For some players in this Pittsburgh clubhouse, the mere mention of “that game in Atlanta” elicits a shudder and a pained head shake.
Pirates fans know, too.
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Their team lost a 19-inning marathon heartbreaker to the Braves on July 26, 2011, on one of the more inexplicable umpiring calls of the past decade. Even though the throw easily beat Atlanta runner Julio Lugo to the plate, and even though the tag was clearly applied, home plate ump Jerry Meals called Lugo safe in the bottom of the 19th inning of a tie game.
Baseball didn’t have replay back then, and just like that, the contest was over.
Pittsburgh, which hadn’t had a winning season since 1992 and was 57-105 in 2010, was 53-47 heading into that game against the Braves. The Pirates were the feel-good story of baseball, but that defeat started a stretch of 11 losses in 12 games and they never pulled out of the tailspin. They went 19-43 to close the season and finished just 72-90.
It was a disaster.
Future NL MVP Andrew McCutchen was in his third year in the bigs, though he hadn’t yet developed into a full-fledged superstar. Manager Clint Hurdle was in his first year with the organization. Slugger Pedro Alvarez was there. So was Neil Walker, as was Charlie Morton. Tony Watson was a rookie lefty reliever who pitched a scoreless sixth inning that fateful night in Atlanta.
“You could just kind of tell, that was deflating, a little bit. Then you’re in the dog days of August and the grind gets real,” Watson told Sporting News. “Everybody’s trying to make their push to the playoffs and we’re trying to push and push and we just didn’t have it. You can’t attribute that all back to the one game, but it seems like everything after that happened.”
But we’re not here to rehash that game in Atlanta. We’re here to talk about what the Pirates have become since the 2011 season, and how the lessons they’ve learned the hard way have helped them become one of baseball’s best teams in 2015.
So after they dropped the first two games of a pretty important three-game set in St. Louis against the NL Central-leading Cardinals this week, they weren’t worried.
“It had better be a different clubhouse, with what we’ve done the past couple years,” McCutchen told Sporting News after Wednesday’s loss. “From losing 100 to getting close, being in second place, there’s definitely a difference there. We’ve turned things around. Things are better.”
In the first inning of Thursday’s game, McCutchen and his teammates backed up that statement of fact. They chased Cardinals starter Lance Lynn before the frame was done, racking up seven first-inning runs — St. Louis had given up more than seven runs only five times in 113 games this season and owns the best record in baseball.
The Pirates eventually walked away with a 10-5 victory.
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That type of resiliency is a reflection of the journey this team has taken since that 2011 season. It’s a reflection on the maturation process of the guys who have been with the team since that game in Atlanta — McCutchen, Alvarez, Walker, Morton and Watson.
“The transfer and the sharing of information has gotten better and cleaner and clearer every year with them. Much more dugout talk, game-related stuff than initially,” Hurdle said. “I think all of them were a little reluctant — ‘I don’t know that much, I haven’t been up here that long’ — but they’ve all been up a significant amount of time together.”
In 2012, they improved from 70 to 79 wins, but still fell short of reaching that .500 mark.
“The first couple of years, we tasted it a little bit in the middle of the summer, and then towards the end, it kind of faded out,” Watson said. “So we were hungry for it.”
In 2013, the Pirates won 94 games and the one-game wild-card contest against the Reds, then pushed the Cardinals to a deciding Game 5 in the NLDS before falling short. In 2014, they again claimed a wild-card spot, but were shut down by San Francisco’s Madison Bumgarner, who went on to produce a dominant World Series performance.
“Over the course of these past two or three years, really, to see where this team and organization was to where it is now makes me proud to be part of it,” Walker said. “It’s certainly much more fun to play 20-games-over-.500 baseball than 100-loss baseball.”
After their win Thursday, the Pirates own the third-best record in the majors, at 66-46; only the Cardinals (73-41) and Royals (68-46) have better marks.
“If you look around, it’s the same faces. I guess the biggest thing is we’re all hungry for more,” Watson said. “We all know what we want here, and that’s a World Series. We’re fighting and clawing every day to try and get that.”
