Wait 'til next year: The Pirates' quest for .500 continues

Via TribLive

By Eddie Small

The Brooklyn Dodgers had a saying: "Wait 'til next year!" But only one team in baseball has lived that saying for two decades. A Pittsburgh fan's lament.

I can’t help but feel like this might’ve been my fault.

Not because I played for the team or engineered a bad trade or… well, you know, did anything, but because this year I allowed myself to publicly express something I hadn’t felt in ages, something that I was convinced 19 years of futility had permanently beaten out of me: optimism about what is unfortunately my favorite sports team, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It was a tiny move, really. At the beginning of August, when the Bucs were still sitting comfortably above .500, I changed my Gchat status to “19,” as in, “19 wins to go before we reach 82 total wins, and I get to feel good about baseball for the first time since unashamedly jumping onto the Red Sox bandwagon in 2004.”

Soon after this, they blew a 7-1 lead against the San Diego Padres. I deleted that status in a panic, convinced that I jinxed my team and could only save them by pretending I never typed that fateful number.

You call yourself a fan, I told myself. The only way the Pirates will break the streak is if you maintain your attitude of gloomy defeatism! How could you make such a foolish mistake? If you want to be confident, go grow six inches and root for the Yankees.

So it’s possible that the Pirates’ recently secured 20th consecutive losing season was because of me. Or maybe it was because of my dad, who broke down and bought an MLB TV subscription around Father’s Day in hopes of watching the Pirates end nearly two decades of embarrassment. Or maybe there was some random fan out in Western Pennsylvania boasting since April about the team’s inevitable success.

Or maybe none of that mattered. Actually, you can take out the maybe: none of that mattered. When it comes to sports, I’m as superstitious as the next guy, but I know that the real reason the Pirates didn’t break their ignominious streak is simple: they aren’t a very good baseball team.

I could comb through the stats and prove this through some combination of OPS or VORP or NATO or whatever the latest trendy acronym is, but it’s not necessary. All you really had to do to reach my conclusion was watch the team play.

They have legitimate stars in Andrew McCutchen and Joel Hanrahan; they have a solid player in Neil Walker; A.J. Burnett had a great year; and I’m still not giving up on Pedro Alvarez. But that’s about it, and that’s not enough to field a winning team. And it’s not enough to make up for the fact that, when the trade deadline hit, the Yankees got Ichiro Suzuki, the Giants got Hunter Pence, and the Pirates got… Travis Snider? Sounds about right. (Although he did have that great catch in a game they didn’t win.)

So while I’m unhappy and disappointed and even a little angry about the way this season ended, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised, nor can I deny that watching the Pirates play this summer was the most fun I’ve had following professional sports in a long time. Who knew rooting for a team that’s good was so much better than running headfirst into a brick wall for 19 straight years? Besides everyone who isn’t a Pirates fan, I mean.

And that’s why, despite their fairly spectacular collapse this season (They were 16 games over .500 on August 1. Damn it.), I’ll be back again rooting for them next year. At this point, loyalty is really all I’ve got left, and while it’s not my ideal reason for liking a team (my ideal reason would be “they do not currently hold the record for most consecutive losing seasons in North American professional sports,” or something similar), it’s better than nothing. Giving up on the Pirates now that I’ve already watched them be bad for about 80 percent of my life simply doesn’t make any sense. In the last 20 years, I’ve been bitterly disappointed in — off the top of my head — Jack Wilson, Craig Wilson, Aramis Ramirez, Kip Wells, Kris Benson, Zach Duke, Tom Gorzelanny, Danny Moskos/Matt Wieters, Ian Snell, Chris Duffy, Nate McClouth, Paul Maholm, Adam LaRoche, Oliver Perez, and virtually everyone on the management team.

The one thing I hadn’t been through yet was feeling hopeful for the vast majority of a season and then watching the Bucs collapse anyway. But now I’ve experienced that too, and it turns out that the frustration still isn’t strong enough to overcome the loyalty (although I can’t quite shake the feeling that I might be using “loyalty” as a euphemism for “stupidity” here). It will take a lot for me to get excited about the Pirates after this season — I’m thinking something along the lines of Andrew McCutchen showing up to spring training with three or four clones — and I don’t think I’ll be capable of publicly expressing optimism until they actually hit that 82nd win, but I am still comically excited for that day to come. The way I see it, I’ve got about 60 years of life left, and the law of averages dictates that at least one of them will include a Pirates winning season. Sad as it might be, that thought is enough to keep me going.

So let’s go Bucs, wait ‘til next year. And, finally, if you’re an Orioles fan, congratulations and please, please do not talk to me until at least February.

Eddie Small is a contributor for Began in '96. He has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Observer.