Andrew McCutchen Preaching This Message To Pirates After Bizarre First Series

Starts to MLB seasons don’t come more unusual than what happened to the Pirates last week.

Pittsburgh lost three of four games in its season-opening series against the Marlins, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. The atypical element pertained to how the Bucs dropped those contests, as all three were via walk-off fashion at loanDepot park.

Pirates manager Derek Shelton admitted it was “challenging” to narrowly drop three games to open a new season. One has to imagine Andrew McCutchen felt the same way, but the 17th-year pro focused on positive reinforcement when he was asked about his early season message to the team.

“Lock it in and do the small things right,” Andrew McCutchen, who homered Sunday, said about what the message needs to be. “I’ll continue to knock on that because if you don’t, this is the situation and this is what can happen. This is the outcome when you don’t do the small things right. Execute when you need to execute, do the things that you need to do when you are hitting and we’ll be fine. But when you don’t do that, you end up 1-3.”

McCutchen and company will try to bounce back beginning Monday when they visit the Rays for the first of three games in Tampa Bay. First pitch is scheduled for 7:05 p.m. ET.