Andrew McCutchen has made this drive hundreds of times before. On a spring morning, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ luminary with the ivory smile and jovial disposition pulls out of his gated home in a sleepy Steel City suburb. He’s wearing Off-White sunglasses and whipping a pickup truck that was comically large even before he had it lifted to a cartoonish height, requiring serious effort to climb into. He hops on Interstate 279 heading south, humming along through the calming greenery that lines the highway, until exit 1B spits him out into the city. After that it’s a few turns through the familiar streets of Pittsburgh’s North Shore neighborhood until he arrives at PNC Park, where he’s played over 700 games and will one day have his number 22 retired.
At this point, McCutchen, known simply as “Cutch” around these parts, could probably complete the trip with his eyes closed. But these days—back, after five years away, in the city where he began his career and became a star—he’s having a little more fun with it.
“I got an air horn put in,” he explains, before doing two little baby toots to demonstrate how loud the horn is without scaring the other cars off the highway. (It’s really something.) He’s well aware that this is the type of vehicle that would typically anger other drivers. It’s loud and proud and takes up a ton of space. But any grumpy Pittsburgh motorist shuts up quickly when they realize that it isn’t just any old yinzer behind the wheel. It’s Andrew McCutchen, the only Pirate of the last 40 years not named Barry Bonds to win an MVP award.
Being a star in a sport like baseball and a place like Pittsburgh has its benefits: going out on the town isn’t a total no-go, though during baseball season he gets recognized in public a little too often for his liking. But Andrew McCutchen is a big deal around here. He’s heard all the jokes about how he could run for mayor. And for now he’s fine using his clout to make sure that people don’t get mad when they see who’s blasting an air horn at them in rush-hour traffic.
“It’s almost like I’m just someone that people know,” McCutchen says. “They’re like, ‘Oh hey. That’s Cutch! What’s up?’”
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The main thing that’s up with Cutch right now is fatherhood. He and his wife, Maria, are parents to three children, none older than six. They still live in the home they bought back in 2013, the year he won MVP—only now it’s overrun with toys. We take seats one recent morning in his basement, which looks like several suburban playrooms I remember from my own childhood: there’s a mini trampoline, one of those plastic bubbles for kids to roll around in, and an army of plush characters manning the floors and sofa. The only difference is that there’s an MVP plaque and multiple Silver Slugger awards displayed on the walls. When we speak, we’re interrupted only by a call from upstairs that one of the kids’ toys has gotten stuck underneath the treadmill. Cutch briefly heads upstairs, and returns with a bright green monster truck slung over his shoulder.
McCutchen is currently playing a similar role with the Pirates. Where he was once the young prince of Pittsburgh, he’s now the elder statesman on a team that, as of this writing, is the fifth-youngest in baseball. The average Pirate is 28 years old. Cutch is turning 37 in October, and he’s doing his best to give these young first mates the tools they need to eventually be captains themselves. And maybe, just maybe, bring a little winning back to this historically challenged franchise too.
You’d be forgiven for feeling surprised that McCutchen came back. He is not old, but he is athlete old. (When I mention to a friend that I’m working on a story about Andrew McCutchen, they ask me if he is the Pirates’ manager now.) Everyone would have understood if he’d decided to spend his last years in baseball chasing a ring.
He didn’t, of course. And before we head to the ballpark, he’s ready to dish about getting from there to here: being traded by the Pirates in 2018, feeling lost bouncing between four different teams in the years since, and ultimately deciding to re-sign with the team that raised him, in the city that still retains its magnetic pull.
It is hard to overstate how bad the Pittsburgh Pirates have been for most of the last 30 years. From 1993 (the year Barry Bonds left for San Francisco) to 2008 (the year before Cutch made his big-league debut), the Pirates were the worst team in the National League. Excluding the newcomers—the Milwaukee Brewers, who switched to the National League in 1998, and the Arizona Diamondbacks, who did not even exist until that year—the Pirates ranked dead last in the NL in wins, home runs, and playoff appearances. Basically all the things that make people come to the stadium and, you know, care. The team had been assembled and gutted several times, with ownership employing the scummy-but-common practice of trading all its good young players just before they get expensive. But things started trending upward when Cutch and a handful of other homegrown stars—Gerrit Cole, Starling Marte, and Pedro Álvarez—reached the major leagues.
