CINCINNATI -- "Just wasn't my day."
It was, actually. Corey Dickerson was having a wonderful opening day. He'd snagged five screaming lasers into left field, he'd homered late to pull his team within two, and he'd put himself -- no, willed himself -- into position for maybe the most memorable plate appearance of his career.
All 12 pitches of it ...
... until the 12th of those brought the final out of the Pirates' 5-3 loss to the Reds on this summer's-almost-here Thursday thriller at Great American Ball Park. Dickerson rolled to second, Cincinnati's David Hernandez wiped his brow on the mound, and those bases were left loaded with little else left to the imagination.
Little else, but not nothing.
"So close," Erik Gonzalez would tell me through an audible sigh, slumped at his stall. "Corey battled so hard."
"It was ... something," Colin Moran told me across the room. "He's capable of so much at the plate. And just wait until he's squaring those up."
Battled so hard. Just wait.
Get used to it.
That's my principal thought, to be honest, following this 133rd opener for the Pittsburgh Baseball Club. And I swear, that's not being suggested in some sardonic or cynical way. Rather, it's rooted in a fear, as I wrote all through spring training, that these guys will sink/swim based mostly on the following:
1. They'll pitch.
2. They'll hit a little.
3. They'll defend less.
It's a recipe for exasperation. Often misdirected exasperation, I might add. Because after an outcome like this, the initial tendency -- mine, too -- will be to point to the pitching. That'll be where the deciding run happens. That'll feel more pivotal.
Case in point: Jameson Taillon rocks through six innings, earns his manager's trust -- as he should have, with a pitch count of 75 -- but then immediately serves up a Jose Peraza home run, a five-pitch walk to Tucker Barnhart and a lashed double to José Iglesias.
"It was a foot away from where it needed to be," Taillon would huff of the latter. "If the ball is a foot the other way, we’re probably talking about an entirely different game.”
A foot?
Yeah, Hurdle had to come for the ball. Unapologetically, too:
Everyone will talk about this. Or write about it, as our John Perrotto did.
Or it'll be about Richard Rodriguez's miserable meatball over the outer half, right in Derek Dietrich's barrel zone for the three-run home run that ensued.
But there was an uglier truth at hand, and that's that this lineup looked about as meek as expected: Eleven strikeouts. Five hits. Only one hit for extra bases, that being Dickerson's home run. Only two struck with enough force to penetrate a wet paper towel. And otherwise, an awful lot of gangly swings at changeup specialist Luis Castillo's countless ... uh, changeups.
"We knew what he'd be coming with," Hurdle explained with a shrug. "It just didn't happen for us today."
I'm doubtful it will, at least on any significant scale. Starling Marte developing a pregame migraine didn't help, and it'll sure be nice to get Gregory Polanco back in a month or so. But this is what they've got for now, for the most part, and it's not like they'll have the luxury of coasting through April and seeing how it goes. The hitting didn't have to happen today, as Hurdle intimated, but it had better happen soon.
An even uglier truth at hand:
Yikes times three.
It's reasonable, if not a lock, to envision the left side of the infield being improved over last season. Jung Ho Kang's superior at third base to Moran, and Gonzalez at the least has greater range at short than Jordy Mercer.
But the right side?
Let's just say that, if Adam Frazier and/or Josh Bell perform anything like those sequences above with any frequency, all that precious pitching will go up in a puff.
• Seriously, give it up for Dickerson. Not to go on about that at-bat, but after the count reached 2-2, he fouled off six consecutive pitches -- curve, fastball, slider, slider, slider, curve -- before the groundout on a smart fastball down.
Give it up for Hernandez, too, obviously.
“I had butterflies out there,” Hernandez would say on the other side. “My heart was definitely outside my body.”
So I felt compelled to ask Dickerson to what extent he had to tune out the standing, roaring capacity crowd of 44,049:
• Iglesias' double off Taillon might have been foul. It bounced up off the dirt in fair territory, landed in foul territory beyond third base, and third base umpire Will Little emphatically ruled that it had crossed the bag. Such a play can't be reviewed at either infield corner.
Cervelli visibly objected at the time, and Taillon later brought it up on his own with reporters.
“It was close,” Taillon said. “Cervi had a good view of it, and he felt pretty strongly one way.”
Of the fateful inning as a whole, he summed up, “First pitch of the inning wasn't very good. Close pitches to Barnhart. Competitive pitches. And a foul ball, I thought, to Iglesias. It's the way the game goes. I'm not going to lose too much sleep over it. I felt good, I made a lot of good pitches. There's a lot of good to take from it.”
Well, OK, as long as some of what's culled from it is that Taillon's trademark curve wasn't working for him and, maybe independent of that, maybe not, the Reds stung a bunch of balls off him, including their outs. He can be much better.
• Don't bury Bell. It's 1 of 162. Besides, there's all this.
• Two-thirds of the Pirates' offense came on one mad rush in the sixth: Kang stepped up with runners at first and second and two outs and lofted a single into left-center. Francisco Cervelli was at first and had been breaking, of course, but he still couldn't have been expected to score ... except that he did:
Joey Cora gets the nod here. I've been tough on the guy, but this is a great read. He sees the ball being thrown to second and demonstratively gets Cervelli's attention to wave him home.
• That said, blame Cincinnati's second baseman, Peraza, for dozing off, too, not even glancing at Cervelli until it was too late. He did well to go deep later, or all the talking and writing would've been about him. But that's baseball.
• Joe West's strike zone on this day, wider than I-70, should serve as a showpiece tutorial for why balls and strikes should be called electronically. They've done it for line calls in tennis for decades. This wouldn't exactly require some technological miracle.
• I'd share with you that Andrew McCutchen homered in the Phillies' first at-bat of the season ...
Sometimes what the first batter does is an indication of how the season will go.
THAT'LL DO. pic.twitter.com/XrLgmqSn0G
— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) March 28, 2019
... or that Austin Meadows did likewise for the Rays ...
THAT'S HOW YOU START A SEASON, @austin_meadows!
The young OF shows off the ?? and puts the @RaysBaseball on the board with a leadoff homer against Justin Verlander!
Check out all of the #OpeningDay action live now on FOX Sports Sun and FOX Sports Go! #RaysUp #MLB pic.twitter.com/r2qMNKxnNq
— FOX Sports Florida (@FOXSportsFL) March 28, 2019
... but none of that matters.
• Mark it down for posterity: The Pirates' opening 25-man roster payroll was $74,809,499, dramatically down from the $91.3 million spent on their 25-man roster salaries in 2018. In total, the team's spending on the 40-man roster, including all related benefits to players, was $103,837,992, but that figure isn't computed until December of each year.
No matter how it's computed, it's a reduction that's reflective, in every way, of this franchise's priority.
• Rob Manfred, on hand here as every commissioner must be, predictably shrugged off a question about the Pirates' payroll: “Our contention is that all of our clubs are in line with the basic agreement and spending their revenue-sharing in a proper way."
They aren't doing that. He knows it.
• My goodness, opening day here is special, as our Matt Sunday beautifully documented. It's the second one I've experienced. The pride, the ownership in the Reds and baseball can be felt all through the community, not just the parade, not just the festival areas around the park beforehand. At a time when the sport feels like it's fading across the country, certainly in our city, this was uplifting.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Pirates at Reds, Cincinnati, March 28, 2019 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS