Andrew McCutchen, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ multi-talented center fielder, has obviously never heard of a fellow of biblical proportions named Samson. He’s the guy who lost his epic strength when his flowing hair was cut off.

The Pirates’ best player, McCutchen, had long hair, dreadlocks, in fact, that were so long they covered his name on the back of his uniform shirt.

McCutchen began the season with a streak of three seasons in which he batted better than .300 each season, slugged a total of 77 home runs and had an on-base percentage of .400 or better and a slugging percentage above .500 each year. In the middle year of those three years he was named the National League most valuable player.

This season, through Tuesday, McCutchen was hitting .179 with 2 home runs, a .296 on-base percentage and a .299 slugging percentage. What happened? He cut his hair, that’s what happened.

No more dreadlocks, no longer a dreaded hitter.

A friend of mine, a Pirates’ fan, blamed the Pirates’ hierarchy for inducing McCutchen to cut his dreadlocks for charity, but the Pirates are blameless.

“It was 100 percent his decision,” said John Fuller, a publicist for McCutchen. “He wanted to do it. He decided it was time to do it. He had them for nine years. It was just time for something different, a different look, and he made the decision to change it.”

In December 1968 Joe Namath, the notorious quarterback, shaved off his Fu Manchu mustache for a television commercial and received $10,000 for it. McCutchen had no such deal. He did it for charity. Of course, baseball players earn a little more in 2015 than football players, even Namath, earned in 1968.

Initially, reports said McCutchen’s shorn dreadlocks would be auctioned, but, Fuller said, “He understood that the hair was a big deal, that it continued to be a powerful impact. He just wanted to raise money. He wanted to use it as a platform to do that.”

Fuller said McCutchen’s shearing produced 15 matted coils, or dreads, of hair, each authenticated as autographs are on memorabilia. The authenticator, he said, came from MLB.com, which had notified its viewers of the availability of McCutchen’s dreadlocks. The barber placed each dread in a plastic bag after cutting it.

“It was a funny process.” Fuller said.

Of the 15 dread of hair available, 10 have been sold, Fuller said, for $425 each, raising $4,250 for Pirates’ charities.

As well meaning as McCutchen was, though, did he anticipate having the shearing sap his hitting stroke?

“I don’t think Andrew was thinking in those terms at all,” Fuller said. “He’s in a small slump. He’ll come out of it. He’s had slow starts and he’s had slow finishes.”

SPEEDING UP THE GAME

Unwittingly Major League Baseball discovered the secret this week to achieving its goal of speeding up games. The White Sox and the Orioles played a game in Baltimore in 2 hours and 3 minutes. They played the game in an empty Camden Yards.

Fans were not permitted as a safety measure. The previous two games between the teams were not played because of rioting and unrest in Baltimore triggered by the death of a black man in police custody. Wednesday’s game was believed to be the first major league game ever played without fans in attendance.

“The players had to heckle themselves,” David Letterman remarked on his television show that evening.

“It was kind of like instructional league, Gulf Coast League, Arizona League,” Orioles manager Buck Showalter said. The Orioles won the game, 8-2, scoring six runs in the first inning.

In an additional safety move, MLB switched the three-game weekend series between the Orioles and the Rays from Baltimore to St. Petersburg.

From the looks of things Wednesday, there seemed to be more threatening and wild protests in New York than in Baltimore. However, the Yankees and the Rays played a day game and didn’t provoke the kind of demonstrations that occurred that evening elsewhere in the city.

The problems in Baltimore prompted former Commissioner Fay Vincent to recall former Commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s contribution to World Series security.

“We learned in baseball that you have to have horses and mounted police,” Vincent related. “Ueberroth came up with idea. In the eighth inning announce that anyone who goes on field would be arrested with a mandatory jail sentence.

“If you put a ring of horses around the field the young fans don’t want that. We would announce it and bring out the horses. You can’t outrun the horses.”

CUBS CLEARED OF TAMPERING, BELIEVE IT OR NOT

In what figures to be the least shocking development in Major League Baseball this year, MLB announced Wednesday that its investigation uncovered no tampering in the Chicago Cubs’ hiring of Joe Maddon as their manager.

The Cubs hired Maddon after he opted out of his contract with the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays filed a tampering charge, believing, or at least suspecting, that the Cubs induced Maddon to leave the Rays.

