For one Pirate fan, the end of 21 years of agony

Published Wednesday, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:38 pm EDT
Text size A A A

So my grandpa died. It was 2008. He was a beautiful, special man at the end of a brutal battle with Parkinson's disease, but that's not the point—not right now, at least.

The point is that I, 22 and back home for the first time since getting a job in North Carolina, felt the need to structure part of his eulogy around the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The author in 1999, Year 7 of the drought. (Photo courtesy of Sean Gentille)

PHOTO GALLERY: Two decades of Pirate frustration

I don't remember exactly what I said, but I wanted to get across that being a Pirate fan, as he was until the bitter end—actively following the team, and actively choosing inevitable, metronomic disappointment—earned him a badge of honor. It showed something. It meant something. It was something worth sharing.

That, in hindsight, was weird and stupid. But really, nothing was weirder or more stupid than staking any portion of your emotional well-being (and I certainly did) on that team. Until now. Five years after that eulogy, 12 years after my summer as a PNC Park employee, 15 years after I last roamed Three Rivers while my dad worked for the stadium's management company and 21 years after a slide I barely remember, the Pirates are going to finish above .500. The longest losing streak in the history of major North American sports has ended, and I can honestly say that for the majority of my life, I literally never thought it would happen.


The math that goes into a streak like that is staggering (was it even a streak? Streak seems thin. It was an era. Maybe two). Disasters of varying degrees compound each other, and embarrassing moments stack up—every failed draft pick, every ridiculous slogan, every cash dump, every, uh, sausage assault gets baked into the overall experience.

It's not possible to lose for 20 straight seasons without collecting some humiliations, and most of them, I've held on to—even in a profession that demands objectivity, whether it's truly attainable or not. The people I've worked with at Sporting News have dealt with it. Talking about the fleeting successes of the last two years inevitably leads to talking about the embarrassments, and then the embarrassments tumble out of my slot-machine mouth.

SPECTOR: How the 2013 Pirates were built

The Aramis Ramirez trade, which sent a future All-Star third basemen to a division rival to make payroll. The Pat Meares Shrine, which is too complicated to explain. Oliver Perez, the toughest lefty Barry Bonds ever faced, derailing his career by kicking a laundry cart. Chad Hermansen's "walks on water" scouting report. Chad Hermansen's strikeouts. Chad Hermansen's toupee. Jason Kendall's compound ankle fracture—I was at the park for that one. Three Rivers Stadium went silent, except for Kendall's screams. Jeff Tabaka punching Marc Wilkins. Lloyd McClendon stealing first. Mike Williams, All-Star. Al Martin, bigamist. Tike Redman, No. 3 hitter. Ron Villone, opening day starter. Bryan Bullington, No. 1 pick and "third starter." John Van Benschoten, NCAA home run leader-turned-pitcher. Center field, pre-Andrew McCutchen. Second base, pre-Neil Walker. The 2003 Rule 5 Draft. The red jerseys. Derek Bell. Raul Mondesi. Derek Bell. Jeromy Burnitz. Derek Bell. Ed Sprague. Derek Bell. The bobbleheads.

(Dear god, the bobbleheads. Part of my job at PNC was guarding giveaway items before gates opened—you know, in case anyone tried to jump the fence and steal a pallet of boxed-up, shrink-wrapped Pokey Reeses. I had to get there four hours in advance. Sometimes I got a folding chair.)

Bryan Bullington, the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2002, bounced from the Pirates to the Indians to the Blue Jays to the Royals, for whom he pitched his last game in 2010. (AP Photo)

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE: Finally, Pirates chalk up win No. 82

I wish I could list them all. If this year ended with another collapse, I may have done it—spent October constructing a failure mosaic, or a quilt. Maybe I'd have made trading cards. Like Pokemon, except sadder! I'll trade you one Mike Kingery and one Jacob Brumfeld for a Jermaine Allensworth and a Charmander.

Yes indeed, each is uniquely horrible, and, for the most part, interchangeable, should you be in the list-making business. Except for one. Everything on that list is a signpost on the road to Ultimate Bottom—the Matt Morris trade.


Lots of people over the last few weeks have had their own version of the Pirates Memory Dump. Two standard inclusions are from 2007: drafting Daniel Moskos over Matt Wieters, and trading for a broken-down, overpriced husk once known as Matt Morris. Those two, to me, are a package deal.

