Plot familiar to Pirates
Cubs take over role as young upstarts crashing playoffs.
The hot, young talent. The emerging ace with the electric stuff. The upbeat manager. The giddy relief that comes with washing away years of futility.
Andrew McCutchen has seen this script before.
Two years ago, the star center fielder and the rest of the Pirates found themselves as baseball’s new darlings when they crashed the playoffs for the first time in two decades.
Now it’s the Cubs, whose rebuilding project hit warp speed somewhere between Joe Maddon’s hire last winter and rookie slugger Kris Bryant’s arrival in April.
“They’ve opened a lot of eyes,” McCutchen said. “We were the hype in 2013. Look at what we did. Everybody was on us … now it’s ‘Let’s talk about the Cubs.’”
The Pirates can change the subject tonight in the NL wild-card game. The winner gets the Cardinals starting Friday.
The clubs that combined for 195 wins both believe they can make a run provided they can survive baseball’s version of a high-wire coin flip.
Heady territory for two franchises that have spent most of this millennium taking turns at the bottom of the NL Central.
Those days have long since passed in Pittsburgh, making its third straight playoff appearance. The Cubs hope to say the same thing in Chicago regardless of a history filled with curses and a World Series drought at 107 years and counting.
The weight of failure, however, hardly appears to be wearing on a team so loose Cy Young candidate Jake Arrieta took to Twitter to tweak the Pirates’ fan base after a parody account warned him of what was coming at rowdy PNC Park.
Arrieta tweeted back “whatever helps keep your hope alive, just know it doesn’t matter.”
Don’t get the bearded 29-year-old who led the majors with 22 wins and posted an 0.75 ERA after the All-Star break — no, that’s not a typo — wrong. He wasn’t guaranteeing victory so much as trying to savor a moment he believed would come even if others did not.
The tall right-hander who never seemed to fit in early in his career in Baltimore has supplanted Jon Lester as Chicago’s No. 1 starter.
When he’s on, Arrieta is borderline unhittable. The Pirates managed a lone single off him in a 4-0 Cubs’ win on Sept. 27 and Arrieta has allowed four earned runs combined since Aug. 1.
That success has sent his confidence soaring. There isn’t any one thing that’s changed from those difficult years with the Orioles. He simply matured, tweaking his delivery and his mental approach. It’s all about the now. Not the last pitch. Not the next one. This one.
In that sense, Arrieta will face a kindred spirit in Pittsburgh starter Gerrit Cole.
Unlike Arrieta, a late bloomer, Cole has been groomed for this stage. He hasn’t missed a beat any step of the way and made the All-Star team for the first time this summer while becoming the first Pittsburgh pitcher to reach 19 wins since 1991.
“He respects everything about the game but he fears absolutely nothing,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said. “That’s a wonderful place to be.”