That quartet led the Pirates back to the playoffs in 2013, energizing a region that had been desperate for even a crumb of competent baseball. Few baseball games in recent memory were as loud as the Pirates’ win over Cincinnati in the 2013 Wild Card Game, where the PNC Park crowd—many dressed as actual pirates—rattled the opposing pitcher so badly that he literally dropped the ball on the mound before serving up a home run on the next pitch. That game was the emphatic declaration that the Buccos were back, baby. A custom Pirates jersey adorned with the number 13 and “OUR YEAR” on the nameplate, signed by the entire roster, hangs in the corner of McCutchen’s basement to commemorate that magical season. The 2013 Pirates won 94 games while McCutchen won MVP on the back of some undeniable statistical evidence. But MVP voting is swayed by narrative, too, and it was impossible to ignore how Cutch played. His relaxed hands at the plate uncoiled a lightning-quick bat, like a snake being provoked. His effortless cool brought comparisons to players Ken Griffey Jr., while the dreadlocks that flowed out of his hat gave Cutch a signature look, too.
The guy whose fingerprints were all over that ‘13 season—and the Pirates’ subsequent playoff runs in 2014 and ‘15—puts it in very simple terms.
“When I [initially] got to the Pirates, we were really bad,” McCutchen concedes. “Then we were really good for a few years, then we were really bad again. But those really good years, I felt, were going to catapult myself to a place where I’m on the Pirates [forever]. I said that plenty of times: I don’t want to go anywhere else, I don’t want to be anywhere else. But I understood my situation. I knew they were going to say they couldn’t afford me.”
That’s exactly what happened. Once the bubble burst and the losing began again, Pirates’ ownership started selling the team for parts. The city of Pittsburgh watched helplessly as fan favorites like Russell Martin, Neil Walker, and Francisco Liriano all left town, either because they were traded or got big money from a different team in free agency. When the 2017 campaign rolled around, the roster was younger, full of new faces, and back to being objectively bad. The writing was on the wall.
“I knew [the rebuild] was coming in 2017,” McCutchen says. “We were flying from St. Louis after the last game in ‘16, and we had SportsCenter on the TV. The first thing that I see come up: is Andrew McCutchen getting traded this offseason? The season’s not even—it’s fresh! I’m like, ‘This is what we’re talking about right now?’ That was my first inkling that it was going to happen.” But before the Pirates C-suite finally ripped the Band-Aid off, they pump faked their beloved player’s eventual trade.
“It popped up everywhere that I was getting traded to the Nationals, and it didn’t officially happen,” McCutchen shares. “So, I was waiting for my phone to ring. I’ll never forget: I was in Florida with my wife and we were about to go to my best friend’s sister’s wedding. My phone never rang. It sucked. I was prepping myself for it and it didn’t happen. I never got an explanation as to what happened, or why my name kept popping up. So I went into the ‘17 season with this fire under me, but it was a negative fire. The tables were turning. I was on the team but I felt like I was on the outside looking in. It just felt like one thing came after the other—and that was probably because of the way that I was taking it—but they pushed me over to right field even though I had been playing center my whole career. Based on these numbers, they thought I’d be better in right with Marte in center. I was just like… ‘Why? I’ve done everything for this place.’”
Cole was dealt to Houston on January 13, 2018. Two days later—having played the entire 2017 season under that cloud of Will they or won’t they?—McCutchen was traded to the San Francisco Giants, and the light went out on the Pirates’ best era since the early ‘90s.
McCutchen was devastated. “I cried for two days,” he says. “You don’t know what your emotions are going to be like until you’re actually going through it. That’s what happened to me. I went from ‘whatever’ to one day being sad. But when something means a lot to you, that’s what it’s going to feel like. I was in a space of grief for weeks. People were calling—they wanted me to go on Good Morning America! I didn’t do it.”
McCutchen felt he’d always been clear with the Pirates and famously stingy owner Bob Nutting. “I came up watching people like Derek Jeter and Chipper Jones,” he says. “Staples, who when you hear their name, you put it next to a team. That was the expectation for me! I wanted that.” But he didn’t feel that the Pirates wanted the same thing. “In my mind I’m like, you didn’t even try. Let’s just work something out!” McCutchen recalls. “I wasn’t asking for the moon, and I never have. The anger was because I felt like the move didn’t need to be made. They didn’t have to trade me. Even if the numbers and everything told them it was a good move, you didn’t have to. That made me pretty upset.” The mechanics of the trade didn’t sit right with him, either: he heard the news from his wife before hearing anything from the Pirates.
