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Byline: Dejan Kovacevic July 07--Andrew McCutchen stepped to the plate for the first time Sunday and faced a pitcher who knew his every hole and who looked ravenously hungry. A.J. [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic July 06--If you don't like Josh Harrison, you don't like the little guy. Or, for that matter, the really, really little guy. It was summer 1990 in [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic July 04--The not-so-long-ago-left-for-dead Pirates enter this Fourth of July three games above .500, within whiffing distance of the National League wild card and still, somehow, in reasonable [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 29--PHILADELPHIA -- It's hard to imagine how haphazard the Penguins' table at the NHL Draft must have come across to the casual observer inside Wells Fargo [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 28--PHILADELPHIA ­-- The restructuring of the Penguins' front office now complete, the reconstruction of their roster formally began with Jim Rutherford's shot heard round the hockey [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 26--Mike Johnston's tenure as the Penguins' 21st coach won't be measured by his resume to date. Nor name recognition. Nor the respect he'll immediately command. Nor [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 20--Dri Archer is so quick that, if the Steelers' coaches have their way, not even their phone-book-thick playbook will contain him. All summer on the South [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 19--Jim Rutherford will choose the Penguins' new coach within the coming week. And he'll do so by culling from a now-disclosed list of candidates that's loaded [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 16--A building is reaching for the sky from the heart of Downtown. It's still just skeletal steel, that PNC headquarters on Wood Street, but it might [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 13--The six-year, $48 million extension Maurice Pouncey signed Thursday might well represent the biggest move the Steelers make all summer. That's terrific and troubling. Don't misunderstand. [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 11--And on the first day, Gregory Polanco traversed the commonwealth without ever touching soil or water (cruised I-80 from Allentown and over the Allegheny River), spread [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 09--Let's get this out of the way: There remains no real target for the Pirates' promotion of Gregory Polanco. It won't be Monday against the Cubs. [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 07--Does it matter, really, how the Penguins went about finally finding their general manager so long as they got the right result? Guess time will tell, [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 06--Pierre McGuire, as this is being typed, is a candidate to be the Penguins' next GM. And man, that's no fun to type. I think the [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 05--The red-eye charter flying the Pirates home from San Diego was due to land by sunrise Thursday and, barring some surprise announcement about a detour to [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic June 02--Not since Neil Walker has Western Pennsylvania seen a baseball prodigy like Brendan McKay. He's a 6-foot-1 left-hander at Blackhawk High School with a blazing fastball, [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 30--Friday marks two full weeks since Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle fired Ray Shero, and if you'll recall, Lemieux told me at the time the Penguins' [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 29--Obligatory disclaimer I: The Steelers' organized team activities (OTAs), which trekked through a second day Wednesday on the South Side, mean next to nothing. Obligatory disclaimer [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 23--The Pittsburgh Baseball Club's tormented fan base is probably unlike any in sports, certainly unlike any locally. It's passionate yet paranoid, dedicated yet distrusting, capable of [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 22--There's nothing at all wrong with these Pirates that Gregory Polanco couldn't fix. Provided, of course, the kid could scale the 21-foot Clemente Wall, consume six [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 17--The Tribune-Review's Dejan Kovacevic sat down with Penguins majority co-owners Ron Burkle and Mario Lemieux. Only others in the room were David Morehouse, CEO, and Tom [...]

