Kovacevic: Who the hell is Derek Dietrich? taken at PNC Park (DK'S GRIND)

The Reds' Derek Dietrich after his second home run Sunday at PNC Park. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS

DK'S GRIND

Kovacevic: Who the hell is Derek Dietrich?

By Dejan Kovacevic

Apr 8, 2019 • 3:06 am

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"These kids ... "

Francisco Cervelli was huffing away at his stall late Sunday afternoon, and not just because he'd finally finished his standard sweat-fest following the Pirates' 7-5 sweep-capper over the Reds.

No, the man was seriously en fuego about something else.

"These kids," he'd repeat. "You can't act like that. You just can't."

Wait, a minute ... kids?

I had to interject because there's no conceivable way Cervelli could have been talking about Derek Dietrich, the Cincinnati spare part who showboated an early home run to set off a slew of surliness that cleared both benches and bullpens, got five people tossed and ... uh, who the hell is he, anyway?

Well, to start, he's 29. So he's no kid. He'd boomeranged between the minors and majors with the Marlins for the past half-dozen summers, slashing .254/.330/.421, and his lone claim to fame is that he led the National League in being hit by 24 pitches last season.

Gee, can't imagine why.

So this spring, the Reds, one of Major League Baseball's worst teams for a while now and already facepalming to a 1-8 start, offered him a minor-league tryout. He made it. And in the opener at Cincinnati a couple weeks back, he hit a clutch home run off Richard Rodriguez, strutted around the basepaths with his fist in the air like an over-caffeinated Kirk Gibson, then took an equally spirited curtain call.

The Pirates noticed. And noted. I heard about it that day in Cincinnati, and I heard it again here. Players don't forget. That's the sport's culture.

Flash forward to the second inning Sunday:

That's Dietrich off Chris Archer. And the only thing longer than the distance of that home run, which bounced into the Allegheny River -- was the time he took to admire it. By my count, it was 4.5 visible chews on his wad of gum, as well as 27 seconds to touch 'em all.

Why would he do that?

Warning: The two-minute interview clip below, from Cincinnati's TV broadcast, is stomach-turning ...

"I was hoping that would get us rolling a little bit, and I think it did," Dietrich begins up there. "We came together there a little bit as a team."

With a straight face, too.

He then adds, "You don't like to get thrown at. When someone's throwing at someone, they're trying to inflict pain or possibly hurt someone or send a message. I'm just trying to put a good swing on a baseball. And you know, I did my job."

The emphasis on 'my' was very real.

So this guy rounds the bases, gets to home, and Francisco Cervelli has some choice words for him. Cervelli told me those words and, suffice it to say, they're unprintable. But hilarious.

Dietrich's response was to look right past Cervelli. Acted like he didn't exist.

"That shows me a lot about him," Cervelli would tell me.

And what, pray tell, might that be?

Eh. Cervelli answered that, too. Equally unprintable. Equally hilarious.

The brouhaha came in the fourth, Here's the whole thing:

David Bell, who's about to be branded with the adjective 'beleaguered' if his Reds don't stop losing, oh, eight of every nine games, made the biggest mess by sprinting out of the dugout as soon as home plate umpire Jeff Kellogg rightly warned both benches.

Brief interlude: This is why human umps always will be needed back there. Kellogg's the one with the fullest sense for the game. He's seeing and hearing everything. He knows why the Pirates were furious with Dietrich, and he knows why it could get worse without the warning. He has to have that authority.

Anyway, Bell made a fool of himself in this setting, which is the sort of thing that happens to nearly beleaguered managers. By freaking out on Kellogg, he fired up everyone in sight.

"It's just completely unacceptable for anyone to intentionally try to hurt one of our players," Bell explained. "It's that simple. And it was obvious."

Sure it was. And it was just as obvious that Archer was targeting Dietrich's posterior, not his head. And presuming that Dietrich keeps his brain in the latter rather than the former, a bruise was all that was at risk.

Asked about Dietrich admiring his home run, all Bell had was, "We concern ourselves with our team. The other team needs to concern themselves with how they play. It's that simple. They don't need to worry about how we go about it."

If that's really Bell's grasp of baseball, he'll be fired by mid-May. But it isn't. He knows better. He knows Dietrich embarrassed the Reds. And because the Reds are 1-8, he lost it.

That essentially gave perpetual hothead Yasiel Puig a license to storm out of the Cincinnati dugout toward Cervelli.

Puig claimed, by the way, that Cervelli had informed the visiting dugout beforehand that the Pirates were about to start throwing at them.

"Cervelli and the other players start talking how he's going to throw the ball," Puig said, apparently referring to Archer throwing at Dietrich. "If you're going to throw the ball, don't say nothing and throw the ball."

If that occurred, it undoubtedly will represent a bold first in baseball history.

