The meeting in the visiting manager's office at Miller Park added insult to Andrew McCutchen's already infuriating season. Before the Pirates headed to Atlanta last week, manager Clint Hurdle told McCutchen to sit the next series. It wasn't a request so much as an order, a distress signal spelled out on the lineup card as the manager tried to right a season sinking steadily deeper.
McCutchen was in no mood to rest, and the timing troubled him, too. His parents, Lorenzo and Petrina, were flying to Atlanta to celebrate their 24th wedding anniversary by watching their son play baseball. They spend every Aug. 1 anniversary watching McCutchen and the Pirates in person.
The way McCutchen was raised, you didn't take days off. Before he became a millionaire ballplayer, he was a boy living in a trailer park outside Fort Meade, Fla. His father worked the graveyard shift at a phosphate mine. His mother was a data entry clerk at the sheriff's department.
"There are life struggles we've gone through as a family that are way worse than baseball struggles, that mean way more than the game of baseball," McCutchen said Friday. "Trying to figure out what you're going to eat? That's a struggle. Worried about keeping the lights on? That's a struggle. Those things are what we define as a struggle, what we define as life-changing.
"When it comes to this game, it's a game that we love, and there are ups and downs that you go through. But, as far as a struggle goes, we don't define a .240 as a struggle. We just define it as a learning curve. It's something you can get better."
The elder McCutchens booked tickets to Pittsburgh. Their son was back in the lineup for a weekend series against the Cincinnati Reds, and they saw him go 2 for 9 with three walks. Through 100 starts, he has a .241 batting average, a .314 on-base percentage and 109 strikeouts, 23 shy of a career-high.
"We continue to believe he's one swing away from getting white-hot," general manager Neal Huntington said Sunday, adding the 2013 National League MVP might be pressing at the plate.
The belief is rooted in McCutchen's track record _ from 2012-15, he hit .313 with a .404 on-base percentage.
The smack of reality, though, is McCutchen's enduring slump no longer can be explained by a slow start or a thumb injury. The Pirates (55-54) are rapidly running out of time for their franchise player to pull from his season-long spiral. It might not happen soon enough, if at all.
"He's still one of the special players in the game, and he's been so successful that he does carry that weight on his shoulders," Huntington said. "He knows where we are, and knows that for us to get where we want to go he's going to be very important to that. We've tried to get him to take a deep breath, tried to get him to go back to being Andrew McCutchen and not try to live up to Andrew McCutchen."
On his eighth-inning single Sunday, McCutchen turned as he left the batter's box and seemed to stare down someone in the stands near the Reds dugout. He's heard from fans at the ballpark and many more on social media who are quick with criticism or, nearly as often, ways to fix his swing.
"I do my best to stay off social media," McCutchen said. "The only thing I really have is Twitter. As far as mentions and all that, we're human, so you could have a 100 great comments and one bad one, and that one bad one is going to stick out to you more than the 100 good ones."
It's a strange spot to be in, a confounding case study of a city's baseball hero now on the fritz.
Some symptoms can be spotted with the naked eye: McCutchen isn't spraying fastballs around the yard like he used to; he's pulling one grounder after another into infield shifts; he's whiffing on a career-high 11.9 percent of swings, according to Fangraphs; and he looks almost lost against left-handers, his current .235 average against them a steep drop from his .320 career left-hander split.
McCutchen thinks there's something people are forgetting as they try to figure him out.
"I hit .259 in 2011," he said. "A lot of people don't remember that, though, because of what I've done '12, '13, '14 and '15. People forget about '11. ... I think a lot of people just got spoiled with the success I've had in the past. The past four or five years for me have been really good. A lot of times people seem (to think) that's normal, that's regular, that's him, that's what happens."
McCutchen said there are good players hitting even worse than he is. Other regulars under .241: Bryce Harper, Matt Wieters, Russell Martin, Jason Heyward, Jose Bautista and Todd Frazier.
"No time to hit the panic button," he said. "I'm still me.
"Nothing has changed. Just because I'm hitting .240 doesn't mean I'm not Andrew McCutchen. That's what people need to remember."
