The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
July 26, 2012
Andrew McCutchen watches his home run against the Astros Tuesday July 3, 2012 at PNC Park. (Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review)
PITTSBURGH — Andrew McCutchen was 6 years old the last time the Pittsburgh Pirates made the playoffs, in 1992. He does not remember watching the series, but if he did, he would have rooted for the Atlanta Braves. They were his favorite team, close enough to his home in Fort Meade, Fla., and they won all the time.
For most of McCutchen’s youth, the Pirates lost. This season marks the 20th anniversary of their last winning team. Their next could come this season, with McCutchen playing the role of Barry Bonds — a do-it-all outfielder and the most valuable player of the National League. The Pirates are 56-42, and McCutchen is the major leagues’ leading hitter, at .368.
“In my opinion he’s the best player in the league, and the fact that he plays here in Pittsburgh, he’s probably lost some of that exposure, because we don’t play on national television that much,” Neil Walker, the Pirates’ second baseman, said. “You stick him in a place like New York or Boston, he may be the face of this entire league.”
McCutchen will be here for a while, having agreed in spring training to a six-year, $51.5 million contract with a club option for 2018. That already separates him from Bonds, who left Pittsburgh as quickly as he could to sign a free-agent deal with the San Francisco Giants. For a decade, the Pirates whiffed badly in trying to draft his replacement.
By 2005, when McCutchen was a senior in high school, the Pirates were on their way to their fifth of nine last-place finishes since Bonds threw wide of the plate as the winning run scored in Game 7 of the 1992 National League Championship Series. Yet McCutchen felt an odd sort of kinship with the Pirates. He wanted them to draft him, and they did, 11th over all.
“It was just the perfect storm,” McCutchen said Tuesday by his locker at PNC Park. “Their spring training field was an hour from where I was from. My high school had the same colors as the Pirates’ colors, black and gold. I felt like it was just the perfect place for me. Back then, in ’05, it was definitely a lot different than it is now.”
The Pirates are contenders for the second summer in a row, but they have a better record and a deeper roster than last July, when they briefly held first place before tumbling to 90 losses. On Tuesday, they traded prospects to Houston for a veteran starter, Wandy Rodriguez, and on Thursday, they welcomed their top prospect, outfielder Starling Marte, to the lineup. Marte responded by hitting a home run on the first pitch he saw.
As a lineup centerpiece, though, McCutchen may be the best there is. He has 22 homers and 66 runs batted in while leading the Pirates in steals, with 14, and the league in total bases.
“I’ve seen guys have great years, but what he’s done thus far, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Pirates first baseman Casey McGehee, who played in Milwaukee last season when Ryan Braun was the league’s M.V.P. “He’s getting infield hits, he’s driving the ball out of the ballpark, he’s getting clutch hits, he’s walking when he’s supposed to walk. It seems like he’s got a new trick every night, and it’s been incredible to watch.”
This is what Rob Sidwell envisioned when he scouted McCutchen in high school. The 2005 draft was loaded with talent — Braun, Ryan Zimmerman, Troy Tulowitzki, Jacoby Ellsbury — but after watching McCutchen at a national prospect camp, Sidwell ranked him even with Justin Upton, who would go first over all, to Arizona.
The only difference, Sidwell told McCutchen, was size; Upton is 6 foot 2, and McCutchen is four inches shorter. He shared that opinion with McCutchen, who agreed with it, showing a quiet confidence that Sidwell believed would help bring out his skills.
“He had lightning-fast hands, and he could really generate bat speed,” said Sidwell, who has scouted for 17 years and now works for the Los Angeles Dodgers. “He had the quickest hands I’ve ever scouted, and he could hit it a long way. He was a five-tool guy, even as a young, skinny, small-town kid.”
Sidwell and Ed Creech, then the Pirates’ scouting director, persuaded the team to draft McCutchen. Previous poor drafts and the steady losing in the majors might have made a college player more appealing, but McCutchen instantly became the Pirates’ top prospect.
In time, he has applied a more sophisticated approach to hitting to maximize his extraordinary bat speed. At first, said Gregg Ritchie, the Pirates coach and former minor league hitting coordinator, McCutchen held his hands much higher, with extra movement before impact.
Now he takes a more direct path to the ball, and he worked last winter to open his stance, allowing him to see the ball better and let it travel deeper. McCutchen said his legs were in a better position to let his hands go to work, and now he punishes pitches to all fields.
“His biggest adjustment is the mind-set of staying within his swing and not trying to destroy every pitch,” Neal Huntington, the Pirates’ general manager, said. “His mentality is to make the pitcher come to him and essentially hit the ball where it’s pitched.”
As McCutchen has improved, pitchers have noticed. He said he gets no more than one good pitch per at-bat, and if he misses it he probably does not see another. Clint Hurdle, the Pirates’ manager, said McCutchen had focused on hitting the ball just to the right of center field and had an uncanny knack for dismissing bad swings.
“His mental approach right now is as good as I’ve ever seen any player have, and his mental toughness,” said Hurdle, who played for Kansas City in 1980, when George Brett hit .390. “I’ve seen some good ones, but right now, him committing to one thing every swing, one thing every at-bat, has really been unique.”
On Wednesday against the Chicago Cubs, McCutchen came up with a runner on first and two outs in the sixth inning of a tie game. He tried to check his swing on a 1-1 pitch, but the umpire ruled it a strike.
Flustered, McCutchen glared at the umpire, then stepped out of the box and quickly gathered himself. Down in the count, he blistered the next pitch to center for a single. Garrett Jones doubled home the go-ahead run, and the Pirates’ bullpen held down a 3-2 victory.
The team left town for a season-long 10-game trip, at the same point in the year that the 2011 version started sinking. The Pirates’ first stop this time is Houston, where they will meet up with Rodriguez, the new starting pitcher.
Rodriguez is not the splashiest addition, but he is an upgrade, and a symbol that the Pirates are aggressively trying to stop the most persistent losing streak in baseball. Hurdle likes to talk about making history, not enduring it, and the Pirates, at last, seem to be on the verge. McCutchen, the star who came to stay, is leading the charge.
“The fans are already here and they’re already happy to see what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re exceeding their expectations, we’re doing a good job and they’re happy. You can see it. You can tell by being around the city and interacting with different fans, they’re appreciative. But we’re not just going to be O.K. with what we’re doing now. We want more.”
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