Ben Cherington doesn't have a poker face so much as a poker existence.
So when he came aboard a conference call Monday from Bradenton, Fla., where the Pirates have mostly abandoned camp following Major League Baseball's advice over the weekend, it was never going to be easy to pick up emotion. He's calm, calculated, always seemingly considering all options even in mid-sentence.
And yet, when I asked the new boss, daring to broach actual baseball on a call that was understandably all about coronavirus, how he'd felt about his team at the stage where our whole world was interrupted, he opened with a slight pause and this: "It feels like a while ago now."
Yeah. Sure does.
"We were really excited about the kind of work that a lot of our players were doing," he kept going. "The energy and the attention that was going into making some adjustments, some important skill adjustments, and the attempt to bring that into games ... "
And then, with one of those mid-sentence adjustments, maybe realizing that some actually take Grapefruit League results seriously, he veered slightly, "Of course, when you have that happening, it's not all going to show up on the field right away. Sometimes it may affect outcomes in the short term. But I think Shelty and our coaching staff and our performance team and all of us around the players were excited about the kind of work that they were doing and the progress that some of our young players were making."
Trust me, I've spent enough time around the man since his hiring to appreciate that's the equivalent of Cherington shouting to the sky while streaking down the Boulevard of the Allies on any other year's St. Patty's Day.
He isn't alone. I made two trips to spring training and both times came away with one impression above all: Cherington, Derek Shelton and the players themselves saw themselves as incomplete, imperfect pieces within a puzzle that's got genuine potential.
I do, too. I've covered a 105-loss team, that miserable collection under John Russell in 2010, the one that sent the setup reliever to the All-Star Game. This isn't that team. Yeah, that one had a 23-year-old Andrew McCutchen and a year-older Neil Walker on the way up, but it also had Garrett Jones as the home run leader with 21 and not that much more in the lineup. In the rotation, it was all soft-tossing except for the early, enigmatic version of Charlie Morton. Worse, they were close to catastrophic defensively, so they just looked bad.
Now, that's not my bar. I'm bringing this up solely because that seems to be most people's bar.
I've never foreseen contention in 2020, but I'm also on record as never having cared about that. I wanted to see them get better, particularly the younger guys, enough that they'd be worth supplementing sooner rather than later.
Bryan Reynolds can get better, believe it or not. Kevin Newman, too. Josh Bell. Mitch Keller. Joe Musgrove. Cole Tucker. Ke'Bryan Hayes. A whole bunch more, notably all the flamethrowing children in the pen. And each of those individuals would support that sentiment without taking it as some insult. Heck, they'd probably be willing to write out entire theses on how they can get better.
As Steven Brault told me early in the spring, "Most guys in here ... it's not that we haven't hit our ceilings but that we aren't even close to our ceilings."
Maybe they'd have smashed their heads against the ceilings had the season started on time. Maybe they still will, if it ever gets going. But the excitement within the fold wasn't the usual, standard spring tripe. They'd felt it. They'd seen it.
Cherington wasn't done in conveying his disappointment from a pure baseball standpoint that it stopped.
"We came into spring training certainly with intentions to try to accomplish something, and I think, largely, that was happening. And we really wanted it to continue happening."
Same with all that symbiosis stuff that so many down there had been praising.
"Probably the hardest part about Saturday and then, even in the last two days as we've had to wind things down and players have left, is that it really was a sense of disappointment from our players that they couldn't continue that work. The initial response from the vast majority of our players several days ago, as information was still evolving, was, 'I really want to stay. We want to stay in Bradenton and continue this work.' I think they were excited about the work they were doing. But we will just need to continue that work and do it in different ways."
It was good work. Promising work. I could bore to tears with the specifics shared with me by certain players, but it was there. Tucker and Hayes lifting the launch in their swings. Bell's three-quarter throwing motion. Musgrove and Keller working high in the zone for the first time. The framing tricks being taught to the catchers by new instructor Glenn Sherlock. Also there was the glint in their eyes when they spoke, as if they'd encountered some great eureka moment in their careers.
For so many reasons, most of them beyond sports, it'll be wonderful to see that restarted.
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