He played less than a full season with the Giants before the Yankees brought him in to be part of their failed 2018 championship push. He went 2-for-15 during that postseason and has not been back to the playoffs since. “I’ve always played better in places that are a little more relaxed and laid back,” McCutchen says now. “When you’re specifically talking about New York—that franchise has 27 championships, [so] the expectation is that you’re going to help them win a championship right away. They’re gonna let you know! I’ll never forget talking to [Yankee outfielder] Aaron Hicks and asking when the fans were going to like me.”
When the Yankee experiment ended, he latched on with the Phillies, but was derailed in Philadelphia first by an ACL tear then the topsy-turvy COVID season, and his post-Philly year with Milwaukee ended up being the worst offensive season of his career, the type that invites creeping thoughts about retirement. It took a toll on his mental health in other ways, as a miniature fall from grace can do.
“One thing you do notice, these teams that you’re on do want you,” he accepts. “For a short period of time, there was a feeling that the Pirates didn’t. That kind of hurt! It was like, ‘We like you, but we don’t need you anymore.’ That didn’t feel good. That’s all you ever want, to be somewhere that you’re wanted. For all those years, I still felt like there was something missing everywhere that I went. I wasn’t searching for something—I just didn’t feel complete.”
But here we are—McCutchen now the old head on a very young team, willingly employed once again by an organization that broke his heart five years ago.
In some ways, he might have known this was coming. He never sold the house, and always returned in the offseason—unlike many of his contemporaries, who choose to spend their winters in places that offer better weather and cushier benefits.
“A lot of the guys like to live where there’s no state taxes: Florida, Texas, Nevada, Tennessee. But this seemed like the better calling to be here,” McCutchen says. “I don’t regret it. It’s great for the simple fact that I have a home base. I go to the stadium, then I come back here. We had our routine. It was amazing. Then I got traded, and I finally felt what probably 90% of baseball players deal with: being in a state where you don’t live. When we were renting a home in San Francisco I was like, ‘Man, this is different.’ I had the perks of being here in Pittsburgh, so having that experience on the other side, it allowed me to empathize with other players, especially the ones who have children. Now that I’m back, I have an even greater appreciation for it. This is forever for us. This is a place we can raise our children and grow old.”
At first a reunion seemed unlikely. “The Pirates were on my radar this offseason. I did want to go back," he says. “[But] I was looking at the roster and the amount of outfielders they had. They’d just signed Carlos Santana and traded for Ji-Man Choi too. I’m like, ‘I don’t have anywhere to play there.’ My expectation was to be somewhere else and have to get used to another city again. My thing was, maybe we go somewhere where there will be an opportunity to win. I knew my role may be diminished [in that situation], but at least I’d have that chance to be on a winner.” Ultimately, though, those other teams didn’t have the same grip on his heart that the Pirates did. “These teams were calling,” he says, “but every single time I kept thinking I didn’t want to be there.”
Still, when he asked his agent to see if the Pirates were interested, and the Pirates said, in so many words: …maybe? GM Ben Cherington (who came aboard after McCutchen was traded) asked to get a cup of coffee, with the understanding that he might not have much of a role to offer Cutch—but wanted to get together anyway, just to meet.
When that meetup happened, McCutchen had a deal on the one-yard line with a different, playoff-contending team. That almost led to the coffee date being canceled. Then Maria stepped in with something that has since become a sentimental touchstone for the couple. “My wife said, [slaps table] ‘No! You gotta have that cup of coffee.’ I went and had coffee with Ben for about an hour. Right before he walked out he said, ‘You know what? I think we can get something done here.’ I went, ‘Huh?’ By the end of that day, it was taken care of. And I almost agreed with that other team! So that’s the running joke, the cup of coffee.”
As for his relationship with the owner that didn’t make much of an effort to retain the most important Pirate of the 21st century? “I always had this feeling with Bob that he—I can’t answer this for him—but there’s a part of him that’s appreciative of my time,” McCutchen opines. “I think he’d be like ‘Yeah, we messed up.’ There was always part of me deep down that thought that’s what he felt like. I don’t feel like he had 100% say in me getting traded. It wasn’t like he had a gavel and said, ‘Do it.’ We love it here. I never even voiced that I wanted to leave. I think I’ve shown that by choosing to come back. I had choices in other places. But nothing felt right.”
If being in a Pirates uniform feels right to Cutch, it feels that way to his teammates, too. Standout closer David Bednar grew up in Mars, Pennsylvania, roughly half an hour from PNC Park, and gushes to me in the clubhouse one afternoon about how he was “beyond pumped” when McCutchen signed on with the Pirates but was “for sure” nervous to meet him. “I think for everyone in the Pittsburgh area, he’s the dude,” Bednar beams. “He’s probably the biggest reason for turning Pittsburgh baseball around. There’s so many times I was cheering him on in the stands. Now I’m cheering him on from the bullpen.” When I finish talking to Bednar, fellow reliever Duane Underwood Jr. chimes in to say how proud he is of the PA native for keeping it together so well, given how big of a Cutch fanboy he is.
