"Believe me, we're that team from the first half. What you saw was real."
That was Steven Brault. On my final day in Florida this past spring, I'd been asking a few of the Pirates why anyone should take them seriously in 2020 when, even after they'd flirted with contention through a fun first half, they fell flat on their collective faces. And to be honest, I wasn't expecting much. If anything, maybe a little contrition over the epic collapse that followed.
Nope. They all sounded like Brault.
"We're a good baseball team," Bryan Reynolds would tell me that day. "We know that. We were out there and felt it."
"I think we're actually a lot better than that," Josh Bell would tell me. "We were missing some key guys, a couple got hurt, we never really had Greg ... I always think of what more we could've done."
Gregory Polanco, he meant. And I could list a bunch more.
Anyone can say anything, of course, especially in the spring. But, as Brault brought up, I did see it. And I did think it was real.
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