Byline: Rob Rossi and Dejan Kovacevic May 17--Regretting not changing course a year ago, the Pittsburgh Penguins on Friday made it official, firing General Manager Ray Shero. However, instead of [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 17--Let's dispense with this right up front: Dan Bylsma isn't coming back to coach the Penguins. No chance. Not happening. His name never came up in [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 12--NEW YORK -- Things will change. Things must change. If these Penguins go down in flames for yet another Stanley Cup playoffs by falling to the [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 10--If the Penguins are fortunate, meaning they'll still take care of the New York Rangers in this Stanley Cup playoff series despite squandering that opportunity Friday [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 08--NEW YORK -- I'd like to invest this complete column in praising the Penguins, really. It would be easy to go on about Marc-Andre Fleury's growing [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 03--Say this for these Penguins: They aren't easily embarrassed. 'I thought we were pretty solid all night.' That was the assessment of Rob Scuderi. He was [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic May 02--Tanner Glass has a pretty good grasp of how lousy the New York Rangers might feel after the coming weekend. 'For me, the back-to-back games, that's [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 30--COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The real number to watch in the Penguins' next round of Stanley Cup playoffs won't be 87, 71 or even 29. Sidney Crosby, [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 27--Sidney Crosby laughed out loud. 'I'm healthy,' he was telling me, peeling off the pads late Saturday night after the Penguins' 3-1 throttling of Columbus in [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 24--COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Marc-Andre Fleury had to know it was dumb. He had to know he had nothing to gain by abandoning his net. And there [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 23--COLUMBUS, Ohio -- It's instructive, perhaps, that the NHL's most revolutionary power play was anything but revolutionary in concept. It was 1981-82, three years before Mario [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 22--COLUMBUS, Ohio -- 'That cannon ... wow, that thing is loud,' Marc-Andre Fleury was musing as he sat back in his stall Monday night, his smile [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 21--COLUMBUS, Ohio -- I don't care, honestly, that Rob Scuderi has been reduced to a rusty turnstile. Or that Kris Letang is a botched assignment or [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 17--Just imagine the field day the Philly headline writers would have had with it ... PENGUINS WIN ON CROSBY DIVE Am I right? Would have been [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 14--The night the Penguins clinched the Metropolitan Division title, April 3 in Winnipeg, not one syllable could be heard on the subject in the visitors' locker [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 13--No, there weren't any padlocks on the 8-foot wrought iron gates at Highmark Stadium. They swung open as scheduled 5 p.m. Saturday, two hours before kickoff [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 11--Sidney Crosby has 16 more points than anyone else in the NHL. That's 103 to the 87 of the Ducks' Ryan Getzlaf. He broke the 100-point [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 07--'Look around this room,' James Neal was saying while doing exactly that up in Winnipeg late last week. It was a tight locker room, too. A [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 06--Frank Coonelly was conspicuously left out of all the Pirates' front office contract extensions Saturday at PNC Park, and not without cause: Turns out there was [...]

Byline: Alan Wallace April 06--F.H. Buckley's new book 'The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America' (Encounter Books, available Tuesday) should resonate with readers who've seen [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 02--Met up with Bob Nutting on Monday morning in a PNC Park office, and much to my chagrin, he wasn't flipping through bundles of bills with [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic April 01--'It's one game. It's just one. With 161 to go,' Neil Walker was saying late Monday afternoon, and it was almost as if he believed it. [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 30--It'll all be so different. How could it not? When that cannon burst comes Monday afternoon at a crammed-to-capacity PNC Park and the 128th edition of [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 28--All season, Dan Bylsma has been describing the cream of the NHL's Western Conference contenders as 'heavy.' And it's a wonderful choice, really, especially if taken [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 23--ORLANDO, Fla. -- It's Jamie Dixon's fault. No, really, not being glib here. It's on him. He's the head coach of the Pitt team that fell [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 22--ORLANDO, Fla. -- Pitt has no chance at an upset. I mean, sure, even on a Saturday filled with all other manner of potential Mercer Madness [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 21--ORLANDO, Fla. -- This was halftime. And the kitchen-sized locker room inside Amway Center, which had to feel every bit as inviting as the scotch-taped slip [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 17--CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Gerrit Cole was calling the Pirates' rotation 'absolutely still a strength of this ballclub,' and being that the kid was clutching a baseball [...]

Byline: Dejan Kovacevic March 16--BRADENTON, Fla. -- Gaby Sanchez doesn't file away everything he hears at first base. No one at his position could. It's the game's fencepost, its water [...]