Third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes was eight years old when McCutchen was drafted, but grasps how meaningful he’s been to their shared hometown. “He was the city of Pittsburgh for a while,” Hayes says. “Other than that, he’s also a super cool dude. I’ve gotten to know him a lot. He’s a lot more fun and loose than people would think.” I ask if Hayes has been in Cutch’s truck. “I have not,” he says. “But I remember seeing it at spring training when he first got it. I was like, ‘Who the heck got that?’”
Outfielder Bryan Reynolds—who, funny enough, was one of the players the Giants sent over in the McCutchen trade—has taken the torch as the Pirates’ best player. Unlike the guy he was traded for, Reynolds is a little less expressive on the field. But during the Pirates’ first home game of the year, when the fans gave Cutch a heartwarming ovation before his first at-bat, even the most stoic, grizzled ballplayer couldn’t help but get a teensy bit emotional. “Seeing how the fans reacted at the home opener—I mean, I knew how much he meant to them,” Reynolds says. “But to see that reaction—it’s pretty special.”
The clubhouse is in a good mood during my early-May visit, because McCutchen and the Pirates are in first place. That’s notable for a multitude of reasons: for one, the team was projected to be terrible, and the players aren’t blind to that preseason chatter. “We knew where we were the last couple of years,” pitcher Wil Crowe says. “When a guy like that comes back, he doesn’t want to come back and be on a bad team! When he bought in, it gave us a real feeling of, ‘We’re going to go after this thing.’” McCutchen has never played for a team that’s won its division. Each of his postseason visits—three for the Pirates and one for the Yankees—came with Wild Card teams.
I bring as much up on our drive to PNC Park. He’s lived a very full baseball life, but there’s also a jarring list of things he’s never done. Outside of never finishing a season in first place, McCutchen hasn’t played in a World Series, either. For that matter, he’s never even played in a League Championship Series, or hit a home run in any of his 53 postseason plate appearances. He’s never gotten one of the $100 million contracts that have been handed out left and right to other players during his career. He explains that he doesn’t really worry about all that.
“I try to tell this to the average fan and they think I’m crazy—you play this game to ultimately win a championship. But at the end of the day, what is that trophy, really? It’s a hunk of freaking metal, right?” McCutchen laughs, referencing an infamous quote from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. “It’s a ring and a celebration for however long, and then the next year comes and it’s, ‘Do it again!’ If you really look at the grand scheme of things, you’re holding a piece of metal. If we win, it’d be great. But it doesn’t mean a lot to me, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s like, yeah, cool. I’m not losing sleep. At one point in my life, maybe I would have, but now I think whatever happens happens.”
The Pirates have done an admirable job of treading water since their hot start, but it seems unlikely that they’ll stay in the race all season. If they’re still competitive by, say, the trade deadline, though, that’s a huge win for a team well ahead of schedule. “I was on the Brewers, like, this team is sneaky good!” McCutchen says of watching the Pirates from the other dugout. “People were like, ‘Uhh, they’re losing 100 games. They’re the Pirates.’ The team was good—I just don’t think they knew they were good. I hope we can win here. We had a great month of April and then hit a little bit of a dry spell. It’s baseball. Whatever. We’ll be good, bruh. It’s been fun so far!”
Those are his last words before jumping out of the truck and guiding me inside the stadium. There are regal photos of him on the wall. He receives friendly greetings from stadium staff, many of whom were there during Cutch’s first stint in black and gold. He walks by a palette of Dasani bottled water and laughs about how that’s the stuff they put in the road team’s clubhouse—something he hated when he came to Pittsburgh as a visiting player.
On the final game of the homestand, I treat myself to a stroll around PNC Park, which is firmly in the conversation for best stadium in America. It’s an absolutely gorgeous day on the banks of the Allegheny River, and as I grab a hot dog and settle into an unoccupied seat for an inning, Cutch cranks a home run. This triggers a pitching change, at which point the DJ puts on “Dang!” by Mac Miller, another untouchable figure in this city. It’s a perfect little slice of life in Pittsburgh—a place that just makes a little more sense when Andrew McCutchen is here, his presence as conspicuous as an air horn blaring down the interstate.
