By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
CHICAGO -- For the 96th opening day at not yet beautiful Wrigley Field, nature dealt this town's north end a full afternoon of pure ugly. Rain and wind and cold co-mingled to emphasize the fact that no ivy will cling purposefully to the old yard's outfield walls for more than a month yet, but somehow Pirates second baseman Neil Walker was not of the elements Friday afternoon; he was a man in full bloom in the new baseball season's very first hours.
You can't take what Walker did in the fifth inning Friday purely for its aesthetic value. Grand slams that fly onto Sheffield Avenue are always moments of treasured natural beauty. Grand slams that rocket your team out of a desultory two-run hole carry some additional burst of luminescence. But even a grand slam that stamps the name Neil Martin Walker into the footnotes of Pirates history next to that of Roberto Walker Clemente does not particularly convey the full import of this one swing.
"Big-league at-bat," yipped Pirates manager Clint Hurdle. "Came at the right time."
But the new Pirates manager has been in the game long enough to know it was more than that, too, and would indicate as much upon some further reflection.
This after all was Walker, on his first opening day, presuming to remind all the young dudes on still another overmatched Pirates roster that the way you win at this game is to think -- not overthink -- and to compete, rather than go through the motions and hope for the best.
"It was the first time [Ryan Dempster] had been in trouble," Walker recounted in the ancient visitors clubhouse. "He'd just walked Jose [Tabata], and he'd tried to get me out with stuff away the first two times."
But there was still more to the game's suddenly inverting karma than that as well.
When Walker stepped in against Dempster, 33, with the bases loaded, this Cubs right-hander had missed the strike zone with 14 of his previous 19 pitches. When he ran the count full on Walker, he had missed with 17 of the previous 24.
Still, 41,358 wet Wriglians came to their feet at that moment, roaring to conjure strike three.
"He threw me a good cutter that I was able to foul away," Walker said, "then he came back with a fastball down the middle at 92 miles an hour."
Walker jacked it high into the gray sky. Said he didn't know until he was halfway to first that it was leaving. It tumbled over the back railing of right-field bleaches and bounced high of some Sheffield concrete.
Instantly it was 4-2 Pirates, would soon be 6-2 when Walker doubled and Andrew McCutchen homered in the seventh, and this club's pre-abused pitching staff sealed a 6-3 victory when five of its agents strung together nine very professional innings. Moreover, Hurdle, who spent part of the morning media obligation trying to downplay the significance of openers, spun it 180 degrees unabashedly.
"I don't want to take away their joy," he said. "They need some joy."
Tell me about it.
It should not have been lost on anyone in that crammed clubhouse that Walker grabbed joy by throat in this case. How tempting, after all, for a young hitter in his first opener against a 15-game winner, to hope for the best in that situation, to cautiously and even reasonably project that the 3-2 pitch was more than likely going to be ball four, that he could probably just stand there and force home the first Pirates run of the game. And all that could have occurred to him twice.
"It crossed my mind," he said.
But he dismissed that consciously. Beat it into the dirt.
That's what Hurdle knew about this at-bat better than anyone, what he appreciated more than anyone.
"We encourage these guys to play to win," he said. "We can't play not to lose. We can't play timid. We have to take some chances."
And nowhere in that seven-pitch at-bat, even though Dempster had fanned Walker on three pitches in the first and dismissed him with one pitch in the fourth, did Walker retreat by one single mental step.
"No," Hurdle said. "He was up there with bad intentions."
Exactly.
What happened to that? It's the way the Pirates are supposed to play. The way baseball players in this town are supposed to be. They don't buckle. They swashbuckle.
I could tell you Walker knows this because he's from Pittsburgh, but inconveniently for history, he's all of 25. In the previous winning summer for the Pirates, he was 6. But he was obviously moved by the mention of Clemente, owner of the only other opening day grand slam in 125 years of Pirates history.
The Great One launched his off Philadelphia's Jim Owens April 10, 1962.
"That's obviously a tremendous honor," he said. "I feel very fortunate."
He will have a hard time forgetting April 1, 2011. It wouldn't hurt for everyone else in the organization to make that homer mean something.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11092/1136513-150.stm#ixzz1IWb5ZqXa
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