Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
June 22, 2012
Pittsburgh Pirates' Andrew McCutchen (22) hits a pitch for a double with the bases loaded against the Minnesota Twins, driving in three runs in the second inning of the baseball game on Thursday, June 21, 2012, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)
Anyone who scoffs at the fearful notion among baseball's so-called purists that instant replay will eventually cannibalize the game needs to reference the Pirates-Twins tussle Wednesday night at PNC Park for the final, dramatic, smoking gun evidence.
It was then and there, let the portentous history show, that a rogue replay episode played the key role in deciding not merely a home run or a fair-or-foul boundary call, but an actual result.
Replay viewers were, in fact, the first to know that in the nightly pierogi race, the photo finish between Jalapeno Hannah and the very intelligent Oliver Onion, Hannah had indeed won by less than the length of her purse.
There was indisputable visual evidence, and all grumbling immediately ceased, save for that which continues to burble from the people who still wonder why the Jalapeno dame gets to carry a purse in the first place.
But, look, the point is to get it right, and they got it right.
Before long, available technology will absorb everyone and everything in its path, sometime after swallowing everything in baseball within the range of a lens.
Someone like Joel Peralta, in that not-very-distant era, will never be able to carry a glove adorned with a foreign substance to the pitchers mound, because as soon as he crosses the foul line, 15 digitized infrared sensors will instantly alert the authorities, at which point six representatives of the commissioner's office in ill-fitting suits will sprint toward the mound and beat an eight-game suspension out of him.
No appeals.
But there is a phenomenon presenting itself to baseball right now, this summer, right here in river city, that no technology known to man nor to the CIA nor to NASA nor possibly even to CMU (possibly, I said) can validate, and it is perhaps best framed by this question:
How do these 2012 Pirates, who came into play Thursday night with only three batters hitting so much as a modest .250, whose 230 runs scored was still the fewest in baseball after 67 games, find themselves only two games out of first place on June 22?
It's a magic show.
This latest episode looked perfectly conventional, a 9-1 thumping in the Pirates' grand Lumber Company tradition, with doubles and triples and homers flying all over the North Shore, but is that elongated portion of our program when nine runs represented a decent week officially over?
"Nothing is official in this game," Andrew McCutchen rightly pointed out. "But we are doing a lot better job as hitters than we had been doing, with a lot more consistency. Now we have to keep it up."
Not one has really so much as approached the consistent excellence of McCutchen, who Thursday night tripled, doubled, went 3 for 4 and drove in three runs in a game he polished his batting averaged to .339. In fact, when popular utility man Josh Harrison singled in the second, he vaulted onto the Pirates' little Mount Rushmore of .250-plus hitters with McCutchen, Neil Walker, and Garrett Jones.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/sports/gene-collier/incredible-magic-show-keeps-pirates-in-contention-641488/#ixzz1yW0czbzk
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