .804 on base plus a slugging percent through Thursday. “Even when I was gone, I was hoping to get an opportunity to get there – and not just come back, but to thrive and make the team successful. To be able to shoot it again meant a lot to me.”
At the home game in Pittsburgh, nostalgia ran high: McCutchen’s mother Petrina sang the national anthem and AJ Burnett tossed Russell Martin a ceremonial first throw, repeating a 2013 playoff team battery. McCutchen fought third, going 5 for 9 with a homer the first home series.
“Our thought from the start was that this wasn’t a farewell tour,” said fourth-year manager Derek Shelton, who signed a contract extension in April. “This is a guy who’s still a really good player and still moves really well. I mean, you watch him running the bases. He’s been playing more DH lately because Choi was injured, but when he played outfield earlier this year he played it very well.
Shelton continued, “The biggest thing, especially with him and Santana, was the quality of the shot. We needed professional racquets to extend our lineup. Now we have people who meet the middle of our order and we don’t meet the kids there.
The Pirates had a .291 on-base percentage last season, ranking 28th in the majors. This year, their .335 OBP finished seventh through Thursday. They also led the majors in stolen bases with 44, nearly half their 2022 total. The staff earned running average of 3.60 ranked eighth among the majors; last season it ranked 26th with a 4.66.
It’s the Pirates’ best start in a generation: the team won 20 of their first 30 games for the first time since 1992, when Barry Bonds was the headliner. Now it’s Reynolds, who in April signed the club’s first nine-figure contract with an eight-year extension worth $106.75 million.
“I believe in my teammates and the staff and in what we’re building here,” Reynolds said. “We have a lot of good, young, dynamic players and the staff really care about that. I like the players, I like the city.”
As of Thursday, Reynolds had a .935 OPS with five homers and fourth in the NL in total bases. Even after being defeated by the Rays in three games, the Pirates held first place in the NL Central at 20-12.
“Everyone would be lying if they said they saw exactly that – but everyone in here knew we were good,” Reynolds said. “Granted, there’s still a lot of season left, but it’s not necessarily a huge surprise for us – a welcome surprise, if you will.”
Ahead of Wednesday’s game — the second of three here — McCutchen said the Rays streak would be a test of sorts for the Pirates (“We can really see where we are as a team,” he said). With only four runs in the series, the results were disappointing.
But some of the Pirates’ defining traits — solid bats, aggressive on-base running — should be relatively fall-proof, and McCutchen said the team’s best quality is understanding its strengths and being proud of them.
“We don’t play the game old,” he said. “We play it new, we play it with fun and we play it fast. And I think that was very beneficial for us.”
New, fun and fast. That’s a fitting slogan from a player who knows pirates, past and present, like no other.
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