Kovacevic: The Pirates will be OK if ...

Aug 6, 2018 • 1:58 am

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So that's it, they're toast now, right?

Eh. Too soon.

I mean, yeah, the Pirates' 2-1 loss to the Cardinals yesterday at PNC Park was a bummer of a way to embark on a cross-continent trip after what had been, inside and outside their immediate environs, undoubtedly their most uplifting week in recent memory. St. Louis would take two of three in a series between teams that had been tied in the Central. The homestand wrapped up at 4-5. The deficit grew to 7 1/2 games in the division, five in the wild card.

The itinerary now: Denver, San Francisco, Minneapolis.

The overall schedule now: Fifty-games remaining, 31 of those on the road.

The context now: Five teams -- Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Rockies, Cardinals, Nationals -- are now between the Pirates and the two currently holding the wild card spots, the Brewers and Braves, with a sixth competitor -- Giants -- a half-game behind the Pirates.

The outlook now?

As Clint Hurdle ably worded it, "Time to go. We would've loved to have won more games here. We didn't. Now, it's time to go put a better package together on the road. I just love the fact that we're in the hunt."

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He should. They all should. No one erased that 11-game winning streak just because it was followed up by a 4-6. No one capable of remembering back to, oh, Friday night could have erased all the energy accompanying the acquisitions of Chris Archer and Keone Kela.

But man, they've got to hit. And that means all of them.

I was writing back in Bradenton that the offense would be there, particularly once Corey Dickerson filled a hole in left field, and I didn't go far enough: Over the past full month, meaning July 6 through right now, the Pirates lead the National League with a .280 batting average and rank second behind Washington with an .803 OPS.

The pitching's important, but this is their identity. It's where they'll boom or bust. Put it this way: When they've scored four or more runs, they're 48-16. When they score fewer than four, as they did in this five-hit stinker, they're 9-39.

"We have a lot of guys in here who can hit," Gregory Polanco was telling me, and he's obviously been better than any of them. "What's important is that we all stay strong at the same time."

That's really it, but I'll go further: All of the starters need to get back on the field and get it together, if only so this currently miserable bench can get back to being better than a liability.

Josh Bell, still on the DL with a strained oblique, told me yesterday he thinks he'll be back in the lineup Wednesday in Denver, this after his expected round of full batting practice this afternoon at Coors Field. David Freese has been wonderful in his absence, but that can't last forever. The best version of this lineup has a barreling Bell. His upside's needed.

"I can't wait to get back out there," he said. "This is driving me nuts."

Josh Harrison needs to get all the way back after his own DL stint. His July saw a .200/.257/.323 line over 19 games that might have been the only blight on the lineup. A 3-for-9 weekend is mildly encouraging.

"I need to keep getting after it," J-Hay said.

Colin Moran's another. He'll still drop the occasional bloop over someone's head, but he hasn't put out an extra-base hit since July 9, and he hasn't put one over a fence since July 1. Third base is a power position.

Here's one unsolicited suggestion: Keep starting the suddenly sizzling Adam Frazier at second base, slide J-Hay to third, and utilize Freese as needed to spell Bell.

Here's another: Start clearing out this awful bench. Jose Osuna's at .190, Jordan Luplow at .167, and Sean Rodriguez's stats can't safely be published on a family-friendly platform.

I get that all Indianapolis has to offer is more Max Moroff from this allegedly deep system, so go grab a waiver claim. Or some Fed League sensation. Any and all will do better than what's at hand.

Again, this will take everyone.

• If Frazier weren't sharing a solar system with Matt Carpenter, he might be the buzz of baseball.

As it is, his home run and double yesterday, his team's only extra-base hits, raised his average to, uh, .419 since being brought back from Indy exactly two weeks ago. He's 13 for 31 with the home run, seven doubles and six RBIs.

I've printed here and I shared with Frazier afterward that nothing surprised me more about the 2018 Pirates than the struggles -- .239 average, .673 OPS -- that got him sent down. Mostly because his stance and swing are so compact, so mechanical that, as Jim Leyland observed in spring training, he looks flawless. Like an early-edition Nate McLouth.

Well, Frazier had something to share right back.

"I give my dad the credit, really," he told me. "He figured it out."

It goes like this: Tim Frazier of Georgia found a still photo of Adam batting in 2017 against the Braves' Julio Teheran. In that image, Adam's hands are much lower and tighter to his torso, a sign, his dad thought, that maybe he presently was taking too long to get into the zone. So he emailed a copy of the pic up north.

"It's funny because you watch so much video, and everything's always moving, obviously," Adam said. "But when you see it like that, where it's just a photo ... I looked at that and wondered, 'Hm, I don't remember my hands being like that lately.' And they weren't. They were way up here."

He held them, in a mock batting stance, nearly up next to his head.

"No way I was going to get the same action way up there. Everything's moving a lot more naturally now. I'm basically just me again."

• On March 3, from Sarasota, Fla., I filed a column entitled, 'Play Frazier over Moran ... eventually.'

In there, I suggested that Moran deserved every chance to start given the prominence of his acquisition and that he was so old -- 25 -- for a prospect with 16 total big-league games. But I also expressed a strong belief that Frazier would prove the better, more consistent hitter and, as such, he could be tried at second base with J-Hay bumped to third.

I'm still not sold on that concept, but that's only because of Frazier's defense.

• In the fifth inning, after Frazier's double and one out, Jordy Mercer's single put gold -- literally, given the Pirates' uniforms on this day -- at the corners. A rally felt imminent, as both balls off St. Louis rookie Jack Flaherty had been struck with authority.

It was Trevor Williams' turn to bat, and Hurdle, having seen Williams run up 90 pitches through his five innings, decided to pinch-hit ... with Jordan Luplow.

His other options were J-Hay, who hasn't been great, and Rodriguez, who's been abysmal. One could easily argue J-Hay would have been the smarter choice, especially in hindsight, but that would have cost him his best bench option with four full innings to go, a close score, and this being a situation that didn't offer a chance to take the lead or even tie.

So he sent up Luplow. And Luplow, being exactly what he is, lunged at the first pitch he saw -- fresh off the bench, against a pitcher he'd never faced -- and his check-swing brought a 6-4-3 rally-killer.

Luplow's got no business being in the majors. That whatshisname reliever who blew the game Saturday night -- hang on, I'll look it up ... oh, yeah, Alex McRae -- has no business being in the majors. They're draft picks who can't play, and apologies for the redundancy when discussing the Pirates' system. Neither of them is a serious prospect, per any national outlet, and neither was worthy of a promotion from Indianapolis.

Deal in causes, not symptoms.

• If I'm Hurdle, and I'm constantly being given a dose of Dovydas Neverauskas upon losing both of my middle relievers in the span of a week, yeah, I'm trying McRae, too. It was the fifth bleeping inning.

• These guys can't draft, can't develop.

Causes, not symptoms.

• Where was Freese when Luplow batted?

A ton of people, myself included, wondered at the time. So I asked Hurdle afterward why one of his hottest bats never got used, and he replied that Freese was unavailable because of a bruised right forearm, the result of a play Friday night, which then flared up after the game Saturday night.

Simple enough response. Easy to verify, too, which I did with both Freese and the athletic training staff.

But even as I was doing that and sharing the info on our live feed and social media, I knew there'd be a portion of the citizenry that had just invested 90 hard minutes yelling at their TV sets because Hurdle wouldn't use Freese, and I further knew those people would never admit they wasted all that invective.