Spring is in the air along with ejections, more
The romantics might tell you that spring can be fully defined only by the inspired artistry of a Wordsworth or a Vivaldi, but the more pragmatic among your Pittsburgers have long known it’s more precisely explained by baseball.
There’s meteorological spring, which starts March 1, and there’s literal, astronomical spring, starting with the vernal equinox on or around March 20 in the Northern Hemisphere, and there is real, honest-to-God, indisputable Pittsburgh spring, which starts only when it snows at a Pirates game.
Baseball’s barely gotten out of its hibernaculum in 2024, but it’s somehow already signaled a season like few others, especially for a bedraggled Pirates franchise that’s coming off 26 losing seasons in the past 30.
This time, Bob Nutting’s lowbudget swashbucklers started by winning their first five games, all of them on the road, the first 5-0 start by the Pirates since the early Reagan Administration. It was April 1983 when a flash blizzard of long balls from Dale Berra, Lee Mazzilli and Jason Thompson begat five season-opening road wins that signaled a deliciously competitive baseball summer.
Can it happen here and now? Umm, as a wise man once said about something very much unrelated, “Let’s try to get to Blawnox before we talk about the Rapture.”
Despite an abundance of positive indicators bubbling around Pittsburgh’s first week, the best thing I saw was manager Derek Shelton getting ejected Wednesday night in Washington, an unmistakable signal the Pirates all of a sudden aren’t going to take any crap.
Shelton bolted from the visiting dugout with a suggestion for home plate umpire Mike Muchlinski, who’d just called out Bryan Reynolds on a dubious check swing.
Shelton urged Muchlinski to consult third base ump Andy Fletcher, and while such consults are not required, they are customary (if not all too common) on check swings.
Muchlinski demurred, Shelton barked his extreme displeasure at a high decibel, Muchlinski ejected him, Shelton delivered some similar vituperation to Fletcher, then stormed off.
Bravo.
It might mean nothing in the long run, or even the short run, but
it further delivered a certain nostalgia for the game before replay, when this kind of improv was for more frequent and thus far more inspired. You can maintain as you should that the greatest moment in the 23-year history of PNC Park was Johnny Cueto’s fumble on that October night in 2013, but I’d submit that there’s a place in the top five for Lloyd McClendon yanking first base right out of its shaft after a close play that went against Jason Kendall during the park’s inaugural summer.
Incensed at first base ump Rick Reed, Mac didn’t feel as though he’d gotten his money’s worth just by screaming and throwing his cap.
It’s an ancient baseball axiom that says you can’t steal first. The hell you can’t, thought Mac. He pulled that thing out with enough force to rip the skin from every knuckle, stuck it under his left arm, marched it into the dugout and threw it down the steps leading to the clubhouse.
Today, of course, he’d just look around for someone to tell him that somebody should take another look at it. Yawn.
Everywhere you looked in the season’s first full week, there was a reaffirmation that when baseball starts, not everyone’s ready, particularly baseball players. Bryce Harper started 0 for 11 in Philadelphia, then hit three homers in the same game, the third a grand slam. Pirates ace Mitch Keller was not ready, allowing 15 hits and 10 runs in his first two starts.
The Miami Marlins were not ready, los-ing their first seven games to become the first franchise in history to do so after playing in the previous postseason. The next night, they lost again. The New York Mets were not ready, at least for the Milwaukee running game, so they watched the Brewers steal eight bases in eight tries and went on to lose their first five games.
By brilliant contrast, Ronel Blanco was ready, pitching the earliest no-hitter in baseball history on April 1 for the Astros. Blanco was making just his eighth career start having spent part of his pitching apprenticeship working in a Dominican car wash, but the best part of that particular 10-0 win against Toronto was that somebody actually let a pitcher work nine innings without calling an ambulance.
No team at the start of the season was more ready to fill the base paths than your Pirates. During that 5-0 start, Shelton’s team sent a staggering 82 batters to the plate with runners in scoring position, but better still, hit .292 in those situations, .358 in the past three games.
That last Pirates team to start 5-0 was in first place as late as mid-September. Can anything like that happen this time? Probably not, but you can hope, because hope is another definition of spring, and especially of baseball.