ST. LOUIS -- It wasn't quite Johnny Cueto dropping the ball, but I'm betting it's as close as we'll come to a crowd distraction at any Major League Baseball game in 2020.
The clock high atop Busch Stadium's scoreboard showed 9:43 p.m. Central time on this Friday night when Ryan Helsley, a righty reliever for the Cardinals, stepped off the mound. And then stayed there. At which point pretty much everyone in the place appeared to pick up on the unmistakable sound of a boombox emanating from the walkway beyond center field, blasting Toto's 1978 hit 'Hold the Line.'
Come on, don't act like you aren't already humming it:
Right on. From the well-coiffed, bespectacled bad boys who also brought you 'Africa' and 'Rosanna.' Because that's the kind of year we're all having.
Anyway, before this column flunks every conceivable rule of sports journalism, I'll go all Associated Press with the lede: The Pirates lost to the Cardinals, 5-4, in their 134th season opener and Derek Shelton's managerial debut. Joe Musgrove conceded two solo home runs, the visitors couldn't really touch St. Louis counterpart Jack Flaherty, and two late rallies fell short, including one in the ninth inning.
There. Now back to Toto.
Helsley was a good sport and got back on the mound to go about his business, as the baseball men love to say. But up in the upper deck of left field, Fredbird, the beloved mascot here who was the only sentient being permitted in any upper deck, couldn't help but turn his beak that way. And the security officer about 75 feet to my left also gazed out there. And the TV reporter six sections over, she looked, too.
Which is to say, nearly everyone in the place. Seriously, the Purell dispensers had the people outnumbered 100 to 1. Most of the extras were in the press box, and even here I counted only 13, just two from Pittsburgh -- us and the Post-Gazette -- plus seven photographers in the lower concourse and no more than a handful of other stadium officials.
"All that red" was how Trevor Williams would describe it.
Wow, what a sight. What a night.
Toto or not, Missouri or not, we most definitely aren't in Kansas anymore as a civilization, are we?
But you know, something else occurred that caught my attention, that felt surprisingly important, that made me think about something other than coronavirus, racial injustice, politics and all of the year's countless other painfully real cataclysms ... and it was a baseball game.
Wait, no, it was stupid, little things in a baseball game. And man, was that ever a release.
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I didn't like a lot of how the Pirates lost. But I sured loved feeling that it mattered.
"I was happy with the way our guys played," came Shelton's unflinching assessment afterward. "We came up short, but we did a lot of good things tonight. I think that’s the thing. That’s the most important thing. We did a lot of good things tonight."
Little things.
Musgrove pitched wonderfully, overall. Except for two pitches, a hanging curve to Tyler O'Neill in the third inning and a 92-mph meatball to Dexter Fowler in the fifth, both deposited into bullpens for a 2-0 St. Louis lead:
It's a shame that's all I'll show because again, he pitched wonderfully: 5 2/3 innings, charged with three runs though one came after his exit, five hits, seven strikeouts and three walks. His pitch count of 99 wasn't optimal, but St. Louis' patient hitters wait out everyone.
"The timing of my delivery wasn't at its best, and I think that's where I lose a little bit of velocity," Musgrove said. "If I can make one improvement on the outing, it'd be getting the breaking balls over for strikes early and the changeups for strikes early. My execution, I thought was pretty good. I mean, the two pitches that I left right over the heart of the plate were the two they did damage on. But other than that, I felt I executed pretty well."
He's right. Chiefly, he succeeded in working up in the zone, as had been his primary objective working with Oscar Marin all through the offseason and the shutdown.
I brought that up with Musgrove, and he replied, "I mean, that's a big pitch, especially when I have a lot of stuff that has heavy downward action. A lot of sinkers, cutters, sliders, curveball, everything I throw has some sink action on. So when I can ride it up above the zone, switch the eye levels up, then that ..."
Then that high heat rips their arms off. Good for him. Two little things hurt him. He also showed he can be better.
Oh, and I can't forget this from Musgrove:
What an athlete. No one will remember it because it came in a loss, but that's superlative athleticism in backing up the ricocheted throw, then nailing Kolten Wong going for the Little League home run to finish the fifth.
I asked Musgrove if he even looked at home plate.
"I didn’t really think I had much time at all to get rid of it," he answered after a hesitation. "As I threw the ball, I saw that I had more time than I thought and kind of wished that I had set my feet a little more."
He actually found a flaw with the sequence and dodged credit completely. Clubhouse leader and all that. Little things.
The offense contributed little more than little things most of the evening.
That was particularly true against St. Louis' ace, and I do mean ace in the old-school sense. Flaherty's seven innings saw two runs, both in his final inning, and lots of soft contact even among their six hits. Pinpointing all his pitches with seeming effortlessness, he'd also rear back for a little extra when needed.
"There were times he'd just dial up from 94 to 97," Shelton remarked. “You watch him on video and think he’s good, then when you watch him live, you realize why he’s pitching opening day for them.”
Flaherty's first six innings required only 62 pitches. He struck out six, walked no one.
“Strikeouts come when they come, and you take the outs when you get them,” he'd tell St. Louis reporters. “If they come quick, they come quick and you get some efficient innings."
