Look, I don’t know what to say about this game. If your biggest complaint about the Pirates so far in 2015 was that they’ve played well against bad teams but don’t have a lot of signature wins in important games, well, you’ve got to find a new biggest complaint.
One of my absolute favorite moments of the 2013 season was Andrew McCutchen’s walk-off against the Brewers in mid-May. The Pirates had played well to that point but were still having trouble with the Brewers with three losses in their first four games against Milwaukee. In this particular game, the Pirates fell behind early but tied the game up in the eighth. In the 12th, McCutchen hit a walk-off homer off of Mike Fiers. He charged around the bases with this fire that felt more like a declaration than a celebration. The Brewers had pushed the Pirates around up to that point, but that was all over because Andrew McCutchen said it was over. He was right.
When the bottom of 14th inning started tonight, things obviously looked bleak with the Cardinals leading 5-4. When the Cards brought rookie lefty Nick Greenwood out, though, I thought, “Well, they’d have no reason to pitch to ‘Cutch, but maybe if Walker gets on Matheny won’t want to put the winning run on base.” Neil Walker singled, Andrew McCutchen sent an 0-2 pitch into the shrubs, and then he rounded the bases with the same look that I remember from that 2013 walk-off.
It is impossible to do this game any sort of justice, as moving even a half-hour away from the end of it robs McCutchen’s homer of all of the weird context that came with seeing it live. In the second inning, AJ Burnett was cruising. He’d set down the first five Cardinals and he appeared to get Mark Reynolds swinging to end the inning. Somehow, though, for the second time in a week, an umpire (this time Vic Carapazza) called an obvious inning-ending swinging strike a foul tip against Burnett. The Pirates came out and argued the call, the umpires huddled, but (as we already learned this week) the play is ultimately unreviewable and no umpire is going to over-rule the home plate ump on a foul tip. Reynolds proceeded to hit the next pitch out of the park and I think Francisco Cervelli might have been tossed before the ball landed.
This is an insane circumstance. I really, really hate to lay blame on bad calls or umpires or anything beyond the players on the field, but it was an awful and obviously wrong call in a huge game. Burnett lost his rhythym and gave up a second run in the third, then the Cardinals got a third run in the fifth when Pedro Alvarez’s defense completely abandoned him. Burnett was obviously fed up on the mound, and he somehow channeled that into his first home run in ten years in the bottom of the fifth. With my desktop currently broken, I watch most games on my Xbox these days. That comes with a pretty serious built-in delay; usually I have to use a browser window to cover Twitter to keep from being spoiled. In this case, though, my iPad dinged to notify me of Burnett’s homer before I saw it on my TV. I was sure it was a typo.
With the game back in reach, the free run the Cardinals got continued to hang in the air much in the same way that bricks do not. The Pirates tied the game with an eighth inning rally that saw an Andrew McCutchen walk, Jung Ho Kang bring him in on a single + error combo, and a Pedro Alvarez single off of tough lefty Kevin Siegrist to tie the game. The game went to extra innings and it just kept on going the same way: Reynolds hit another homer to take the lead in the 10th, but a Jung Ho Kang triple (against the advice of Rick Sofield, who threw himself down at the grass to ensure that Kang slid into third) and Chris Stewart single tied the game. In the 14th the Cardinals took the lead after yet another questionable third strike foul tip call on Jhonny Peralta (I’m pretty sure Carapazza got this one right, actually, but if it was tipped it was tipped just barely), and that set the table for McCutchen. I could keep typing, but I’ll just send you over to watch the highlight again. And again. And again.
It’s just impossible to oversell this. The Pirates trailed 3-0 in the fifth, 4-3 in the tenth, and 5-4 in the 14th, pulled out a win when their best player hit a two-run homer in the 14th inning to give them their first lead of the night. He did not do it by himself: Jung Ho Kang played a really slick third base tonight and contributed hits to game tying rallies in the eighth and 10th innings. The Pirate bullpen was excellent — Antonio Bastardo and Jared Hughes bailed Burnett out of a mess in the seventh, Arquimedes Caminero and Tony Watson got the game into extra innings with no incident, Deolis Guerra recovered from the Reynolds homer to give the Pirates three strong innings, and Vance Worley pitched a scoreless 13th before Chris Stewart’s throwing error set the Cardinals up for their fifth run in the 14th.
The Pirates are 3 1/2 games behind the Cardinals, with a chance to get to 2 1/2 back tomorrow on Sunday Night Baseball. I have spent much of the first half of this season fretting over the distance between the Pirates and the Cardinals (to be fair, the distance was nine games not even two weeks ago). There is a lot of baseball left to be played in 2015, and the outcome of this game may ultimately not be all that important to the final NL Central standings. The look on Andrew McCutchen’s face when he came around third base said that he believes, though. If he does, well, then I think I do, too.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
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