This season....

I haven't written much on this blog, and I apologize for that. Besides some real life shit that would be tl;dr to go into (and no one would rightly give two fucks about), I've been kind of afraid to say anything about this season, as if mentioning it would cause me to wake up and find out it was all a dream and the Pirates were 15 games below .500 and 25 out of first place.

But it isn't.

Tonight's win clinched a winning first half of the season for the first time since 1992. Imagine that, if you can. A lot of teams have championship droughts, but consider this: an entire generation of baseball fans in this city have never seen winning baseball. There's more fans in Detroit with memories of Lions playoff games than fans in Pittsburgh with memories of Pirates playoff games. It's been said that Pittsburgh doesn't even care about baseball anymore, and there's been times where that's been hard to argue. That's no longer the case now. Not only is the team doing it's part, the fans have been too. It gets pointed out quickly that sellouts vs the Phillies and Red Sox included a large portion of visiting fans, but when you have standing room only in a game against a Cubs team that pretty much called it a season on Memorial Day you know you have something real.

It's been long forgotten that Pittsburgh was first and foremost a baseball town for nearly a century. The Steelers were an afterthought from their founding in 1933 to about 1969. They were lucky to break .500 and were barely covered by the local sports media. The Pirates were the kings of the city by a large margin. Even when football took hold, it was still neck and neck. Some of the most beloved sports heroes were Clemente, Stargell, and Maz. Even into the 80s, we had Andy Van Slyke, Doug Drabek, Bobby Bonilla, and yes, even that skinny young Bonds guy (wonder what became of him) giving the fans something to cheer for.

As we all know, times got hard. It hasn't been fun being a Pirates fan for a long while. There was the Freak Show team in 1997 that somehow contended until the last week of the season (still finished below .500) but that's been it until now. Now there's reason to believe again, and no matter what happens the second half of the year, this season is a success because of that alone. A city remembered it was a baseball town again.