Jun 13, 2013 By John Perrotto for The 3 min read

PITTSBURGH – There have been few nights at PNC Park more magical than Tuesday.

Gerrit Cole, the Pirates’ top prospect and one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, made his major-league debut and took a shutout into the seventh inning against the San Francisco Giants, winners of two of the last three World Series.

As manager Clint Hurdle put it, “it was a great moment for the entire organization.”

The Pirates invested $8 million in Cole when they made him the first pick in the 2011 amateur draft with the hope the UCLA star would eventually become the ace of their staff. Whether he becomes a No. 1 starter remains to be seen, but his strong outing against a very good team was another sign that things are changing for the long-downtrodden franchise.

However, as usual, there was a dark cloud in the silver lining because just as Mary Tyler Moore could take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile, the Pirates can take an important day and mess it up.

The Pirates decided to implement new security measures Tuesday night, primarily wanding each fan before going through the turnstiles. It turned out to be a disaster.

The lines stretched for blocks and a significant number of the 30,614 in attendance missed Cole striking out Giants left fielder Gregor Blanco on three pitches to start the game. It’s one of those moments you never get back as a fan.

According to some of those who got caught in line, security was understaffed and extremely slow in the wanding procedures.

It’s hard to fault any professional team for adding security in light of the terrorist attacks in Boston and the fear of something on an even larger scale occurring at a sporting event.

However, it is also the team’s responsibility to make the security screenings as reasonably smooth as possible and keep the line moving. Anybody who has ever been caught in a long TSA line at an airport knows there are few things more frustrating than a long wait at a security checkpoint.

Pirates officials should have known Tuesday was not the right time to start the wanding. Once the decision was made last weekend to call up Cole, it should have signaled to anyone with a modicum of either common sense or baseball sense that the debut would create a much larger-than-normal weekday crowd.

Then again, it’s the Pirates. Sense, neither baseball nor common, is abundant in the organization.

The Pirates didn’t even have the smarts to leverage the public relations value of Cole’s debut by making him available to the media on Monday, which was an off day for the Pirates. A quick press conference would have ensured Cole of being plastered over every newscast in the city.

So, even though their fortunes are changing on the field, Pirates and fiasco are still used in the same sentence far too many times.