‘Cutch’ was man who broke Pirates’ Bonds curse

Baseball fans in Pittsburgh thought the Pirates were cursed. The malady had a name: The Barry Bonds Curse.

For 20 straight seasons after the Pirates let Bonds go, they had a losing record. Fans made the connection.

When the Pirates used the 11th pick of the 2005 draft on a well-regarded high school outfielder from Florida named Andrew McCutchen, and he rose in the national prospect rankings, Pirates fans not only thought they could end the curse, but thought they had the next Barry Bonds.

Can you imagine that kind of pressure?

When the Pirates ended the 20-year-losing streak in 2013, and won 94 games and an NL wild-card spot, McCutchen in his fourth full season was the MVP. He became a huge star in a one of the nation’s most sports-infused cities, and he got his due. He was not the next Bonds, nor the next anybody. He was just “Cutch.” “I’m my own person, just like Barry Bonds was his own person,” McCutchen told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2014. “I’m going to create my own legacy. Fifteen or 20 years down the road, I don’t want people to say I reminded them of this or that guy. I want them to say, ‘He was Andrew McCutchen.’ ”

McCutchen’s career has taken a strange arc. He seemed headed for a no-brainer Hall of Fame career and was the key player on a Pittsburgh team that could win a championship. After six full seasons, McCutchen had a .298 career average and 151 home runs.

With McCutchen in center field, now a perennial All-Star, the Pirates reached the postseason three straight years, but did not make it past the Division Series. They lost the 2014 wildcard game to the Giants in a Madison Bumgarner shutout.

The Pirates’ decline in 2016 coincided with McCutchen’s worst season. His average plummeted to .256, his OPS to a career-low .766. His slump continued into 2017, and for the first time people in the Steel City began to talk about the end of McCutchen’s time there.

McCutchen confided to writers that maybe he was trying too hard on the field to let prove he deserved an extension so he could fulfill his ambition to remain with the Pirates for life.

Moreover, his defense in center sagged to the point where the Pirates came to him after the season and told him they wanted him to move to right field, with Starling Marte going to center.

McCutchen did what the team asked, cementing his reputation as a good teammate and standup guy.

McCutchen’s time in right lasted less than three weeks. He returned to center after Marte got an 80-game suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs. Defensive metrics said McCutchen was a bad center fielder, one of the worst in the league, but the Pirates thought otherwise.

When Marte returned, they gave McCutchen the choice of staying in center or moving back to right. He chose center.

He also rebounded at the plate after his average dipped to .200 on May 23. He hit .411 in June with six home runs and .322 with eight home runs in July before sagging in August to .222. McCutchen finished strong with a .287 September and clearly convinced the Giants he could help them out of their 98-loss morass from 2017.

McCutchen did not want to go. He said his piece in the 2014 interview with the TribuneReview, and his feeling had not changed, according to Pirates watchers.

“This is where I want to be,” he said. “I don’t know anything else outside of here. I think for every player, the dream is being on one team for the rest of their career. That’s the way I want to be. I want to be comfortable here. I want to win championships here. I want to raise a family here.”