That was the game's biggest facet. Still, it felt like little things hurt the Pirates' offense, too.
In the eighth, the inning after Jacob Stallings' two-run single cut the Cardinals' lead to 3-2, the top of the order was up against, mercifully, anyone else in the form of Helsley. This is where, I was thinking at the time, the game gets won or lost. So when Helsley zipped through Kevin Newman, Bryan Reynolds and Adam Frazier on 15 pitches ... yeah, those three will come around and do more good than harm over these 60 games, but this snapshot stung.
Little things, little things.
How about Shelton turning to Clay Holmes, of all people, upon pulling Musgrove in the sixth with runners at the corners and Yadier Molina coming up?
Yeah, that Clay Holmes, part of the endless string of Neal Huntington/Kyle Stark pitching busts.
I'm guessing that one had you grousing at the TV, and not mulling any global crises.
Holmes would give up a bloop single into shallow left, but he also emphatically set down his final four hitters, including all three in the seventh to keep the score close.
In asking Shelton about summoning Holmes, I mentioned that might not have been a popular move in 2019, and his response was pointed.
“First off, we’re not in 2019," he began. "I’m dealing with everything that’s current with our group, and what we’ve seen out of Clay Holmes is the ability to execute pitches. I thought he threw the ball really well. They hit a soft fly ball that ended up being an RBI. But he bridged the game for us. He gave us a chance to win. Anything for this year is all based on what we’ve seen this year, and the strides Clay has made have been tremendous."
That's neat. It's a little thing, too, but the manager making his own calls on his own observations can only be a positive.
Not positive at all: Richard Rodriguez.
There's no excuse for a 90-mph fastball from that arm. Not if he'd prepared himself properly through this shutdown. That's the same garbage he was throwing in the Cleveland exhibitions. And that's not a little thing.
The Pirates rallied again in the ninth, again through their middle three.
Josh Bell scorched a ball off St. Louis third baseman Tommy Edman for what was hilariously called an error even after the 102-mph exit velocity was posted. That would've been his second hit. Colin Moran doubled for his second hit. And Jose Osuna followed his own second hit, a two-run bouncer up the middle.
The score was 5-4. Nobody out. Man on first. Kwang Hyun Kim, a 31-year-old South Korean transplant making his big-league debut on the mound.
Exciting stuff. And this, maybe more than any point on the night, is when baseball seemed like it was the only thing in the world. You know, the way it used to.
So, the wheels start spinning: Pinch-run for the big-bodied Osuna? Bunt him up to get the tying run into scoring position? Pinch-hit somebody?
Turns out none of the above happened. Guillermo Heredia hacked at the first pitch he saw from a guy who'd never gotten an out in the big leagues, and popped up. And Stallings, after digging a 1-2 hole, sliced into a 4-6-3 double play to end it.
I had a million questions I could've asked Shelton about this inning alone, obviously, but I chose the pinch-runner: Had he or Don Kelly discussed lifting Osuna?
"We talked about it," Shelton replied. "I think if he would've gotten to second, we may have. In the situation with where we’re at and what we had coming up, we didn’t make the move."
He didn't elaborate, and the Zoom interview format isn't kind to follow-ups.
But ... maybe Osuna would've gotten to second if he'd been bunted up. And maybe "what we had coming up" would've been different if pinch-hitters had been used.
Whatever. Smallest possible margin of defeat. Little things. But fun things, too. I wasn't tracking coronavirus death rates or reading about violence in Portland.
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Not that one can ever escape it.
On this same day, we lost 1,178 Americans to the coronavirus, the fourth day in a row of 1,000-plus, with cases continuing to rise across the country, and that can never be normalized:
Our daily update is published. It was far and away the biggest testing day on record, with 930k results reported. States also reported the second highest number of cases ever (75k) and, for the fourth day in a row, more than 1,000 deaths (1,178). pic.twitter.com/KMqWgf5iQ7
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) July 24, 2020
There was no way to see all this emptiness, inside and outside the stadium, and not think of it.
We also continued to face forward, as most of the nation's doing, at the ongoing, righteous fight against racial justice.
The Pirates' Jarrod Dyson elected to kneel during the national anthem, the only player on either side to do so. In a show of support, Shelton left his spot near home plate to stand alongside Dyson:
[caption id="attachment_1007560" align="aligncenter" width="540"]
Jarrod Dyson and Derek Shelton. - AP[/caption]
Regardless of anyone's stance on the subject, specific to this or in the broader sense, there can't be any question that racial injustice remains vibrantly in the conversation at a level that hasn't been seen in a half-century.
Between that and the increasingly poisonous circus our politics have become ... yeah, give me a real, live ballgame, empty stadium, weirdness galore and all.
Baseball can't and shouldn't diminish the importance of the harsher, larger realities. But sports can play a role in our healing, as I've been writing all along. Because that counts, too. We've got nothing to gain as a society from dwelling 24/7 on the unprecedented challenges we're all facing. We'll shrink. We'll buckle. We'll have that much harder of a time emerging.
It's OK to invest in sports. As distractions go for Americans, they're right up there with sonic-boom Toto.
MORE PIRATES COVERAGE
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