A reborn team and a star that never wanted to leave

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida – For a Pittsburgh Pirates fan born in the 1990s, childhood was an endless series of lost seasons. David Bednar, a Pittsburgh kid who grew up to be the team’s clincher, never looked for a winner until his freshman year at Lafayette College, in 2013. That’s when Andrew McCutchen turned decades of despair.

“It’s such a big sports city, and what he did for baseball and the city of Pittsburgh, he really brought up,” Bednar said here at his locker before a game against the Tampa Bay Rays. “Now he’s back – and it’s so cool.”

McCutchen, 36, won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award in that charmed 2013 season, which was crowned with a victory over Cincinnati in the wild card game. The ballpark glowed by the Allegheny River. The fans wore black, as did the players. The bleachers pulsed so wildly that a Reds pitcher dropped the ball right there on the mound, too rattled to even make a pitch.

McCutchen hoped it would last forever. He had signed a long-term contract and bought a house in the suburbs. He would take the Pirates to two more wild card games and win the baseball award, named after Pirates saintly outfielder Roberto Clemente. McCutchen was a worthy heir, on and off the field – and then he was gone.

For the 2018 season, the frugal Pirates traded McCutchen, their highest paid player, to San Francisco, sending him on an indefinite journey like so many others in his mid-career: the Giants, the Yankees, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Milwaukee Brewers.

McCutchen never wanted that future for himself. He tried not to look back at the team he once led.

“I couldn’t really follow them, just because I was mentally at the time, almost, in a way, forced to go somewhere you didn’t ask,” said McCutchen, who managed the home and has raised his family there. “I didn’t ask to be traded; there was never a time when I said I wanted to be. So for that to happen in the capacity that it did, it was really hard, frankly, to pay attention to whatever the Pirates were doing.

Most of the time they were losing and fell right back to where McCutchen found them as a rookie in 2009: Irrelevance. In the five years McCutchen was gone, the Pirates lost 121 more games than they won, always finishing last or penultimate in NL Central.

Last season, the Pirates went 62-100. But they signed their third baseman, Ke’Bryan Hayes, to an eight-year, $70 million contract extension. They saw promise from other young players — pitchers Roansy Contreras and Mitch Keller, shortstop Oneil Cruz, outfielder Jack Suwinski. They knew they had superstardom in Bryan Reynolds, a switch-hitting outfielder they got in exchange for McCutchen.

“There was a lot of belief in this team,” said Steve Sanders, the team’s assistant general manager, “a lot of belief that we were better than our record showed.”

To signal an organizational shift from building to winning, the Pirates sought stabilizers: Ji-Man Choi, Austin Hedges and Carlos Santana for the lineup, Rich Hill, Vince Velasquez and Jarlín García for the pitching staff. There was little risk in that signing (about $27 million combined, all on one-year deals), but the capper was McCutchen, who texted the owner, Bob Nutting, about his interest in returning. They worked out a one-year, $5 million deal.

“In this book I wrote in my head, I always wanted to go back to Pittsburgh,” said McCutchen, who had six homers and an .804 on-base plus slugging percentage during Saturday’s games. “Even the times I’ve been away, I was hoping to get that chance to get there – and not just come back, but thrive and let the team do well. Being able to turn it around again meant a lot to me.”

There was a lot of nostalgia at the Pittsburgh home opener: McCutchen’s mom, Petrina, sang the national anthem and AJ Burnett threw a ceremonial first pitch to Russell Martin, repeating a battery from the 2013 playoff team. Batting third at bat, McCutchen went 5 for 9 with a homer in the first home series.

“Our thought process from the beginning was that this is not a farewell tour,” said Fourth Year Manager Derek Shelton, who signed a contract extension in April. “This is a guy who’s still a really good player and still moves really well. I mean, you see him running the bases. He’s been playing more DH lately, because Choi is injured, but when he was out earlier this year played in the outfield, he played very well.”

Shelton continued, “The most important thing, especially with him and Santana, was the quality of the at bat. We needed professional hitters to extend our lineup. So now we have guys hitting the middle of our order and we’re not hitting the kids there.

The Pirates had a .291 on-base percentage last season and were ranked 28th in the majors. This year, through Saturday, their .329 OBP was tenth. They also led the majors in stolen bases with 45, more than half their total as of 2022. The staff’s earned run average, 3.71, was tenth in the majors; last season it was ranked 26th, at 4.66.

It led to the Pirates’ best start in a generation, winning 20 of their first 30 games for the first time since 1992, when Barry Bonds was the headliner. Now it’s Reynolds, who signed the first nine-figure contract in club history with an eight-year, $106.75 million extension in April.

“I believe in my teammates and the staff and in what we’re building here,” said Reynolds. “We have a lot of good, young, dynamic players and the staff really care. I like the players, I like the city.”

Through Saturday, Reynolds had a .923 OPS with five home runs and was fourth in the NL in total bases. Even on a losing streak, the Pirates held onto first place in NL Central, 20-14.

“Anyone would be lying if they said they specifically saw this happen — but everyone here knew we were good,” Reynolds said. “Admittedly, there’s still a lot of season left, but it’s not necessarily a big surprise for us – a welcome surprise, if you will.”

Before Wednesday’s game — the second of three here — McCutchen said the Rays series would be something of a test for the Pirates (“We really get to see where we stand as a team,” he said). With only four runs in the series, the results were disappointing.

But some of the Pirates’ distinguishing traits — solid at bats, aggressive baserunning — should be relatively slump-resistant, and McCutchen said the team’s best quality was understanding and pride in its strengths.

“We don’t play the game old,” he said. “We play it new, we play it nice and we play it fast. And I think that has been very beneficial for us.”

New, fun and fast. That’s a fitting slogan from a player who knows the Pirates, past and present, like no other.