PITTSBURGH — It was one of those defining moments in a player’s major league career, a time when the only thing lower than his spirit and self-confidence is his batting average, and so it was with the Pirates’ Pedro Alvarez as he sat in the office of manager Clint Hurdle.

There was clamor to send Alvarez back to the minor league and take his sub-.200 average with him, strikeouts coming far more often than the home runs the Pirates thought they were getting when the Pirates made him the nation’s No. 1 draft choice out of Vanderbilt University in 2008.

Hurdle and the front office, of course, had heard that clamor but Hurdle was not quite ready to give up on the raw talent he saw, for, in many ways, he felt he was looking at a mirror image of himself.

“There’s some common fabric with Pedro and myself and then there’s some things I can’t identify with,” Hurdle said during a quiet moment in his office Saturday afternoon. “I don’t care what kind of math you do, the money I signed for and the bonus he signed for are dramatically different. You can look at inflation, you can go anywhere you want with it, you’re not going to tell me it’s the same.”

If Hurdle didn’t get the $6 million signing bonus Alvarez received, he got all the pressure that went with it. He was selected ninth in the nation and in March 1978, Sports Illustrated made him the cover boy for its baseball issue as “the next big league superstar,” putting pressure on Hurdle he never could shake.

And so it was he would sit Alvarez down with him on occasion and offer advice.

“As far as expectations, there’s a number of conversations Pedro and I have had in the past year about things along those lines,” Hurdle revealed. “There’s been a couple of times I’ve told him, ‘I really want you to take inventory. How many people do you know who can identify with the situation you are in?’ He’d be sitting in that chair over there pointing at me, saying, ‘You can, can’t you?’

“I’d say, ‘Yes, I can. Here’s what I didn’t do and maybe should have done more of. Here’s what I did too much of.’ I’m just throwing it out there, not trying to give you shortcuts, just letting you know I had that experience, I went down that route. Maybe, by sharing the information, I can keep you from making some wrong turns.”

Hurdle recognized what he had done, certainly too late to help him as a player, but not too late to help others.

“Initially, I just did my business, but I turned into somewhat of a people pleaser, trying to make everyone happy — every coach, every teammate,” Hurdle explained. “Being very young and getting that opportunity very quickly, I think there was some part of me that felt I had to continually measure up in everything I did, which caused a lot of probably unnecessary expectations from my vantage point.”

A talented athlete that young knows little else and they tend to set impossible goals.

“All I’d ever done my whole life was play baseball,” Hurdle said. “I happened to do that well enough to get to where I had gotten as quickly as I had, but then I felt I had to add on to it. It seemed almost to get like a dog chasing his tail. I wasn’t getting anywhere. If I went 2 for 4 it was more important to me what I did the other two at bats than the at bats in which I got the hits. I was never embracing the good I was doing. I was always chasing perfect.”

Because of that, Hurdle never realized that Sports Illustrated potential, finishing a 515-game major league career with just a .259 batting average and only 32 home runs.

“As a player, I do think I should have done more, but then I look at the circumstances and I ended up doing the best I could with what I had with where I was. I was challenged. I faced a lot of adversity. I fought, clawed and scratched my way back to the big leagues (after being sent down in 1982) and got another five years,” he said.

“I was able to become a major league coach. I’ve been able to be a major league manager for almost nine seasons. There’s part of me ... I would have liked to have played better. But all said and done, I think that probably has given me some of the insight and patience and understanding that I have put into play while working out of this chair now. That would not have happened.”

And that is what he is using to keep Alvarez together through some truly trying times.

“There’s been so much come his way in a year and a half,” Hurdle said. “He hasn’t batted 1.000. He’s whiffed some. That’s the beauty of the relationship we are developing. We can come in here and talk. We communicate constantly.

“He pushes himself. He expects a lot out of himself. I do think one of the redeeming qualities he has is that those guys out there have never given up on him. He has never given them a reason to give up on him. I can’t say that about other players with other situations in other times. There have been guys in the clubhouse waiting for the other shoe to drop on them.”

The result is Alvarez is giving the Pirates what they need, a home run bat to protect Andrew McCutchen. The third baseman isn’t ready to become an All-Star player, but he may be ready to offer them the home run bat they really haven’t had since Barry Bonds left town a couple of decades ago.

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com. Follow on Twitter @bhertzel.