A father’s sacrifice
The Giants’ biggest off-season acquisition, former MVP Andrew McCutchen, plays with a joy his father made possible.
Lorenzo McCutchen, the outfielder’s father, hoped to become a college football star one day.
Andrew McCutchen, the newest Giant, can tell you why he didn’t.“He had a newborn,’’ Andrew said, smiling widely, “and that newborn was me.”
Lorenzo abandoned his college football career in 1989 and returned home to help raise his 2-year-old boy. Andrew McCutchen remains forever grateful, and he plays that way.
As the former MVP gears up for his first season in San Francisco, he wants his new fans to know why he’s still a little kid inside. He wants people to understand that he takes the field with a joy his father made possible. To put a twist on that old Ernie Banks line: “Let’s play for two.”
“My dad had to come back (home) and throw football away,’’ Andrew said. “Well, not throw that away, but take care of something that was a little more important. And I’m happy he did that.”
Lorenzo McCutchen made it as far as his redshirt freshman season at Carson-Newman University, a Division II school in Jefferson City, Tennessee. That’s hardly a pipeline to the NFL, but it’s worth noting that the running back ahead of him on the depth chart, Vernon Turner, carved out a 54game career as a special teamer.
David Needs, the Carson-Newman quarterback during that time, recalled that Lorenzo bulldozed opponents during contact drills and put on a show in the weight room. “Here was a running back who was benching 350 pounds,’’ he said, still impressed.
Because they were also roommates, Needs remembers the day McCutchen decided to give it all up and head back to Fort Meade, Florida. He eventually became a youth pastor.
“He had a real strong sense of what was right and what was wrong,’’ Needs said in a telephone interview. “He had been raised well and was really morally responsible. He just said, ‘David, I have to take care of my family.’ ”
Lorenzo returned to Fort Meade to join Andrew’s mother, Petrina Swan. (Lorenzo and Petrina were married Aug. 1, 1992). The couple lived in a trailer park and worked multiple jobs to afford their son’s youth-league entry fees and equipment costs.
Lorenzo worked as an assistant manager at a grocery store, a chicken fryer at Junior Foods and a phosphate miner at night. Petrina, a former high school volleyball star, worked as a clerk at the Fort Meade sheriff’s department.
Even with all that, it was barely enough. Jon Spradlin, who coached Andrew in high school, ventures that there were times when Lorenzo could cover everything but his own game ticket.
“He’d get (Andrew) to the games and, quite honestly, his dad couldn’t afford to get into the tournament,’’ Spradlin said. “He might have had to watch from outside. But he’d find a way to get him there and let him go perform.”
Spradlin continues to marvel at how little has changed, even after Andrew’s five All-Star games and $50 million in career earnings.
“His parents,’’ Spradlin said,
“still get up and go to work every morning.’’
GRIDIRON TOUGHNESS
Baseball was Andrew’s athletic path even as a little kid, but having a hard-blocking fullback as a father instilled him with a dose of gridiron toughness. “He was a guy that used his football mentality and put it on the baseball side,’’ McCutchen said. “So a lot of the stuff I learned, I learned it a little different.”
For example, there’s the lesson about avoiding strikeouts. Some young players are told to shorten their swing or keep their eye on the ball.
Lorenzo’s coaching advice was a tad more intense.
“One of the things that he used to preach when I was a kid was that home plate was my house. And my sister was in that ‘house’ and my mom was in that ‘house,’ ” McCutchen said. “And when they pitched the ball, you don’t want anybody to get in it. He told me to hit that ball so no one would get in my house. He would tell me to protect my house.
“He would say that all the time. That was my mentality, and I think that helped me as a kid growing up. He knew what fueled me to make me better. If it made me emotional, it made me better.”
Such ingrained self-defense reflexes help explain how McCutchen manages to generate offensive lineman strength out of a cornerback body. Listed at 5-foot-11, 195 pounds, McCutchen hit 28 home runs last season, his seventh consecutive season with at least 20 home runs.
A right-handed hitter, he finished his nine-year Pittsburgh career with 203 home runs, joining Ralph Kiner, Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente as the only players with at least 200 homers as a Pirate.
Giants closer Mark Melancon played parts of four seasons in Pittsburgh and saw first-hand how the sleekly built outfielder generated unexpected power.
“I don’t know if anybody in the game has quicker hands,’’ Melancon said. “I think just it’s that explosiveness. He’s able to produce just lightning-quick hands and feet. That nervous system is different than most, those fast-twitch muscles.”
McCutchen, 31, showed off those fast-twitch muscles on Instagram during the off-season. He posted a video clip of himself running on the treadmill at a leg-blurring 26 mph. It looks as if someone hit the fast-forward button.
That’s why Melancon celebrated the Giants’ trade for McCutchen by hopping on the treadmill and posting his own clip on social media. His pace, though, was the tortoise to McCutchen’s hare.
“He’s just so impressive in everything he does that I don’t even try to go down that road and fight him,’’ Melancon said.
McCutchen was a bit of a physical anomaly even as a
kid. Fort Meade High School is what’s called a “middle-senior” high school, meaning it includes students from sixth grade through 12th. When he tried out for the baseball team as an eighth grader, McCutchen planned on reporting to the junior varsity squad.
Spradlin caught him first and directed him to varsity practice. “No, that guy ain’t going nowhere,’’ the coach joked. “I think he’s probably the only kid who came in middle school that never played a JV inning.”
McCutchen batted .591 as a freshman and led the county in hitting.