The Rays’ suspicions were reasonable because three years earlier the Cubs were suspected of tampering with Theo Epstein to lure him from Boston to be their president of baseball operations and Epstein’s tampering with Jed Hoyer to get him to leave San Diego and become the Cubs’ general manager.

No one filed a tampering charge in those situations.

The Cubs, of course, denied all suggestions of tampering.

“We’re glad the process is over,” Hoyer said. “They did a thorough process. Obviously there was no wrongdoing and we’re glad that was announced today.”

The Rays were not convinced.

“We make our decisions based on the facts at hand and the processes we trust,” Stuart Sternberg, the Rays’ principal owner, said in a statement. “We can never be certain of the outcomes.”

Last year the Kansas City Royals won the American League pennant. Three weeks into this season they lead the league in the number of times their batters have been hit by pitches. Cause and effect?

Dayton Moore, the Royals’ general manager, doesn’t think so.

“I think four times the pitches were intentional,” Moore said. “Teams are pitching us inside. We have guys who look to run and we steal bases. Pitchers use slide step and that prompts a pitcher to hit a batter.”

Perhaps more significantly, Moore said, “I think a lot of people are getting hit. I think it’s up throughout baseball.”

Moore was speaking on his cell phone Friday afternoon before the second game of the Royals’ four-game series with the Chicago White Sox. At the time, through the Royals’ first 16 games (A.L. best 12-4), their batters had been hit by pitches 17 times, tied with the Texas Rangers.

According to Elias Sports Bureau, entering the weekend, pitchers had hit batters 0.74 times per game. That average confirmed Moore’s suspicion because in the equivalent number of games last season, pitchers hit batters 0.63 times per game.

Look at the Kansas City batters, who have accounted for 14 of the major league-leading 17 times the Royals have been hit:

• Mike Moustakas       5 times; last season 3 times in140 games
• Alex Gordon              5 times; last season 11 times in 156 games
• Lorenzo Cain             4 times; last season 4 times in 133 games

Only Anthony Rizzo of the Chicago Cubs has been hit more often, 6 times in 16 games. Last season he was plunked 15 times in140 games. Then there’s the Texas second baseman, Roughned Odor, who has been hit 5 times among the 17 times Texas batters have been hit. Last season, as a 20-year-old rookie, Odor was also hit 5 times but in 114 games.

The outbreak of pitches that have connected with batters’ bodies has fueled fights and other skirmishes and has resulted in seven suspensions and nine fines. One player, Kelvin Herrera, a Royals relief pitcher, was suspended and fined twice in five days, and another Royals pitcher, starter, Yordano Ventura, was suspended once and fined twice.

The last player to be suspended twice around the same time, according to Major League Baseball was outfielder Nyjer Morgan in 2010. He was suspended Aug. 25 for seven games for intentionally throwing a ball into the stands and again Sept. 3 for eight games for running into a player, charging the mound and making inappropriate comments and gestures toward fans.

Herrera, a 25-year-old Dominican right-hander, was suspended for five games April 21. two days after he threw a pitch behind Brett Lawrie. The same Oakland batter was at the source of Ventura’s fine. A day earlier Ventura threw a 99-mile-an-hour fastball that hit Lawrie above the left elbow, a pitch that Major League Baseball officials decided was deliberate. Josh Reddick had just hit a home run.

The Royals were upset with Lawrie because of his hard slide into second base in the first game of the three-game series. Shortstop Alcides Escobar was injured and had to be helped off the field.

Some observers, including Harold Reynolds of MLB Network, a former major league second baseman, called the slide dirty. Reynolds knows a lot more about runners taking out infielders at second base, but after viewing replays, I felt Lawrie’s slide was aggressive but not dirty.

The play was close enough that the sliding Lawrie could have thought he had a chance to beat the backhand flip from third baseman Moustakas to Escobar, who was covering second in the Royals’ defensive shift.

The Royals, however, were not seeking excuses to absolve Lawrie, who was out on the play and became a target for the Royals’ pitchers.

“I don’t mean to hurt anybody,” Herrera said. “I was just trying to throw inside, but just a bad grip on that fastball. It started raining pretty good. And they just tossed me out of the game.”

As he walked to the dugout, Herrera raised the level of heat, pointing to his head. He later told reporters he simply was telling Lawrie to think. But that’s not how Lawrie saw the gesture.

“That’s what got me hot,” Lawrie said. “That’s what got me mad. You can’t throw at my head and then say, ‘Next time I face you, it’s in the head.’ He needs to pay for that. He doesn’t throw 85. He throws 100.”

