And as fans, the meaning of that phrase is a given. No one has to ask what "The Year" is, because it's the same thing for everyone: a championship. Champagne and jubilation and your team riding on parade floats down your city's main avenue. That's what you envision when you invoke the magic words. "The Year" is this rosy, diaphanous thing in the lexicon of every fanbase. Every fanbase, that is, save one.
If you happen to root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, "The Year" is almost assuredly not concerned with the World Series. You've probably heard, but the Bucs have a sustained track record of ineptitude to rival that of any organization in sports. (Yes, I am aware that the Charlotte Bobcats exist.) To wit: The Pirates have finished with a sub-.500 record every season for two decades. That a team could miss the playoffs for twenty straight years seems statistically improbable; that a team could fail to win even half their games for twenty consecutive seasons defies belief, yet that's exactly what the Pirates have done. Last time the Bucs won more games than they lost in a year, the first President Bush was in the Oval Office, Boyz II Men's "End Of The Road" was #1 on Billboard's Hot 100, and the term "email" had yet to be coined. I imagine that, if any Pirates fan has used the phrase "this could be the year" in the two abysmal decades since, they weren't thinking about October glory so much as just a nice, pleasant season in which the team managed to win more than 81 games.
To that end, it appears that this may in fact be "The Year" for the Pirates. Here is a thing which is true: Pittsburgh has the best record in baseball right now. Not the NL Central, or even the NL, period. In all of baseball. Again: Pittsburgh. Best. Record. In baseball. This is not a typographical error.
Despite such an encouraging start, there is, of course, plenty of fretting among the Bucs faithful. Cautious optimism is the only kind that fanbase has known for a long time, and even a first half as auspicious as this year's is no guarantee of anything. (See: 2012.) There are real baseball concerns like whether or not the pitching staff can continue their superlative performance through the stretch drive. There is also, because it's the Pirates we're talking about after all, irrational, fatalistic dread. It's the sort of apprehension that comes from having watched a team repeatedly, completely, utterly wilt after (if not long before) the All-Star break. They're waiting for the other shoe (injury? surging Reds team? Inexplicable decline?) to drop. Twenty years of abject misery will to that to a body. Twenty years and one of the slowest, most perfectly mustachioed baserunners in the history of the game.
Sid Bream's slide in 1992 effectively murdered baseball in Pittsburgh. As a Braves fan, it was one of the great moments of my young sports-watching life, but I can see how, given everything that's happened to the Bucs since, that slide has come to embody the whole sorry mess of bad trades and worse luck and collapse after collapse after collapse. (I was at Turner Field last year for the 20th Anniversary commemoration/bobblehead giveaway of the Sid Slid game, and there was a guy a few rows down from us wearing a Pirates cap and a homemade t-shirt that read: "Twenty years of lies. Sid Bream was out.") And I get it. It's the same pathos that causes me to refer, to this day, to a long-retired Minnesota Twin as "Kent F****** Hrbek" or Red Sox fans to still call a 61-year-old man "Bucky F****** Dent" or Clevelanders to call pretty much everything "Awful, Demoralizing, Heartbreaking F****** Sports." Some moments you just never let go of.
Admittedly, I used to revel in the Pirates' failures. They were the Braves' fiercest NL competition for two or three seasons, and a heated rivalry flared up during the incredible '91 and '92 NCLS. Thing is, that rivalry was ultimately too short-lived, with too little history attached, to really hold water two decades removed from its inception. I'll never stop hating, say, the Phillies, but I long ago discarded any real animosity for the Bucs. Which brings me to a sentence and a sentiment that little-kid me who watched Sid Bream's slide could never have imagined writing. I am rooting, actively and more than a little fervently, for the Pittsburgh Pirates. And so should you, if you have a heart. Root for them because not even Bills fans are this miserable and the Bucs faithful need something, anything, good to happen. Root for them because it's a fun team miraculously playing over their heads and Clint Hurdle seems like a good guy. Root for them because watching a team, finally, mercifully get off this kind of historical schneid is gratifying and even a little life-affirming. Mostly, root for them because every fan should be able to say the magic words from time to time, with hope resting in the truth of possibility. Root for them because, after all, this could be the year.
