7-6-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
Rowdy, Rowdy, Rowdy!
I was there when it started rebounding for Rowdy Tellez with the fan base. Sitting in Center Field, watching a game that felt like a sure loss before I even sat down.
It was a bullpen game, and at the time, we weren’t all that excited about Carmen Mlodzinski opening for Luis Ortiz, and shocker alert, the offense wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.
Rowdy Tellez came to the plate in front of a packed house on Pirate Parrot Concert Tee night at the ballpark and was met by what had become his customary boos. Thing is, he had started swinging the bat a bit better back in Toronto, but let’s be real, sell outs on a T-shirt night in June are not exactly 30 thousand educated and plugged in fans.
He sucked, they heard boos from the people who do it, they heard on the news he said fans shouldn’t boo, they joined in. It’s the only way to explain how a ball park full of people who were booing, flipping the switch to chanting his name.
See, fans who actually know what’s happening, know that one swing of the bat doesn’t take someone from awful to awesome.
Truth is, the Pirates weren’t even getting the low end of what Rowdy historically has done, and while they put forth a public face that they supported him, his hourglass was just about out of sand.
I had no expectation he’d hit 35 homeruns like he did in 2022 but I thought he could do better than his 13 in 2023. It was a good bet, he was injured much of 2023 after all, and I simply don’t believe there are many first basemen they could have signed who had more potential. Rhys Hoskins is he popular name, but he’s only caught 40 games, many of which he was defensively replaced. He has hit 12 dingers compared to Rowdy’s 7 homers, but again, Rowdy hardly touched a baseball for the first 2 months of the season.
In his past 30 games, 97 at bats, he’s slashing .309/.350/.546.
If you just parachuted in to catch the Paul Skenes freak show, chances are you look at his season numbers and rightly see them as underwhelming. They are.
Rowdy Tellez has really experienced the worst of his career, and the best of his career in a matter of 3 months, and Pirates fans took the ride with him.
We heard a guy who wasn’t performing and just got here telling us to have more respect for a player that had damn near been the face of this franchise for the previous 3 seasons in David Bednar when he caught the boo birds.
As “punishment” for struggling himself, many of us decided to make sure he knew how wrong it was for him to lecture us. He didn’t know our pain! He didn’t have a right to pretend he could tell us how to act. I mean, look at him, overweight, not hitting at all, how dare you?
Now the thing is, he’s hitting, probably better than it’ll look like when it’s all added up at the end of the year because of how deep and dark the hole was early on, and fans are really starting to have fun with it.
Maybe this is all just natural fandom. The Yin and Yang of struggle vs performance and a frustrated fan base.
Maybe it’s a lesson that snap judgements really have no place in baseball. That’s not how the game works. It’s a series of series, a culmination of good and bad stretches. When they happen right out the gate, there’s no buffer of numbers to take the edge off.
Think about Connor Joe, started the year hot as hell, struggling now, but your perception of Joe never dipped as low as it did for Rowdy, even while in his past 30 games he’s hit .202.
If he started that way, first of all, the Pirates record would be much worse. Second, he’d in no way be seen as a positive contributor. I mean, without looking, do you see him as a .245 hitter? He is, but his hot start is what many remember.
He has that hot streak in him, and before the season is over, he’ll get back on one, in fact he’s hitting .353 in his last 7.
Rowdy showed us just how wrong we can be, and sometimes it works in reverse.
Keep this situation in mind when you decide Henry Davis is a bust after 310 career MLB at bats. Guys get better, they get worse too, and sometimes everything seems to click after one swing. For Rowdy, it was a really long fly ball that went foul followed by a homerun into the bushes at PNC Park.
I couldn’t be happier for him. You can say whatever you want about Rowdy on the field, but off the field, he’s done nothing but be locker room glue, even while struggling. In fact, even while he was struggling mightily players would regularly talk about how he was always there to talk.
Management had his back, but trust me it had a limit. He could have just let the boos envelop him, instead, he took it as deserved and fought back. He fought back for a player that never deserved that kind of treatment, and quietly accepted it being directed at him. Leadership comes in all forms and this one has made his mark on Pittsburgh, even if it’s just this season.
Believing we know what everyone is going to be from the jump is a dumb but very human experience. This year’s team has shown us how wrong that can make us at times.
Steel City Pirates 