Why Pirates fans should be angry

For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art.

"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" by John Updike© 1960

This gets to the issue for Pirates fans. The fifteen years of losing is bad, very bad. That’s a chronic condition. Something a city has to live with. It’s no way to win new fans but old fans are bludgeoned into weary acceptance. In Pittsburgh, loving baseball means watching your team lose most of the time every year.

Still, as Updike says, any particular game is relatively detached from the season’s inevitable disappointment.

The acute problem, the ugly fact that jolts the baseball lover from bitter acceptance to boiling anger, goes back to Updike’s “tissue-thin difference.” This team is filled with players who do not care. Or at least do not care enough to do things well.

Lack of talent is a given for small market teams. Our lineup will never rival the Yankees; our pitching won’t make anyone forget the ’71 Orioles.

Yet, in each game a mediocre player has the same choice as a superstar: to take pains or go through the motions. In Pittsburgh there are too many who just go through the motions. What we see over and over is a group of millionaires who don’t give a damn about the game. Poor base running, bad fielding, and sloppy play all contribute to the general malaise hangs over this team.

UPDATE: I’d love to see a local paper do something gutsy with regard to the Pirates. In my dream scenario I’d love to see a sports editor announce that they are reassigning the reporters on the Pirates beat to “big-time sports” and using AP recaps for Pirates’s games. That would be a sweet statement:

“In a time of constrained resources for newspapers, we can no longer justify assigning full time reporters to a minor league team.”

That will never happen, of course. The local press is made up of wimpy little lapdogs who defend the owners and think that doing so is somehow principled. MSM delusions reign even on the sports pages as this column shows:

Fans waging fight against way Nuttings do business

We're not talking about a boycott, which some people are calling for. There's a movement afoot to boycott not only the Pirates but all of Nutting's business ventures. That's mean-spirited and wrong.

Nutting is not a bad person. He is not dispensing social injustice. What he is doing is not illegal, unethical or immoral. What he is guilty of -- in the eyes of most people -- is running his business in a fan-unfriendly manner. He does not deserve to be boycotted and most certainly the people who work for him, be it at PNC Park, Seven Springs or his many newspapers do not deserve to have their jobs placed in jeopardy because the Pirates stink.

I have to disagree strongly on this. First, when a business antagonizes its customers, it should pay a price. Mr. Smizek believes that Nutting should not worry about social justice, but apparently the paying customers must make that uppermost in their minds. (Buy tickets or some poor ticket-taker will lose his job). That is so silly that it boggles the mind.

Further, I do consider Pirate ownership unethical and immoral because lying is immoral and unethical. When tax payers put up millions for a new ball park, they did not do it so Bob Nutting could have a profitable, bad baseball team in Pittsburgh. They were told that the new park would make the Pirates competitive on the field, not just on the income statement. For the owner to take the money and not follow through is most definitely immoral and unethical.

The usual justification for keeping the Pirates was that big league sports enhanced Pittsburgh image. Maybe the Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review should start putting some tough questions to the “civic boosters” and politicians who led the charge to spend tax money on PNC Park. How does the city’s image look now? Is it a good thing for the national press to refer to the Pittsburgh Pirates as a “glorified triple A team”? Is “fifteen years of losing” really the best brand message for a struggling city?