Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Actor Michael Keaton, a Pittsburgh native, acknowledges the crowd as he's introduced before throwing out the first pitch at PNC Park yesterday. Click photo for larger image.

Met new Pirates manager Jim Tracy for the first time yesterday.

It was like talking to Chuck Tanner a quarter-century ago.

"It's my upbringing," Tracy said. "I was raised by two people who always looked for the silver lining."

Yeah, the Pirates dropped to 1-7 with a dud of an 8-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in their home opener at PNC Park, but ...

"There's a lot of baseball left to be played," Tracy said.

Yeah, Zach Duke put the Pirates in a 2-0 hole three minutes into the game when Jason Repko smacked Duke's eighth pitch into the left-field seats and, yeah, Duke drew the first boos of the season from the home crowd just nine minutes in when Cody Ross rattled his 20th pitch off the right-field wall for a triple to deepen the cavern to 3-0, and, yeah, Duke gave up two more runs in the second inning, but ...

"The bullpen did a very nice job," Tracy said.

Yeah, the Pirates left 13 runners on base, but ...

"We had 14 hits ... We were down, 7-0, and brought the tying run to the plate in the seven inning ... We don't quit. We won't quit," Tracy said.

Yeah, Jason Bay grounded out with a man on second base in the first inning, hit into a double play with the bases loaded in the third, flied out with a runner on second in the sixth and struck out with men on first and third in the seventh, but ...

"From what I've seen offensively to this point, we're going to be fine," Tracy said.

It's a great way to go through life.

The world would be a better place if more of us had Tracy's and Tanner's, for that matter, constant sunny outlook.

But that doesn't mean Tracy's boyhood upbringing won't be severely tested this season.

The man was a winning manager in four of his five seasons in Los Angeles. His Dodgers lost 91 games last season but only because his players spent 1,366 days on the disabled list and he had to play 20 rookies. He doesn't know losing, at least not like we know losing around here. The Pirates have lost for 13 consecutive seasons because they've been bad or young or cheaply constructed or some combination of the three.

"You can appreciate some of the frustration," Tracy said of the PNC Park crowd, which, somehow, refrained from a "Here we go, Steelers!" chant yesterday to entertain itself. "But the thing I would ask is to not render this situation at 1-7 done."

No one is going to do that. The baseball season is ridiculously long. As Tracy noted, his Dodgers started 12-2 last season and finished 71-91. Pirates fans woke up June 12 last season to a front-page story in this newspaper about the team reaching .500 at 30-30 and actually dreaming of its first winning season since Bush I was in the White House. It went 37-65 the rest of the way.

In other words, a lot happens in a baseball season, good and bad.

Still, it's hard to think of the Pirates' woeful start as much of an aberration. The questions from spring training about the young starting rotation remain legitimate. The starters are 1-4 with a 6.25 earned run average.

Duke is the most worrisome. It would be a lot easier to believe he'll pitch lights out again if he hadn't had such a horrible spring. It also would be a lot easier to believe if pitching coach Jim Colborn would forget about the mechanical tweaking he has done with Duke's weight distribution and tell him to go back to what he did last season.

What?

An 8-2 record and 1.81 ERA in 14 starts isn't good enough?

Duke has been a good team man about the changes. "I'm all for doing anything that will make me better ... Tiger Woods changes his swing all the time. If he's trying to get better, why shouldn't I?" Even yesterday, Duke blamed himself, not Colborn. "I felt I was doing my mechanics correctly. I was just doing it too fast. I couldn't get my body under control. I wasn't getting my balance point at all."

The result was Duke's worst start in the big leagues. He allowed seven earned runs, one fewer than he allowed in his seven home starts last season. He gave up two home runs after giving up just three last season.

"As hard as it is, failure is the best teacher," Tracy said, looking for that silver lining again.

If that's true, the Pirates should have a 10-game winning streak coming right around the corner.

Tracy stopped short of predicting that -- not even he is that much of a Pollyanna -- but he did plead for a little patience.

"Great starts are great, but the overall process over six months carries a whole hell of a lot more weight than a small sample size of the season."

That's easy to say on April 10 when there are 154 games to play.

Let's see what Tracy says on July 10 if the Pirates are 38-54 and have only the string of a 14th consecutive losing season to play out.