In the far end of the Pirates’ clubhouse at PNC Park on Monday, past the putting mat and sitting atop a ping-pong table, were two boxes and three smaller plastic packages. Their contents became plenty obvious to Pirates fans during a much-needed 10-3 win over the Nationals.
The larger meaning, of course, goes much deeper, and it revolves around the 38-year-old who ordered Phiten necklaces, the franchise legend who transported everyone back into happier times, the Pirates leader who took a heavy load off of his team’s shoulders and showed that the old man still has his fastball.
Even better is the fact that McCutchen isn’t a gimmick guy. He’s not here for vibes or humor, though he excels at both. He’s here because he can still perform at a high-level, and what happened during one of the few feel-good games of the season was another reminder of that for me.
We’ve all been so fortunate to have watched McCutchen do this stuff for a long, long time. His relationship with the city and his influence over the Pirates is just ... nah, I’ll let Paul Skenes explain.
“That’s the blueprint,” Skenes was telling me after the crowd around his locker dissipated. “How a city can embrace you is pretty dang cool. Looking at him and seeing the legacy he has, the way the city embraces him, it’s pretty inspiring."
With the Pirates in need of a serious lift, the result of a 5-11 start, a moribund offense and so much negativity swirling, McCutchen acted on a hunch. It’s unclear if he had Phiten overnight the necklaces, but they nonetheless arrived here in time for a series against Washington.
Adam Frazier actually told me that McCutchen, who had been sporting a Phiten necklace with Lakers colors, had been thinking about doing this for around a week. Then Monday, following a sweep in Cincinnati, the boxes arrived.
“It gives us something to cheer and laugh about,” McCutchen said. “You just have to do that in this game. I guess that was my way of doing it.”
Added Frazier, “They worked. Got us going a little bit. Hopefully they work again [Tuesday].”
The necklaces are fun — and we’ll get back to that. But I don’t want to underplay McCutchen the baseball player here.
With Bryan Reynolds’ right shoulder limiting his defensive abilities, McCutchen has also been throwing it back to a previous era of Pirates baseball by playing a pretty darn good right field.
In a tense moment in the sixth inning Monday, McCutchen actually made an elite play, diving to take a hit away from Nationals catcher Keibert Ruiz.
McCutchen joked that he only dove because he wanted to wind up on MLB Network, but don’t let his sense of humor obfuscate the point: There’s a reason McCutchen is doing what he’s doing. A few of them.
Number one, he wants to play. It’s the easiest way for him to get in the lineup every day with Reynolds relegated to designated hitter duty. He’s also capable of doing it, which certainly helps.
But what McCutchen said after this one peeled back another layer of how he’s approaching this season.
Cutch will never tell us when he’s going to retire, an idea that I explored with him this spring, but he’s also making sure to not leave anything in the tank.
“Use it to my advantage and tell ‘em to run me into the ground,” McCutchen said of his increased usage in the outfield. “That’s what I’m here for. I wanna be able to crawl home. When I’m done, I’m done with the game. I don’t wanna be like, ‘Well, at least I was healthy!’ I don’t care about that, man.
“I obviously want to have a full season, but I wanna play every day and give it everything I have every single day. When I’m done, I’m done. I wanna be able to know I gave it everything I had.”
On this night, McCutchen singled and scored in the first, was hit by a pitch in the fifth and walked and scored in the eighth. Same as ever, his ensuing bat flip was elite. The catch was obviously impressive. And McCutchen playing the outfield once again gave the Pirates some needed lineup flexibility.
But his biggest impact was, well, bigger. It allowed everyone to breathe. It later had Cutch retelling the story of when Rod Barajas and A.J. Burnett saw “Dude, Where’s My Car?” on an off-day, and the whole “Zoltan” thing took on a life of its own.
Armed with the black-and-gold Phitens, which Reynolds joked took everyone back to middle school, the Pirates broke out with a season-high 10 runs to go along with 14 hits. Five players had two. The Pirates went 8-for-10 with runners in scoring position. It was unlike anything we’ve seen from this group so far.
“We were a little out of sync, a little out of balance,” Reynolds said. “We just had to put on our Phitens and get locked in.”
I don’t know what sort of shelf life the Phitens will have. It would be fun and hilarious if they took us all back to a winning era of Pirates baseball, if the Phitens served as the launching point to so much more. I’m also not holding my breath. We’ve seen a lot of bad baseball thus far, and more of it transpired against Washington.
Four errors, including another misplay by Oneil Cruz in center field, plus two cases where having an actual first baseman would’ve helped. Ke’Bryan Hayes and Enmanuel Valdez were thrown out because of baserunning blunders.
But I’ve also done this long enough to know when to take McCutchen seriously. There’s a special relationship between him, this city and this team. Cutch doesn’t always make it a point to interject himself, but when he does, the Pirates would be foolish not to listen.
“It’s just kind of cool that we were able to do something as a team, then it translated into the game and we had the game that we did [Monday],” McCutchen said. “You could say coincidence, I guess. But I think it’s more just these are the things that you need to do as a team sometimes to win ballgames. Sometimes it takes buying in just to do something. We just all bought in on it and ran with it. It worked out for us.”
It’s been an odd stretch for McCutchen, who wasn’t invited to Pat McAfee’s Big Night Aht and was seemingly misidentified by the Apple TV broadcast over the weekend, the Pirates most popular player in decades not getting the credit he deserves.
I also know that the Pirates’ start has been brutal. But if there’s one person who can lighten the mood and get thing pointed in a better direction, it’s the guy who’s certainly done it before.
“He’s still Cutch,” Skenes said. “There’s a reason he’s still playing. From what it sounds like, he’ll hang it up when it’s time for him to hang it up. And it’s not time yet.”
First Published: April 15, 2025, 8:00 a.m.
Updated: April 15, 2025, 11:31 p.m.
