PITTSBURGH -- Bryan Reynolds felt he needed a change, so he took matters into his own hands. He changed his cleats. He changed his sleeve. He changed his walkout song to “Beer For My Horses” by Toby Keith.

“Yeah, something had to change,” said Reynolds. “Thought a little bit about it last night and went with that.”

All that change manifested itself into his first game with multiple extra-base hits since Opening Day and helped get the Pirates’ struggling offense going Sunday afternoon. Reynolds’ pop at the plate and a go-ahead shot by Oneil Cruz in a four-run sixth propelled the Pirates to a 5-3 victory over the Rockies, taking the series at PNC Park.

“I think, all around, it was a well-played game and we came out on top,” said Rowdy Tellez, who doubled, drove in a run and scored another Sunday. “That's what we needed. We need to get it going.”

After combining to score three runs the first two games of the series and 31 in their previous 17 games going back to April 16, that sixth inning was a much-needed, yet scarcely-seen crooked number. Reynolds’ double put two runners in scoring position, and after a productive out by Ke’Bryan Hayes moved everyone up a station, Cruz got a hold of his second home run of the series, this time on a Ryan Feltner slider.

Those two Cruz home runs are the longest by a Pirate this season (433 feet on Friday, 429 feet Sunday), a sign that perhaps he’s heating up.

“He was huge for us this series, so hopefully he can build off that,” Reynolds said of Cruz. “I know he will. It’s big for our offense to have him going like that.”

Getting Cruz going would be huge for this offense. Getting just about anyone going would be a boost, actually. The vast majority of players have hit below the team’s internal projections. The team’s three-week offensive lull has been the source of much frustration, but there’s belief that the group will eventually hit.

General manager Ben Cherington took to his weekly radio show on 93.7 The Fan to reaffirm his belief in the group and why it was prudent to, essentially, stay the course. There’s work being done with individual players to try to get them on track, but he said it wasn’t time to make a more major, macro-focused change.

"If you believe there's better stuff to come, you don't want to cut yourself off before you get to that better stuff,” said Cherington.

On Sunday, they got a small taste of that better stuff, and from their most important hitters.

While it’s probably a step too far to say Reynolds struggled at the plate over this first month of the season, his .711 OPS entering Sunday was over 100 points lower than his career average of .823. Cruz and Tellez certainly started slow, but have been making harder contact of late.

Going into the year, that trio was projected to be some of their main sources of power. On Sunday, they showed what they can bring when they start to click.

"It jumpstarts us,” said manager Derek Shelton. “The middle of the order today was a big part of it, and those are the guys that we need to get going for us to continue to have good offensive games.”

That goes double for Cruz, who admitted last month a bit of crisis in confidence amid his slow start. A quality weekend series can help change that.

“Definitely putting better at-bats together,” said Cruz Friday night, via interpreter and coach Stephen Morales. “I feel pretty good. I’m making good contact more often, and that’s a product of getting in the cage with [hitting coaches] Andy [Haines] and [Christian] Marrero.”

“I think the one thing we have to realize with Oneil is he does a lot of things that look easy, so at times, he kind of gets that moniker of, 'the body language is bad,' when he cares and is locked in,” Shelton said. “But I do think getting a couple hits, having a couple good games -- your confidence will definitely tick back up."

A more confident, aggressive approach is a potential way out of this offensive slump and, if the team continues to pitch the way it had, a path back towards competing.

“We just kept playing,” Reynolds said. “Earlier in the year, that’s what we were doing. Good start for us to get it going today and build off of it and do what we were doing earlier in the year.”