Column: Someplace truly special … to pitch

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BY DEJAN KOVACEVIC

“It’s domination, man,” Gerrit Cole was saying. “Just total domination.”

The standard rap fare blared in the background, but very much at the foreground of the Pirates’ 3-0 throttling of the White Sox on this Tuesday night at PNC Park, not to mention their back-to-back-to-back shutouts or their six-game winning streak in which they’ve been charged with a total of one — count it, one! — earned run, it’s been … well, you know …

“Pitching, pitching, pitching,” A.J. Burnett was saying, right near Cole. “And not just starting pitching. All of it. Everyone.”

“It’s not about me, this game tonight,” Charlie Morton added, to Cole’s other side. He’d just put up seven zeroes and conceded all of four singles and a walk, so Tuesday night was, to be fair, mostly about him. “When you look at these six games, this is about all of this pitching, all these guys doing the job, everyone who takes the ball.”

No doubt about that one. Take a look for yourself:

Prates 18-1

Wow, right?

We’re quite possibly looking right there at the best week of pitching in the 129-year history of the franchise. And yes, I’m going all the way back to when pitchers were coal miners and men were men and freakish circumstances such as this were far more possible.

It’s sensational. It’s stupendous. It’s actually historic:

• There have been only six occasions in which any big-league team recorded at least five shutouts in a six-game span. And get this: The only two in which it happened before September, when rosters expand and lineups soften, were both by the Pirates: The 1903 National League pennant winners who participated in the inaugural World Series actually blanked six opponents in a row, and the current guys did five in six a century later.

“Their intent, their commitment to the pitch that’s called and the execution has been …” Clint Hurdle began saying, before joining a lot of us in failing to find an adjective. “I haven’t seen a run like this out of a starting rotation in all my years of managing.”

•  The three consecutive shutouts were the franchise’s first since Oct. 2-3, 1976, against the Cardinals at Three Rivers Stadium. Those were done by the all-lefty trio of John Candelaria, Jim Rooker and Jerry Reuss in the last three games of that season.

“Seriously?” Liriano, another lefty, asked. “Nineteen-seventy-what?”

• In the six games, the pitchers have a 0.21 ERA, 34 strikeouts and six walks. And the lone run allowed was by the noted slacker Cole, owner of the league’s best ERA at 1.71.

“Don’t worry,” Cole quipped. “I’ll get back on track.”

• The box score from Tuesday alone offered maybe the most striking sight of all: Morton finished up with a 1.62 ERA, Tony Watson at 1.83, Mark Melancon at 1.89.

“Guarantee you don’t see that too often in mid-June,” Watson said.

Yeah, guaranteed.

• Two of the shutouts were in extra innings. Which means, among other things, Heberto Andrade, the venerable bullpen catcher, has caught about a billion extra pitches.

“That’s OK,” Andrade said. “This is beautiful.”

• Kind of like guaranteeing it’ll be a while until another catcher matches Francisco Cervelli’s ridiculous run of catching 51 consecutive scoreless innings.

All while, you know, clearing the Notch.

I asked Morton to describe what it was like to be part of this and, given all he’s overcome in his career, I’d hope it’s easy to understand why he was a bit emotional:

Several other Pirates remarked on it, too, of course, with the most notable coming, predictably from Andrew McCutchen, who cracked: “It’s been pretty simple. We only have to score one. That makes it easy on the offense.”

I wanted more, though, and went down the hall to ask what it’s like to face these guys, beginning with Chicago manager Robin Ventura:

I’d hoped to hear from more White Sox, but the visiting room ranged somewhere between desolate — most players hid in an off-limits-to-reporters room — or flat-out defeated.

Understandable.

I don’t know if this is real. No one can, especially not given that all of these past three opponents are last in their respective divisions. In fact, the easiest prediction anyone could make at the moment is that the Pirates are due to give up runs in bunches over the next few days. Baseball’s gravity tugs relentlessly until it pulls things back to the norm.

At the same time …

“What’s happening here didn’t start this week,” Cole said. “This isn’t about who we’re facing or these six games or anything like that. It’s about the whole season.”

He’s right, of course. The Pirates’ overall pitching ranks No. 2 in the majors with a 2.75 ERA, not far behind the Cardinals’ 2.63. The starting pitching is No. 1 with a 2.83 ERA. Even the bullpen, unfairly maligned early in the season because the lack of offense was magnifying mistakes, now has a 2.57 ERA and ranks No. 3!

Watson has given up three earned runs in his past 24 games.

Melancon has given up one in his past 24!

“It feels like being part of something special,” Watson said. “It really does.”

Why shouldn‘t it?

Why shouldn’t this staff, if not necessarily staying below 2.00 with half their ERAs, continue to be among the majors’ deepest and most dynamic?

Why shouldn’t this organization, from Neal Huntington to Hurdle to Ray Searage to Jim Benedict, feel satisfaction even at this early stage of the summer, if only for having cultivated what Morton calls “an environment any pitcher at any level would want to be in?”

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Andrew McCutchen strides to the on-deck circle Tuesday as the sun sets Downtown. — JARED WICKERHAM / GETTY

Twenty years of losing inflicts immeasurable psychological trauma on a fan base. I get that. I get why, when the Pirates’ first six batters of the game Monday reached base and had run up a 5-0 lead, that Jordy Mercer making the first out in the No. 7 hole was enough to draw calls from across Western Pennsylvania for his trade, release, parole, whatever.

Ask someone where the Pirates currently stand among all teams in the majors, and they’ll almost surely guess a lot lower than third overall at 37-27. But there it is: It’s the Cardinals, Royals, Pirates and everyone else. And it feels like no one even knows.

Did you?

Well, that’s baseball, and yeah, that’s Pittsburgh. Our glass is half-empty until the bartender comes along to fill it back up. And then it’s about to be half-empty again.

At the same time, here in the city that the world’s first radio station famously used to call “Someplace Special,” I dare say we’re seeing something truly special on our North Shore.