Xavier Nady is greeted by Jose Bautista after hitting a home run with two outs in the ninth inning to tie the score against the Astros last night at Minute Maid Park in Houston.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
By Dejan Kovacevic
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
HOUSTON -- We have liftoff.
Easy as 3-2-1, Nate McLouth, Xavier Nady and Jason Bay launched home runs in the eighth, ninth and 10th innings to rocket the Pirates past the Houston Astros, 4-2, last night at Minute Maid Park.
And those long balls, along with some sound pitching and superlative defense, allowed Major League Baseball's most beleaguered franchise to open the 2007 season in seriously uplifting style.
"A complete game," manager Jim Tracy said, appearing almost as joyful afterward as he was tightly wound beforehand. "I've talked about building blocks, about our players getting better, about believing in each other. ... My goodness, did you see that?"
The Pirates' players, whose emotions seemed to mirror those of the manager throughout the day, experienced it and embraced it, as was evident in a backslapping clubhouse that bordered on playoff-level jubilance.
"Look around," closer Salomon Torres said over the blaring music. "Look at this team. Look at what we did. If we were down in a game like that at the start of last season, that would have been a loss. Not now. Not anymore."
Perhaps pinch-hitter Ryan Doumit put it best: "Dude, that was fun!"
In an understated way, signs of victory were apparent even before the late ignition.
It started with Zach Duke.
He knew from the outset the challenge he would face in Houston ace Roy Oswalt, and he would not be disappointed. Oswalt would go 7 2/3 innings and allow one run while almost mechanically throwing 72 of 95 pitches for strikes.
Duke's response: He went seven innings, the longest outing for a Pirates opening-day starter since Francisco Cordova did the same in 1998, and allowed only Luke Scott's two-run home run in the fifth.
"I just wanted to get outs, keep us close," Duke said.
The defense helped there, too.
Center fielder Chris Duffy threw out two baserunners, including Chris Burke at home in the fifth. He barehanded Orlando Palmeiro's single out of the grass and nailed Burke with a frozen rope that landed in Ronny Paulino's mitt.
Third baseman Jose Bautista started two double plays off hot shots his way.
And second baseman Jose Castillo put down a rally in the sixth with a leaping grab of Carlos Lee's liner to start another double play.
"Tremendous across the board," Tracy said. "Those plays kept us in the game."
Still and all, Houston took that 2-0 lead into eighth with Oswalt continuing to pump away. And it was against that intimidating backdrop that the team with the fewest home runs in the National League last season showed in the unlikeliest of ways that it had not yet scrapped the mission.
Jason Bay connects for the winning two-run home run in the 10th inning.
McLouth, cold off the bench as a pinch-hitter, brought the Pirates' lone dent in Oswalt by smoothly riding a 1-2 slider in the direction from which it came and sending it over the 404-foot mark in left-center.
"It was away and a little up," McLouth said. "The way he was pitching, you weren't going to hit anything that wasn't a mistake."
Houston's closer, Brad Lidge, opened the ninth by fanning Adam LaRoche on three pitches and breaking Paulino's bat on a slow groundout.
Two outs.
Game over?
Not yet.
Nady uppercutted a 1-2 fastball, slightly down and in, into the porch above the tall left-field fence to bring a 2-2 tie as the capacity crowd of 43,803 sat back down and fell silent.
"With Lidge, you've got to try to have a zone," Nady said. "Fortunately, I got a fastball in and was able to put some wood on it."
"What a feeling in the dugout when X hit that ball," shortstop Jack Wilson said. "It's not just that it's opening day. It's that we're doing this in Houston. We're doing it against against Roy Oswalt. I mean ... my gosh."
Good points: The Astros had been 42-11 against the Pirates at Minute Maid, and Oswalt was 18-10.
The gosh factor continued.
Wilson's one-out single off Chad Qualls in the 10th brought up an exasperated Bay, 0 for 4 to that point. And he quickly saw two strikes.
But, when Qualls tried to sneak a third fastball by him, Bay tore into the pitch with a ferocious hack and shot it high over the left fielder Lee, who never moved as it easily cleared the fence for a 4-2 lead, the Pirates' first of the evening.
Bay was even more forceful when high-fiving teammates in a rare show of exuberance.
"It was just such a good feeling," he said. "Such a big moment for the whole team."
Torres made sure it all counted with a 1-2-3 10th for his first save as full-time closer, fanning Burke and fielding two comebackers, the second of them a look-what-I-found liner by Mark Loretta.
It was, the schedule will confirm, just one out of 162.
At the same time, as was glaringly apparent on and off the field, the meaning to these Pirates -- especially those who opened 2006 with six consecutive losses and never recovered -- was greater than that.
"You look at how we picked each other up again and again ... that's the kind of thing you can build off," Bay said. "It's a great way to start."
(Dejan Kovacevic can be reached at dkovacevic@post-gazette.com)
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