Invectives were flying.
Heck, someone's iPhone went flying. Hard, too. Banging into the back of a stall.
A trio of younger players were gathered around that stall in the home clubhouse at PNC Park late Tuesday night, this after what had to be these Pirates' most uplifting outcome all month, a 9-4 pounding of the Padres, and ... let's just say that something had set them off. And that it might've had something to do with this scene:
Pitch No. 2 of that sequence between Ji Hwan Bae and San Diego lefty Adrian Morejon was called a strike by home plate umpire Jeremie Rehak. It was inside, as is plainly evident below:
MLB.com
It was the third time Bae'd been hosed by Rehak on the evening -- the other two strikes poked holes in the ozone layer -- and, maybe more relevant, one of what's seemed like several occasions in recent weeks where any/all of the Pirates' younger players were similarly hosed.
Bae, befitting how a rookie's expected to behave, hadn't had any palpable reaction to that stuff until this, when he barked at least one mega-unkind word toward Rehak -- as Derek Shelton recalled, "I think Bae said a thing you're not supposed to say" -- and was tossed immediately. At which point Bae got his ejection's worth, raising three fingers to Rehak's face to remind him of the other two blown calls, before Shelton got between the two and that was that.
Or was it?
The invectives and the flying phone, all related to the above, will stay in the clubhouse. Neither was part of any formal interview and, honestly, neither was a big deal at all. I don't think anyone outside a super-small radius would've even noticed. But the reason I'm sharing is to illustrate, ideally, what really, really needs to happen with this team ... like, right away.
"What we need, especially as younger players, is to fight," one of them told me. "We need to fight. We need to believe in ourselves and fight for ourselves and for each other."
Kinda like this:
That's Jack Suwinski snapping an 0-for-29 pretty much the only way he knows how: Out of his 45 hits all season, 16 are now home runs. And that shot, a literal back-to-back Jack following Carlos Santana, put the Pirates ahead to stay, 4-3, in the third.
"We're down, 3-0, early, and we just kept coming and coming," Shelton would say.
Young players, as much as anyone:
That's Nick Gonzales snapping an 0-for-8 start to his big-league career in a big, big way, belting a run-scoring triple off the Clemente Wall, then a 442-foot bombed off the batter's eye beyond the center-field bushes. First hit. First home run.
I asked the kid, among other things, which he liked better:
"Amazing," he'd say of the feeling. "Obviously, to get a win, my first hit, my first home run, is something special."
So, which one?
"Probably the homer," he'd come right back with a huge smile. "Yeah, yeah."
They always say that.
Henry Davis did this:
He'd gotten off to a 1-for-10 start to his career, but he's now got a five-game hitting streak that included two here plus the RBI.
And my goodness, Josh Palacios did this:
Regarding the near-loss of that left limb, I had to ask:
"He hits it really high," Palacios would recall, referring to Juan Soto. "And I'm thinking right away, 'Ooh, here's an opportunity to rob a home run. So I book it, just like they train us, got to the wall, grabbed onto the wall, I look up ... and I saw the ball coming down at a slight angle. So I thought I had it, I kept following it, I thought I had it ... and thank God it was still within my reach and I was able to finish the catch."
Between that and adding another hit to his encouraging .283 output over the past 24 games, good for him. Maybe better yet for the entire team, judging by how they bounded out of the dugout to match his own fist-pumping joy the whole way back from left.
"I feel like that's what we need right now," he'd say. "All of us."
I'm not sure anyone would need it more than Rodolfo Castro, who's looked like a Class AAA option waiting to happen for weeks in lugging his own 0-for-18 here before going 2 for 5 with an RBI and this late gem that -- don't hate me for this -- I loved even more than Palacios' catch:
Wow. Wonderful. The degree of difficulty to this putout, charging forward but having to fire across the body, is only doubled by dealing with the superlative speed of Ha-Seong Kim. Every minute motion has to be precise.
"I loved this whole game," Castro told me. "I loved seeing the young guys come out here and prove ourselves and work together and fight together like we just did. It showed us again what we can do."
OK, check what I just wrote above. Because there's nobody, not even Castro, who needed this more than beleaguered Roansy Contreras, who's battling through the two worst months of his baseball life, but who finished off Rich Hill's solid six-inning start by putting up three zeroes -- two hits, a walk, three Ks -- for his first career save, and an ElRoy Face special at that.
Shelton told me that Oscar Marin's been trying to speed up Contreras' delivery, a flaw management first recognized several weeks ago but one that's only now bearing fruit.
"Everything's getting better," Contreras replied when I brought that up. "Everything."
Don't get too excited. The fastball was still running up there at a meh-for-him 94-95 mph, and it was still the slider doing the lifting.
Don't get too excited about any of this, actually. In part because the Padres were forced to make an emergency recall of their starter, Reiss Knehr, who was serving up more meatballs than the Downtown Vallozzi's. In part because the Pirates now have two whole Ws to show for their past 14 games. And in part, of course, because there are few things more volatile in the wide world of sports than baseball rookies.
If they can do anything akin to this the next two days against, oh, say, Blake Snell and Joe Musgrove, we can start talking, right?
But from this perspective, the point that stands out is that these kids have to know that they've got to get it done. And neither they nor the team can afford for them to passively wait out whatever anyone else might see as some initiation phase.
Want to know who was most responsible for this little fire?
Mm-hm.
"Yeah, I said a few words," Andrew McCutchen would confirm me after two younger players told me he'd had a chat with a group of them before this game. "I just told them that we need to get back to doing the things we were doing early on. And that's not always here."
With that, he motioned for me as if he was holding a bat.
"It's everywhere. It's our approaches. It's our fielding. It's our baserunning. We can't let any of that slide."
He then cited the Central standings, if anyone still remembers those:
MLB.com
"We're not out of this. We're not far back. We just need to focus on playing good ball and to make sure everyone's doing the right things."
With energy like this?
"Never hurts, man."
THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
• Live file
• Standings
• Statistics
• Schedule
• Scoreboard
THE HIGHLIGHTS
THE INJURIES
• 10-day injured list: OF Bryan Reynolds (lower back)
• 15-day injured list: LHP Jose Hernandez (calf), RHP Colin Holderman (wrist), LHP Rob Zastryzny (forearm), RHP Vince Velasquez (elbow)
• 60-day injured list: SS Oneil Cruz (ankle), 1B Ji-Man Choi (Achilles), RHP Wil Crowe (shoulder), RHP JT Brubaker (elbow), LHP Jarlin Garcia (elbow), RHP Max Kranick (elbow)
THE LINEUPS
Shelton's card:
1. Josh Palacios, LF
2. Andrew McCutchen, DH
3. Henry Davis, RF
4. Carlos Santana, 1B
5. Jack Suwinski, CF
6. Rodolfo Castro, 3B
7. Ji Hwan Bae, 2B
8. Nick Gonzales, SS
9. Austin Hedges, C
And for Bob Melvin's Padres:
1. Ha-Seong Kim, 2B
2. Fernando Tatis Jr., RF
3. Juan Soto, LF
4. Manny Machado, 3B
5. Xander Bogaerts, SS
6. Gary Sánchez, C
7. Nelson Cruz, DH
8. Brandon Dixon, 1B
9. Trent Grisham, CF
THE SCHEDULE
Middle match of the series Wednesday aligns Mitch Keller (8-3, 3.45) against Blake Snell (4-6, 3.22) with a 7:05 p.m. first pitch.
THE MULTIMEDIA
THE CONTENT
Visit our team feed for all the latest around the clock and our team page for everything else.
