Bryan Reynolds' first at-bat in PNC Park in 2020 lasted just one pitch. Facing Robbie Erlin in the bottom of the first of the team's inaugural intrasquad exhibition, he hit the lefty's curveball hard, but he was a little ahead of it and it found the mitt of a leaping Cole Tucker.
More times than not, that type of hit would have been a single into center. Even if it was an out, making hard contact when fooled by a breaking ball is the sign of a good hitter.
Derek Shelton saw plenty of those signs from Reynolds during spring training. As he put it, "If you’re a hitting coach, this guy’s a dream."
"It’s a low-maintenance swing," Shelton said during a Zoom call Thursday. "The path to the ball is really good. He hits the ball hard, both sides of the plate. Bryan Reynolds is going to be a good player and he’s going to be a good hitter for a long time."
Once spring training was shut down and Shelton went home, he started to watch Pirates games from last year to manage along with the team in preparation for the season. While doing so, he started to realize he might have undersold his left fielder.
"When you watch a lot of Pirate games, this guy’s really good," Shelton said. "Like, really good."
Shelton wasn't the only one who missed out on the full Reynolds experience last year. In a normal year, his .314 batting average and 4.1 WAR could have won him the rookie of the year award. Last year's National League rookie class was one of the best in years, though, and Reynolds finished fourth in the voting. It also didn't help that he was playing for a last place team, meaning less eyes were on him at the end of the season, even if he was in the mix for the batting title crown.
Those who play with or against Reynolds know how talented of a player he is, but he isn't among the game's better known players. His brand of consistent, unflashy performance can even fly under the radar in Pittsburgh sometimes. That doesn't bother him.
"That's not for me to worry about, so I don't care," Reynolds said during a Zoom call Friday.
That's Reynolds. If he says something is not for him to worry about, he simply won't worry about it. He's here to play baseball, not to run for class president. If he doesn't get the same respect other young players who had a rookie season like his would, that's their problem, not his.
But Shelton thinks Reynolds is going to start to become more of a household name.
"He’s going to be one of those guys that I think people outside of Pittsburgh are going to realize how good of a player he is," Shelton said. "I don’t think people in the game realize how good this guy is going to be and how much he’s going to hit."
Reynolds appreciated his new manager's words.
"You always want your manager to go to bat for you, so that's cool that he's got my back like that," Reynolds said.
So what does he have in store for the encore after his rookie campaign? Well, he is trying to maintain what he had going last year.
"I'm just approaching everything the same that I've always had," Reynolds said about this upcoming season. "I'm just going to go out there and play the best I can, do what I can to help us win."
"I just want to be better all the way around," he said shortly after. "... I just want to be a well-rounded player and get better at every aspect.”
MORE FROM DAY 8
• Reynolds and his wife Blair are expecting their first child, and players who live with a high-risk individual, such as a pregnant spouse, are potentially eligible to still receive pay and service time if they opt out.
So did he think about possibly sitting the season out?
The full answer: "“Yeah, I wasn’t ever considering it.”
Easy enough.
• Finding quality live pitching was a challenge for most hitters during the shutdown, including Reynolds. He did find some live pitching, though, as he was part of a group of players who would go do live batting practices once a week. Some of the other members of that groups were Jacob Stallings, Steven Matz of the Mets and Lance Lynn of the Rangers.
"We probably did it once a week and I would get 10 at-bats a day," Reynolds said. "We had four hitters and we’d go in and out. It was great. It was really good for us.”
Those were the only times Reynolds was able to face quality live pitching during the shutdown.
“I was still getting swings. I just wasn’t getting live at-bats," Reynolds said about the layoff. "It was a good time to work on my swing and work on little things here and there. Obviously, I didn’t get the amount of live that I would’ve liked to. Other than that, it was as good as it could have been.”
• Friday was the first intrasquad game. Trevor Williams was the main starter, going five innings. Last week, he said he was scheduled to go five or six for this outing. He should have at least two more starts before the end of camp.
• Luke Maile hit the first home run at PNC Park this year, landing in the visitor's bullpen. If someone put $5 on that back in January, they're probably a millionaire.
• Finally got to see Gregory Polanco's arm in action Friday. Before the game, he took a couple reps making throws to third base and home, one-hopping the fielder each time:
Polanco made a couple throws to third and home in warmups. Each was on line and one-hopped the fielder. Here’s his final throw home. #DKPS #Pirates pic.twitter.com/hrWrVI6Jqe
— Alex Stumpf (@AlexJStumpf) July 10, 2020
In the game, he hit the cutoff man from the wall, holding Jacob Stallings at third after a double, and then two-hopped the third baseman trying to get Josh Bell, who was going from first to third on a single.
• It may have been an intrasquad exhibition, but there were plenty of defensive shifts, both against lefty hitters and right-handers. The later is much rarer in the game, but Shelton's old stomping grounds in Minnesota shifted against right-handed hitters more than any other American League team.
Afterward, I asked Shelton if that was more for the defenders to get used to the shifts, for the hitters to bat facing a shift or if it might be a preview for what's to come. Turns out, it was somewhat unexpected. Here's Shelton's full answer (this one is a little longer than Reynolds'):
"We got like three innings into the game, and I actually asked our defensive guys if we had set up our shifts – and we had not. That was the players doing it on their own, which was really cool. And it was something [bench coach] Donnie [Kelly] made sure we didn’t do, just to see how our players would react and how they would pay attention to their teammates. So I was pretty excited with that, because I was sitting in the stands the first three innings of the game so I could get a different vantage point and so I could also watch the pitching. And the fact that they were doing it on their own – one of the things that we talked at length about with you guys and with our club during 1.0 was our spacing -- and our spacing was really good today."
MORE CAMP COVERAGE
• Kovacevic: Still waiting on Polanco