Commenting on the Lawrie play, Moore said, “Lawrie made a very aggressive slide. Often times when a runner slides aggressively into a middle infielder a pitcher takes it upon himself to make up for it.”

The dugouts emptied after each of those incidents, but somehow the teams avoided throwing punches. Those were to come in Chicago.

The scene shifted to Chicago as the Royals traveled there for a four-game series, but the intensity did not abate with the White Sox in the other dugout.

“It’s a shame it keeps happening,” an unidentified Kansas City player said. “I don’t know what it is.”

The first game of the series lasted 13 innings and produced the brawl that didn’t occur between the Royals and the A’s. In the seventh inning Ventura fielded Adam Eaton’s bouncer back to the mound, and the two yelled at each other as Eaton trotted to first and Ventura threw him out. It was believed Eaton felt Ventura had quick pitched him.

“Ventura is emotional,” Moore said. “He has to learn to channel the emotion and I know he will.”

The dugouts emptied, and the featured fight of the brawl was attempts by the Royals’ Cain and Chicago’s Jeff Samardzija, former Notre Dame football player, to get at each other. The pair had had previous experiences with each other.

Those two as well as Chicago’s Chris Sale and Kansas City’s Ventura, Edinson Volquez and Herrera were suspended. Herrera and Ventura have been suspended seven games each, Volquez, Sale and Samardzija five games each and Cain two games. They will serve their suspensions once their appeals are heard and decided.

The day after the brawl two interesting developments were reported: Samardzija expressed remorse for his participation in it, and it was learned that Sale tried to get into the Royals’ clubhouse after he was ejected.

MLB.com quoted Robin Ventura, the White Sox manager, as saying, “Yeah, all emotions are running high at that point. I just found out about it. You’ve got to have a conversation, and you move on from there. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and nothing happened.”

Some baseball people have said they think the Royals have been targeted because of their unexpected success last year in getting to the post-season as a wild card and then in the post-season in which they went unbeaten until San Francisco beat them in the World Series opener.

Others feel the Royals have become overly aggressive because other teams don’t give them credit for what they achieved.

Moore, however, said, “I don’t see anything going on with our team. Our team is trying to win in 2015. They’re a more confident group. There is maybe a hungrier pursuit getting back and winning the World Series after coming up short. No doubt that seed has been planted. They’re a very hungry group.”

There is always one danger for a team the year after it plays unexpectedly well. It can easily suffer a setback in the face of higher expectations.

“That’s one of the things we worked hard to monitor,” Moore said. “There’s nothing that needs to be said. In our players’ routines this season we were no different from previous years. You pay attention to those things to see if there’s going to be a difference. We haven’t seen anything.”

What about the skeptics?

“We’re our biggest skeptics,” Moore said. “We’re constantly evaluating, seeing what we can do to get better, make better decisions. There’s no time for reflection in this game. We’re not trying to prove anybody wrong. We want to put a good team together.”

TIME TO RUN TEXT MESSAGE LEADERS?

Baseball has come to this, and what would Bob Gibson and Hal McRae say about it? Baseball players using social media to say they’re sorry? What a revoltin’ development.

Brett Lawrie of Oakland took out Kansas City shortstop Alcides Escobar with a hard, aggressive slide at second base, was criticized for it and sent a text message to Escobar with an apology.

Escobar said he never got it.

Lawrie said he had text messages from a number he was told belonged to Escobar. He said the number was given to him by a friend and Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer.

“I reached out to him in a text message, and he got it,” Lawrie told reporters. “I have the text message. I did reach out to him, and I sent a number of paragraphs and he messaged me back and he didn’t really seem to care about my apology to him. He actually said it was stupid and that it was intentional.”

Lawrie said he sent Escobar another text message, “He don’t say nothing,” Escobar told reporters. “I don’t hear nothing from him. Yeah, I’m surprised because when you do a guy like that you say, ‘My bad.’ He don’t say nothing. I don’t know why.”

Frankly, I don’t care who sent what to whom. In the interest of full disclosure, I have never sent a text message and wouldn’t know how if I wanted to, which I don’t.

It would be bad enough, then, if I suddenly sent someone a text message, but a baseball player sending one to apologize to another player for something he did on the field? Oh my. What is to become of the grand old game?

When a Federal appellate court threw out Barry Bonds’ conviction for obstruction of justice earlier this week, I thought of Bowie Kuhn. What was the connection? Their answers to questions when they were under oath.

