Bob Walk: Tarp Incident Reminiscent Of Minor Leagues
PITTSBURGH (93-7 The Fan) – Pirates broadcaster Bob Walk joined The Fan Morning Show Wednesday for his regular weekly spot and talked about the Pirates' eventful start to the week.
One of the headline happenings from this week has been the PNC Park grounds crew's struggle with the tarp during the storm on Tuesday night, and the efforts of the Pirates' Sean Rodriguez and Andrew McCutchen to help save a worker that became trapped in the tarp as it blew around.
"Cutch and Sean, they just bolted out of that dugout and ran right there and were helping get him out of there," Walk said. "You're getting bounced around out there. You don't know what might happen. You could break an ankle or something. It was an odd, crazy scene right there, with the players, the front office crew, I mean everybody was chipping in. It was kind of like, it reminded me a little bit of minor league days, when it was always all hands on deck no matter what because you didn't really have all that many employees."
Another one has been Josh Harrison's thumb injury, which will inevitably lead to more playing time for Jung-Ho Kang. Walk shared his thought's on Kang's development.
"You're not really sure even to this point what kind of offensive player he gonna turn out to be," Walk said. "Will he start showing that power that he had in the Korean league, where he hit a ton of home runs? When he has hit a homerun this year, it has been a tape measure shot. He does have that bat speed to generate the great amount of power, but can he do that at this level, get the trajectory on the baseball? So far, he has been a pretty good line drive-type hitter. He gets great velocity on his line drives, but he can't seem to get the ball elevated and at the same time hit it hard enough to get it out of the ballpark with any kind of consistency."
Walk also commented on the guys' debate about whether or not a team should be able to have the second-best record in baseball and still be relegated to playing in the Wild Card Game, as the Pirates would be if the season ended today.
"You can make an argument that if you actually don't finish first, why should you be in the playoffs at all?" Walk said. "So why not go ahead and have to play yourself in with a play-in game? If you didn't actually come in first place, I don't think you have anything to complain about. You need to just go ahead and accept your fate and have confidence that you are a good team, and we have several starting pitchers that I think can go out there and really shut down somebody in a one-game scenario."
The interview can be heard here:
