In Charlie Wilmoth’s Dry Land (a great read to prep yourself for spring training if you didn’t read it last year!), he’s got an interview with former Indianapolis Indians’ play-by-play guy Scott McCauley where Scott talks about how Pirate fans would obsess over minor league players in a way that sort of befuddled every other minor league broadcaster that he’d ever met. The reason for that, of course, was that by the mid 00s, Pirate fans were so starved for any sort of hope that we’d begun obsessively combing the minor leagues, desperately trying to find it.
Somewhere along the line, and I can’t even remember when it started, a lot of fans started looking for this impossible Galahad of a baseball player to deliver the Pirates out of darkness and into the light. For a while, I became skeptical that, even should the Pirates reverse their fortunes, such a player existed. I was wrong. Here is the Andrew McCutchen player comment from Baseball Prospectus 2015.
For the first three years of his career, Andrew McCutchen was good in interesting ways. In his first season, he flashed a little bit of unexpected power. In his second year, he the power tailed off a bit, but he put together a really solid 154 games. In his third year, his batting average plummeted, but he drew a ton of walks. Because his wRC+ hadn’t budged from year to year, some people thought he had plateaued. Instead, he exploded in 2012, hitting .327/.400/.553 with a career-high 31 homers. He faded a bit in the second half, though, and I went into 2013 cautioning that we’d probably just seen McCutchen’s best and that even if he regressed some, that he’d still be a great baseball player. So he hit .317/.404/.508, won the MVP award, and lead the Pirates to the playoffs. I guess technically, he did regress some. Last year, he somehow had the best offensive season of his career, hitting .314/.410/.542, leading the majors in wRC+. Please consider this for a moment: in 2014, in a league with Mike Trout and Giancarlo Stanton, the statistical best hitter in all of baseball was Andrew McCutchen.
There is no way to overstate the impact of Andrew McCutchen on the state of Pittsburgh baseball. In 2014 alone, he got white-hot in May and June to keep the club afloat after their awful start, then came back for the pennant race from a broken rib in 15 days exactly with no drop in performance despite being in obvious pain for several weeks after the injury. There is no hyperbole in this sentence: there’s not a player in baseball I’d trade Andrew McCutchen for.
<500 is an ongoing series previewing 2015 for each key Pirate in fewer than 500 words
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