Monday, May 14, 2007
Jose Bautista grabs his leg after being tagged out by the Braves' Jarrod Saltalamacchia yesterday at PNC Park. Bautista sustained a sprained ankle on the play.
By Dejan Kovacevic
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Take your pick.
The Pirates finally ...
A. Found a pitcher with a high enough career ERA that they could hit.
B. Found a defense generous enough to help them along on the basepaths.
C. Found a way to look something other than petrified at the plate.
Or, it might well have been D, all of the above.
Those rare sounds reverberating through PNC Park, that of the home team's bats making firm contact with baseballs, resulted in -- sit down for this -- a 13-2 thumping of the Atlanta Braves yesterday afternoon in which the Pirates' offense rang up a season-high 18 hits, drew seven walks and went 9 for 19 with runners in scoring position.
"That was pretty nice," manager Jim Tracy said, smiling. "Offense throughout the lineup."
"That gives us a little taste of what we're capable of," first baseman Adam LaRoche said after a double and two walks. "I don't want to fool anybody and say we're capable of scoring eight or 10 runs a day, but you saw the quality of the at-bats, the way we worked the count and took walks, the way we fought off tough pitches ... it was fun."
OK, so Atlanta's pitcher, Anthony Lerew, was riding buses with Class AAA Richmond a week ago, had a 6.75 career ERA in Major League Baseball and was starting a game at the top level for only the second time. Five of the Pirates' runs and seven of their hits came in his 32/3 innings.
And yeah, two other runs came on third baseman Pete Orr's throwing error in the fourth that handed the Pirates a 5-0 lead. The Braves were charged with two wild pitches and a passed ball, too.
But that did little, it seemed, to diminish the magnitude of the event.
Jack Wilson eludes the tag of Braves catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia yesterday at PNC Park.
For one, the Pirates topped seven runs for the first time. It came in their 36th game, which is one game longer than the previous franchise record for such futility from the outset of a season, that in 1965.
For another ...
"Hey, that was outstanding," shortstop Jack Wilson said after reaching base all five times up, three of those on singles, and driving in a run. "It was just fun to be out there. We got on base, we stole, we did hit-and-runs, did everything offensively a team can ask for."
Well, there were no home runs.
Still, go figure a team looking so thoroughly lost, then looking like it could extend innings for hours.
"That's baseball," Wilson said.
A night earlier, center fielder Chris Duffy was lugging a 4-for-34 May around his neck as he spoke in a nearly silent clubhouse about how poor hitting can be contagious.
Yesterday, he was 3 for 4 with a double, a walk, a stolen base and a sacrifice bunt.
"I guess it's pretty evident that contagious goes both ways, huh?" Duffy said. "You get that early lead, and you just see people relax. It's not something you talk about in the dugout or anything. It's something you subconsciously feel."
Other standouts on a day when every starting position player had a hit and no fewer than two men reached base safely in every inning: Freddy Sanchez went 3 for 6 with three RBIs; Jason Bay and Ronny Paulino each went 2 for 4 with two RBIs; and Ryan Doumit stayed sizzling with an RBI double and a single.
To be sure, Pirates starter Ian Snell was not complaining. He had been getting only 2.4 runs per game of support, but he seized upon the early lead and went seven solid innings -- two runs, seven hits and seven strikeouts -- to improve to 3-2 with a 2.38 ERA.
"It felt good to work with that five-spot," Snell said.
Even the only downer to the day wound up brighter than initially feared.
For now, anyway.
Third baseman Jose Bautista's left ankle was sprained in the sixth inning, when he was thrown out at home plate by left fielder Willie Harris after tagging up on a Doumit flyout. Bautista stepped on the left shoe of catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and the ankle rolled back in an ugly way.
He lay writhing in pain, as the crowd of 19,484 fell silent. But he was helped off three minutes later and, within a half-hour, was walking about the clubhouse in a soft boot-cast.
X-rays detected no fracture, and his status was listed as day to day. He will be examined again this afternoon, after which more should be known.
"It hurt a lot at the time, but it didn't feel too bad a couple minutes later," Bautista said. "I was worried about something worse than a sprain when it happened."
Bautista, in his first season as an everyday player, is batting .260 with two home runs and nine RBIs, and is playing Gold Glove-caliber defense.
"I took a deep breath," Tracy said of seeing Bautista go down.
Jose Castillo took Bautista's place at third base and likely will assume some starting infield duty -- second or third -- for as long as Bautista is out.
The Pirates avoided a three-game sweep and improved to 16-20.
(Dejan Kovacevic can be reached at dkovacevic@post-gazette.com.)
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