A day after Jared Oliva and Brian Goodwin made their mark on the center field competition with home runs, Anthony Alford answered in a way that might have pushed him to the forefront.
Alford hit a two-run homer in the second inning, made a spectacular catch in the third, then doubled and scored the tying run in the fourth as the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Baltimore Orioles, 7-5, on Thursday in a Grapefruit League game at LECOM Park in Bradenton, Fla.
“When you make competition more fun,” Pirates manager Derek Shelton said, “you get the best out of guys.”
When it came to which play was his favorite, it was a no-brainer: chasing down a fly ball in the left-center gap and laying out to rob Cedric Mullins of a hit was Alford’s personal highlight on a day when he went 2 for 3 with two RBIs and two runs scored.
“Definitely the diving catch,” Alford said. “It’s funny. That’s my first fly ball of spring. And I was just thinking to myself, ‘Man, I’d really like to lay out for a ball.’ It just happened to happen today. Yeah, you’re going to run into some balls and hit home runs. I definitely want to make highlight plays in the outfield.”
The catch was a sign of Alford’s willingness to play the outfield with reckless abandon, something he brought from his days of playing quarterback at Southern Miss and safety at Ole Miss. More importantly, it was a pivotal play in Alford’s return from season-ending elbow surgery after he crashed into the center-field wall at PNC Park last September.
“I, for some reason, thought I could knock that wall down but, unfortunately, it ended up with me being on a table and having surgery a few days later,” Alford said with a smile. “That wall is undefeated. But I just kind of have that mindset that I have in football, when I was back there roaming on the field playing safety … when I’m in the outfield of if the ball goes up, I want to come down with it.”
It also allowed Alford to rip off the Band-Aid and prove he is fully recovered from the elbow injury, serving as a confidence booster for Alford and the Pirates coaching staff.
“When you go through an injury, especially the one that he went through and you spend as long as he did rehabbing to come back, then the first time you have to leave your feet, there’s a little bit of anxiety for everybody involved,” Shelton said. “To see him do it, to see him do it with no hesitation, to make the play, I think it checked a lot of boxes for a lot of us. It probably gave him a little bit of relief to get that out of the way.”
The Orioles tagged Mitch Keller for two runs on two hits and two walks in two innings. Cedric Mullins doubled to right, then scored on a Yolmer Sanchez single to center for a 1-0 lead.
The Pirates tied it on Todd Frazier’s RBI double in the first, then took a 3-1 lead when Alford drilled a Felix Hernandez sinker 393 feet to right field in the second. Not only did Alford go opposite field, he did so with power. It was the hardest-hit ball of the spring by a Pirates player, with an exit velocity of 108.8 mph, according to Statcast.
“(There was) a little bit of cross-wind. To go right-center field into it was fairly impressive,” Shelton said. “He’s a strong man. That ball was hit really well and was a no-doubter.”
Keller walked Jahami Jones to start the third before being replaced by Chasen Shreve, who allowed three runs on four hits. Sanchez singled and scored on Ryan Mountcastle’s double to tie the score at 3-3. Pat Valaika hit an RBI double to center to score Mountcastle and made it 5-3 on a single by Ramon Urias.
The Pirates chipped away at the lead, as Bryan Reynolds singled to center, reached second on a wild pitch by Hernandez, advanced to third on Frazier’s groundout and scored on an RBI single by Jacob Stallings.
In the fourth, Alford doubled, reached third on Andrew Susac’s groundout and scored on a wild pitch by Jorge Lopez to make it 5-5.
Will Craig gave the Pirates the lead in the seventh with a homer to left-center, and Arden Pabst had an RBI double for a 7-5 lead.
Chase De Jong is scheduled to start for the Pirates when they host the Toronto Blue Jays at 1:05 p.m. Friday in Bradenton.
Kevin Gorman is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Kevin by email at kgorman@triblive.com or via Twitter .
Categories: Pirates/MLB | Sports
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