See, when then-GM David Littlefield introduced Moskos, he said he projected to be "a solid reliever"—or something. I don't want to watch the video again. That'd be fine, if he weren't talking about the fourth overall pick. But he was—and the fifth overall pick was Wieters, a switch-hitting, middle-of-the-lineup catcher who was just the sort of player the Pirates always needed and never possessed. At the time, I was finishing up my junior year at the University of Maryland. Wieters wound up on the Orioles, and I wound up resenting most of my Oriole-fan friends. It sucked.

It was also, in a horrible, perverted, roundabout way, justifiable. Littlefield was an absolute nightmare of a GM, and more responsible for the streak than anybody else. He'd cobbled together garbage roster after garbage roster, stitching together on-the-way out vets with low-ceiling prospects solely to make a run at mediocrity. Whatever money he had—and it wasn't much—he wasted. We knew it then, and it's even more obvious now. But Wieters' agent was Scott Boras, and Scott Boras is Scott Boras. It was easy to imagine them taking Wieters, running into a Boras roadblock, and winding up with nothing. Plus, maybe they didn't have the money at all. Maybe. Maybe.

Matt Morris' name still boils the blood of Pirate fans. (AP Photo)

Then came the Morris trade—which proved that they did, indeed, have the cash. Littlefield just thought it wiser to spend it on Zombie Matt Morris than a potential All-Star (and Wieters has generally delivered on that potential. Not that I track his career or anything. I don't have a bulletin board filled with yarn-connected newspaper clippings. I swear).

That all went down on July 21, 2007. I was home for the summer, and I got the news while I was driving down Forbes Avenue, through Pitt's campus. I had to pull over. I knew what it meant. I'd read "Moneyball," and I'd seen what poor teams did to at least attempt to compete. This was the absolute, mathematic opposite. It was easy to attribute failure to small-market status or bad luck. But this was total lunacy. Littlefield was a crazy person, and he was running the franchise in the worst, most destructive way imaginable. It was hopeless. It transcended the concept of hopelessness, as much as sports could. And in that moment, I should've bailed.


I didn't bail. Bob Nutting, though? Bob Nutting bailed. That was Littlefield's last stand; the fans that were left were mortified by the Morris deal and what it, beyond all possibility for doubt, exposed. Nutting, by then the team's principal owner—and, to at least some degree, responsible for its failure—didn't have much of a choice.

In came Neal Huntington. Rhetorically, he won me over immediately, because he was honest. He promised suffering. The team's farm system was a sewer, and the on-field product was worse. This wasn't going to be fixed anytime soon, because doing things the right way—in baseball, particularly—takes a while, especially when you start with nothing (except for, paradoxically, McCutchen and Walker, who were the only Littlefield first-rounders to deliver. They were diamonds in a septic tank).

That's not to say Huntington (or Nutting, or president Frank Coonelly) has been perfect. There have been some major PR missteps, and the 2013 roster is really the first of Huntington's to feature meaningful major league signings. Francisco Liriano, Russell Martin—those guys remain the exception, not the rule. But there's been dedication to infrastructure, to at least attempting to amass high-end talent through the draft and the once-ignored Latin American market, and a focus on the long game, rather than a short shot to mediocrity.

Under Neal Huntington, the Pirates finally have found success. (AP Photo)

And that's part of what has made the last few months so funny. Ending the streak is beyond important. For fans, it can't be anything else—I still feel like they could go 0-for-September and leave me content. But if you're a sports executive who makes that your goal, like Littlefield did, you're cooked. You need to at least attempt greatness. And amazingly, that wasn't a given for the majority of the last 22 years. Since 2007, the effort has been there. Now, the results have caught up.


Last month, I moved back. Twelve hours after dropping off the U-Haul, I was at PNC, watching a 16-inning Sunday game from the third-base line. They lost, but it didn't matter. Things felt different. The park certainly wasn't the same. I mean, there are bandwagon fans now! Bootleg shirts for sale by the Clemente Bridge! People watching baseball without the promise of post-game Zambelli fireworks! Dogs and cats, living together! To say a season like this, not long ago, seemed impossible would be a slight to the concept of impossibility.

And now, Win 82 is on the board. It's on to whatever comes next. Baseball Prospectus had the Bucs' playoff probability at 100 percent on Wednesday morning; that seems like some sort of math error, but those guys know what they're doing, so whatever. This is where some people would say they wished it happened at home, but I honestly don't care. The fact that it happened at all is good enough for me. I do wish my grandpa was here to see it, but I can take heart in one immutable fact: If someone has to give my eulogy anytime soon, they won't feel the need to babble about the pathetic glory of Pirate fandom. Mediocrity has its benefits.