Not much more ensued. There was pushing, shoving, barking and all the usual baseball fare, but not a single punch thrown, at least none I could spot. Melky Cabrera tried to fend off Puig in one of the more visible exchanges, though all Cabrera would tell me later of that was that Puig "is really strong." Tom Prince, Clint Hurdle's 54-year-old bench coach, also went at Puig once, to which Hurdle told me Neal Huntington had just shared with him a Twitter meme illustrating Prince's low block: "It said the Steelers were going to reach out to him for maybe some guard play on the offensive line. He had a very firm foundation, I guess.”

Turning serious, Hurdle added, “He was trying to get out there and take care of Cervelli.”

Hard to tell if it made any difference with Dietrich. Archer struck him out following the melee, but his next time up he bopped another ball into the river -- first player ever to achieve that here -- and remained in ham mode ... for a moment:

"Maybe he learned something," Kyle Crick told me.

"You know, if that's Joey Votto, you live with it," Steven Brault chimed in from the next stall. "He's headed to the Hall of Fame. He could stand there all day if he does that to me, and I'd tip my cap to him."

“You do something like that, you’re going to pay for it,” Felipe Vazquez would say. “We’re trying to play the game like we have to. Respect the game. Votto can do it because he’s been here a long time. But a guy like that, he hasn’t earned the right to do stuff like that."

Nope. But the real point is that Votto wouldn't do it. Votto's always been as passionate as he's been productive, but he's also been a consummate professional.

The Pirates aren't perfect. Not in any context, including this one. Archer kept his own antics to a minimum on this Sunday, but in the home opener six days earlier, he was animated on every other pitch, underscored by a backward sprint off the mound after whiffing the Cardinals' Paul Goldschmidt for his final out. Anyone's free to feel about that as they wish -- I'm mostly ambivalent -- but Archer doesn't exactly deal from a position of piety in this discussion.

The Pirates aren't perfect in other contexts, either. Yeah, they've won four in a row and are 5-3, second in the Central, heading into Chicago. But all four of those came against the Reds, and the same questions that popped up during the rough early going --  hitting, bench, hitting, long relief, hitting, infield defense, hitting -- will apply for the foreseeable future.

Not team togetherness, though. I wrote about that back in Bradenton, and I'll add bold, underscore and all-caps now.

Take it from Brault, who yet again lapped the bullpen field in his Olympic-level sprint to join the fracas.

"Our team is built on chemistry," he told me. "It's built on relationships. It's built on how close we've come to each other over the past few years. When something like today happens, we're all going to be there. There's no individual presence here. We're the Pittsburgh Pirates. We're one thing. That's very important to us."

• Just a random thought: If I'm 29, I have no more than a nominal history of power, and I'm suddenly launching baseballs into orbit, I'm not terribly inclined to call extra attention to that. But hey, that's just me. And, of course, purely hypothetical.

• Let history record that only one human has ever homered all the way over the batter's eye at PNC Park, and that would be Josh Bell.

This place has been open since 2001. I was sure I'd never see it, and that's because I knew it would require something of this mathematic scale:

When I mentioned to Bell that he was the first to do this, he replied with, "Nope. Giancarlo Stanton." But I was ready for that. See, Kip Wells -- yeah, the pitcher -- once hit a ball halfway up the eye, and that had been the longest by anyone from the Pirates. And on June 9, 2017, Stanton, the lesser-known teammate of Dietrich on the Marlins at the time, did this:

That doesn't technically clear the eye. It strikes a small green slice of the eye at the far left, then rattles around on the roof up there that's used by TV camera operators. Now, that small green slice has since been removed, but I'm all about history, so I'm standing by this.

• Sammy Sosa hit the longest home run in PNC Park history, all the way out to the little security building beyond the bullpens. But that's accompanied by an asterisk the size of Sammy's head at the time.

• Bell went 7 for 15 in the series, with two home runs and two doubles in the final two games. He seems OK.

And that steady stance he and I discussed in Houston a couple weeks back?

"I'm still there," he told me after this.

I conceded to having some doubts down in Houston after a few of his at-bats there. He admitted, "I wasn't really on it yet at that point."

And now?

"I'm on it. Here we go."

• Anyone else realize how crazy-close the Pirates came to being 7-1 right now?

Two badly blown leads away. That's it. They've had the lead after the sixth or seventh inning in all eight games.

• Insane stat: The Pirates and Tigers are currently tied for the best defensive efficiency ratio in Major League Baseball, both at .753. It's a clean, objective ratio of balls put into play that are converted into outs, exempting home runs or unplayable balls off the wall.

I know, I know. But it's there.

• Puig, the Reds' high-profile offseason prize, is off to a 4-for-30 start, including 1 hit in 21 at-bats against the Pirates. It can't be ruled out that, in being so aggressive during that fourth-inning fracas, he was simply trying to see if he could still hit anything.

• Give Puig a high-five for this, though:

That was late Friday night, when he and a few other Reds were walking back to Downtown across the Clemente Bridge. And that's painfully awesome.

• Come back from this coming trip over .500, and we'll talk.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY

Pirates vs. Reds, PNC Park, April 7, 2019 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS

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