Both Bonds and Kuhn got away with giving answers that induced skepticism in the minds of people who heard them or read about them, Kuhn in Federal court in Chicago in 1977 in Charlie Finley’s lawsuit against him for blocking sales of three players, Bonds before a Federal grand jury hearing testimony in San Francisco in 2007 in the investigation of Balco and steroids.

Covering the trial in the Finley lawsuit, I couldn’t believe some of Kuhn’s answers and wanted to stand up in the courtroom and say, “Your honor, that’s just not so.” I restrained myself, just did my job and didn’t inject my opinion into the coverage.

Finley, who owned the Oakland Athletics, lost the case and was unable to sell Vida Blue to the New York Yankees for $1.5 million and Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers for $1 million each to the Boston Red Sox. Neither Finley nor his lawyer accused Kuhn of lying, and he prevailed in the lawsuit.

Bonds, who will turn 51 in three months, avoided three perjury charges when the jury deadlocked on a verdict, and the government declined to retry him. He was convicted on an obstruction of justice charge, a verdict that a three-judge appellate panel upheld and then an 11-judge panel threw out.

The larger panel’s ruling was the final blow to the government, which bungled a case that should have been a lock. Prosecutors in Washington, D.C., suffered a similarly humiliating loss in the Roger Clemens perjury case.

The government went after the most highly decorated hitter and pitcher in baseball history and got neither one. No award-winning performances there.

Now that he is free of all felony charges, can Bonds expect to gain the most cherished award that has eluded him – a bronze plaque in the Hall of Fame? Not likely. He and Clemens have been convicted in the court of public opinion, and that status isn’t likely to change.

In three years on the writers’ Hall of Fame ballot (with seven years of eligibility remaining) Bonds and Clemens have failed to attain as much as 40 percent of the writers vote. Free of legal entanglement, Bonds may gain a few more votes, but he needs a deluge of votes to get into the Hall, and they don’t seem to be flowing in his direction.

Bonds’ last team, the San Francisco Giants, will very likely find an enhanced position for him. They have seemed to be interested in having Bonds join them in a meaningful role and will very likely come up with something before too long now that he is unencumbered by legal matters.

On a more general basis, Bonds could benefit from the change at the top of Major League Baseball.

When Bud Selig was commissioner, he was careful not to say anything negative about Bonds publicly, but he clearly didn’t like him and his position as the top home run hitter of all time.

Besides having no interest in being positive about someone with Bonds’ reputation as a user of performance-enhancing drugs, Selig had a personal stake in issues involving Bonds. Bonds had supplanted Selig’s close friend, Henry Aaron, as No. 1 on the career home run list.

Rob Manfred, the new commissioner, who directed MLB’s effort to get steroids out of the game, might have no use for someone as notorious as Bonds, but there’s nothing personal between them. Anyway Manfred is not faced with making any kind of decision on Bonds as he is on Pete Rose. Manfred can ignore Bonds, but he has said he will decide Rose’s request for reinstatement.

As I said before, I believe Bonds has been convicted in the court of public opinion. Not that I have taken a survey, but I don’t think there’s a preponderance of fans who acknowledge him as the No. 1 home run hitter of all time because he hit 762 home runs to Aaron’s 755.

Bonds might never have tested positive for use of performance-enhancing drugs and he might not have been convicted in court of having lied about using them, but he is surrounded by so much circumstantial evidence one false move and it will topple over on him.

Bonds might have his lawyers to thank for keeping him out of prison, but the reality is he owes his freedom to one man – his former trainer, Greg Anderson, who served two separate prison sentences for contempt of court rather than testify in grand jury and court proceedings involving Bonds.

With a friend like Anderson, Bonds didn’t have to worry about enemies. Without having Anderson to confirm that prosecutors’ evidence was legitimate, the government was unable to use the evidence against Bonds.

Steroids? What steroids? I thought I was using flaxseed oil and balm for arthritis, Bonds said.

It sounded ridiculous at the time, but more than a decade later Bonds is free and clear, as clear as one of the creams he allegedly used to mask the steroids.

NO NEWS MUST BE GOOD NEWS

MLB.com claims stories on its website are “not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs,” but it makes no claim about printing all the news that is fit to print.

My exhaustive multiple searches of the site, the last just before this column was posted, found no mention of the Bonds’ court decision. The list of 30 “news stories,” however, included three about the site’s new “statcast.”

I found a lengthy (1,200-word) Associated Press report on the ruling on ESPN.com.