“To be honest, he was never bigger or stronger than anybody. It was just his skill set,’’ Spradlin said. “Here was this kid who at that time was, I don’t know, 140 pounds? But he just had this bat speed. You have 18-year-old kids who don’t know the strike zone like he did.”
By the time McCutchen was a senior, 30 to 50 scouts showed up for batting practice, arriving at 4:30 p.m. for a 7:30 game. One day during BP, McCutchen launched one from home plate to a distant cow pasture. A scout hopped over the fence behind home plate and began stepping off the distance to see how far it went. (Spradlin thinks it was about 400 feet.)
Most impressive of all, Spradlin said, is that McCutchen never showed a trace of ego. Lorenzo and Petrina made sure of that.
“Nowadays, man, kids are just completely different,’’ Spradlin said, referring to the kid who was the 11th overall pick in the 2005 draft. “And we always talk about the story: Andrew McCutchen was here for five years, and not once was it ever, ‘I can do this. I can do that. I’m this good.’
“He just showed up and did his work every day. He worked hard, and it showed in games. It was never about him.”
CHANGE IN POSITION
McCutchen, a career center fielder, will play right field for the Giants. The Pirates tried to make that move last year, owing to the 2012 Gold Glove winner’s declining range.
McCutchen’s first reaction was shock. His second reaction was: “I don’t want to do this.” As he wrote in The Players’ Tribune last February: “In my mind, center field is my spot. I’m the center fielder. I always have been. And I was proud of that.”
But he eventually agreed, in part because his father always told him to be an athlete who can play anywhere or do anything. He also reminded himself that playing in right field in Pittsburgh meant following in Roberto Clemente’s footsteps.
The experiment lasted only a few weeks before McCutchen moved back to center in the wake of Starling Marte’s injury. But along the way, he posted a photo of Clemente tipping his cap to the home crowd.
“I definitely felt a connection,’’ McCutchen said this spring. “The philanthropy throughout his career was something that was very intriguing to me. I learned that he was a great player but an even better person.”
Clemente, a Hall of Famer and 15-time All-Star, died in a
plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1972 while attempting to deliver supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
“He used baseball to be able to do so much good in the community — so much so that he ended up losing his life trying to help others,’’ McCutchen said. “And for me, that’s the greatest thing you can do in your life.”
While in Pittsburgh, he combined with Pirates Charities to found “Cutch’s Crew,” a program designed to mentor inner-city youth baseball players. He also supported the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation, the Homeless Children’s Education Fund, the Light of Life Rescue Mission and Habitat for Humanity, among others. He won the Roberto Clemente Award in 2015.
“He was a face of the franchise, which almost every team has. But I think there’s a lot more that went into that because he’s such a class guy and stood for so many good things,’’ Melancon said. “It was pretty cool to see how one person can change a city.”
Or, as Pirates manager Clint Hurdle once said: “This is the guy I’d let hit third and date my daughter.”
McCutchen charmed Pittsburgh quickly, but one particular woman took some extra effort. Not long after the outfielder made his major league debut in 2009, at age 22, he met a young Pirates employee named Maria Hanslovan at a baseball camp. Then they started bumping into each other on random occasions throughout the city.
“So eventually I got the courage to ask her out ... and she shut me down,’’ McCutchen said. “And she shut me down, like, five more times after that.”
Maria figured he was a typical ballplayer on the prowl. McCutchen got a date only after proving he was a man of substance. He proposed to Maria on the “Ellen DeGeneres Show” in 2013. “Definitely out of my league,” McCutchen says now, “but I did it. I did it!”
Andrew and Maria settled in Pittsburgh, had a child last November and bought a beautiful home. Even after leaving for San Francisco, he vowed that he left his heart in Pittsburgh. McCutchen wrote a sweet farewell letter to fans there, vowing to forever stay connected to the Steel City. (“Maybe when I’m 100, they’ll drag my butt back down to Florida, snowbird-style,’’ he wrote.)
But McCutchen wants to clear up one misconception. As much as he loves Pittsburgh, he did not name his son Steel in honor of the city. He and Maria had always planned on picking a strong name for their child, and Steel fit the bill. “Next thing you know, one thing led to another, and everybody said, ‘Oh, you named your kid after Pittsburgh,’ ” McCutchen says now. “Well, not really.” POP, BUT NO PUB
One of the perks of joining the Giants is that McCutchen doesn’t have to be the face of anything. The Giants already have more faces than a winning poker hand thanks to the likes of Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, Brandon Crawford and Hunter Pence.
McCutchen needs to provide some pop for a team that finished last in home runs last season and upgrade an outfield defense that should have played with butterfly nets a year ago.
He spent much of the spring providing the kind of quiet leadership the Giants hoped for when they acquired him in exchange for pitcher Kyle Crick and outfield prospect Bryan Reynolds.
McCutchen tutored rookie Steven Duggar, the center fielder of the future, on the nuances of the position. Even during games, he’d catch Duggar’s eye and reposition him a few steps here or there based on the situation.
McCutchen might not be the player he was at his peak, when he led the National League in offensive WAR for three consecutive seasons (2012-14). But his reputation remains unchanged.
“Another true pro,’’ second baseman Joe Panik said. “Another guy that’s going to come in and not be afraid of the big moment. He’s proven throughout his career that he can play with the best of them.”
This is why Lorenzo McCutchen gave up football. This is why Petrina McCutchen wound up belting out the national anthem at Pirates games over the years.
This is why Andrew McCutchen is still protecting his house.
“Everybody that I’ve known who knows Andrew McCutchen would say that they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he has integrity,’’ said Needs, the Carson-Newman football teammate. “And I don’t have to look very far to find out where that comes from.”