mathematically eliminated #18 the Pittsburgh Pirates

Perhaps this will be the saddest elimination thus far this MLB season, as the Pirates were briefly our collective darling, having risen from the ashes of futility like a modern Phoenix (the bird, not the city), to make us love baseball in a special way. But let's be realistic - this is the second or third time the Pirates have done this in recent memory, and all those times have ended in the bitter taste of failure. Can we be content to dabble in success, and have these traditional teams who do not fit the alleged "large market" criteria to teeter at the periphery of relevance until we settle into the showdown of 8 or 10 of the same 10 or 12 teams? What if the Orioles do not make it as well, or are eliminated in the stupid wild card game playoff? Who will be our huckleberry then?
It is sad too because there are few teams with the bold artistic flourish of the Pirates. The bright yellow and black uniforms (traditional to Pittsburgh sports team, which in itself is a pretty cool thing for a city to do), the immensity of figures like LSD Dock Ellis or Playboy Cocaine Dave Parker or Kent Tekulve's wacky sidearm or Willie Stargell's quiet epicness or even the brilliantly legendary yet tragically short Robert Clemente, who was as much a pioneer for the black Hispanics who fill our 2012 rosters as Jackie Robinson was for regular American-Africans. (Man, "American-African" sounds so much more fucked up than "African-American" doesn't it? It is strange how our ears and mouths become accustomed to certain things.) The straight-sided caps, with the pimp stripes around the whole thing. Three Rivers Stadium itself, one of the best overhead blimp shots to be found in baseball history. The Pirates are a wacky and wild and wonderful team historically, and perfect for those crazed folks of western Pennsylvania.
But this is not a time that respects such craziness and wildling behaviors. This is not the age of American hallucinogenic exploration of self as in Dock Ellis, or proudly anti-authoritarian yet 1000% diligent and acceptable as in Dave Parker. This is a time of obedience and respect for nothing but the dollar, a forced worship for an abstract concept that is slowly losing its perceived value and never having had that much actual value to begin with. But the smoke and mirrors have gone into overdrive, and we shall be forced to believe in the exceptionalism of the almighty dollar, and baseball is nothing if not one of the most purely American artistic creations we have come up with as a culture, albeit now an international phenom. So the rule of the dollar means the teams that spend are the ones that succeed, so it is believed that until a team like the Pirates (or Orioles or Royals or Brewers) learns to spend, it will not sustain success. Or you must learn to maximize dollars, as in the sabermetric nerderies of Billy Beane and his philosophical disciples. But it is still based on dollars, not intuition, not magic.
Am I sad Pittsburgh is eliminated from this year's MLB post-seasonal possibilities? Sure, why not. But I am more saddened that the regional ways of Pittsburgh - a sort of cultured hillbilly people, full of Old World influences and New World dreams - has been eliminated. Not this year though, but somewhere along the way while none of us were looking. The ways of the Pittsburghs and the Baltimores and Oaklands and so on and so forth have been replaced by the false gentrification of our western society, which is actually taking the old flavors, sterilizing it "clean" and replacing it with new gaudy facades that look the same whether you are in a city here or one there. It is lifeless and robotic and predictable. That above all is the worst part - so predictable. I did not entertain wild notions of Andrew McCutcheon carrying the torch lit by Dock Ellis and Dave Parker into the October boxes on the 2012 calendar, because I knew better. Spirit like that has already been extinguished, and usually is bought out by piles of dollars, to go play in predictable ways in predictable places, so that nothing gets too wonky or off-kilter. We are not a place of wild spirit and shocking euphorias any more; we are a place of predictable facades and standard orders.

Blue Jays 8, Pirates 5: Travis Snider Answers from the Mouth of His Cannon

still loving the new uniforms btw

Only a day after my most recent denunciation of Travis Snider, dude hit a couple of doubles, drove in a pair on a weird groundout, stole third, and threw a guy out from left. That is all awesome, however I would be remiss if I did not point out to you that he hit like .347 or something in spring training last year, so while you might be thinking this all might auger well I am here to say that we don't know how it augers. We just don't know. How. It augers.  Also, thinking about the Pirates for a minute, isn't it something how the Pirates traded for A. J. Burnett on the condition that they wouldn't actually have to pay him really any money but then in a bunting drill Burnett fouled one off his eye and that shit is broken and he's out for months? Oh, Pirates . . .


KS

So You've Decided to Be in Second Place: Giants Lose, 9-2

"Nope, I don't see any hits over here, either."

I'm pretty sure the final score was 9-2. I stopped watching. Why would I do that to myself? This is some Absolute Zero of a team right now, and it's not getting better. The bad news is that the Giants head to Miami and Atlanta to get their clocks cleaned on the road for a while before wrapping things up by losing a series to the Houston Spoilers.

It is important that this is a team that has been ravaged -- and that is the appropriate word, ravaged -- by injuries to key players, and other key players having absolutely catastrophic seasons. Bochy and Sabean are not to blame for what is going on. Well, not entirely, anyway. This is what the universe decided was a fitting repayment for last year's improbable World Series victory. And that's cool. I more or less resigned myself to the Giants missing the playoffs a couple of weeks ago. It's a shame, but it's really pretty admirable they have been able to do so much with so little thus far. This is a team that is dangerously close to fielding a tee as their fifth starter. They can get 15 hits in a game and score less than two runs. They can get three hits in a row with RISP and score none.

The fact that the Astros are giving the Diamondbacks fits indicates that, perhaps, the Diamondbacks are not the unstoppable juggernaut I imagined they were. They hit lots of home runs, and have a Justin Upton, but they're only marginally better than the Giants at this point. They can be caught, and overtaken. There are nearly two months left. But if the Giants miss it, it won't be the end of the world. Posey and Freddy will be back next season. Zito and Rowand will be closer to the end of their deals, if they're still around. Beltran and Ross will likely be gone, which opens up a potential spot for Belt. There's a chance the Giants will acquire an actual shortstop. Given their track record, I'd bet on Jimmy Rollins. Things look a lot better in 2012.

My hope is that things start looking better in 2011. It's hard to imagine things looking worse.

Called It: Pirates Embarrass Giants, 5-0

Dominating victory by whoever these guys here are.

Really embarrassing to be a Giants fan these days. Couldn't even watch the whole thing. The beginning of the end, certainly.

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.

Pirates 6, Blue Jays 2: What Have We Become?

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

So for the first time since 2003, the Pittsburgh Pirates have won an Interleague series on the road. How about that. 


KS

Pirates 7, Blue Jays 6: So it has come to this, then.

No doubt intended as good-natured ribbing, I actually agree with the sign.

I know that the Pirates stubborn refusal to drop below the .500 mark is one of the nicer stories in baseball this year, given the extent to which they have awfuled their way through the better part of two decades now, but come on. Much of the blame, sort of, falls at the feet of Jo-Jo, who gave up six runs and didn't get out of the fourth, but as we have discussed previously, there is really no faulting Jo-Jo for anything, as he is only what he is. The bullpen only allowed one run the rest of the way, but that one run, Andrew McCutchen's solo shot in the seventh, ended up being the killer, as the Blue Jays otherwise potentially rad four-home-run comeback fell short. E5 hit a pair,  Corey Patterson had another, and Jose Bautista hit his league-leading/hater-smashing 24th, but in the end it was nothing but a loss. At home. To the Pirates.  


This is not, nor cannot come to good.


KS