Prior to the last two weeks, I haven’t covered Pirates minor league Spring Training since 2019. The pandemic played a big role in that, but it also felt different being back, due to all of the changes made with the Pirates new player development system.
Some things are still the same. Before I left an empty Pirate City field yesterday, I spent some time walking around and thinking about covering Spring Training from these fields for parts of ten years, prior to this one. I remember watching Josh Bell hit a monster home run onto the golf course beyond field two in one of his first batting practices as a pro hitter.