"The Year", The Pittsburgh Pirates, And The Truth.

The phrase has passed the lips of every fan of every team of every sport at one point or another: "This could be the year."  It's more talisman than utterance, more affirmation than statement.  It's saying the magic words, an incantation to the team and invocation of the Gods.  It's not an every-season thing, obviously, because sometimes the writing is just plain on the wall, and your team is not coming within a stone's throw of success, even if they're using a catapult.  But sometimes, we say it and we mean it.  With enough luck, if most of the team stays mostly healthy, if things break right at the perfect time or at least avoid breaking poorly and the worst possible moment, it becomes a truth and a hope and a dream.  "This could be the year."

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. 

Night In A Car Alone: A Brief Rumination On Irrational Fandom.

Being fans is a fascinatingly irrational part of our daily lives.  Whether it's a psychopathic overreaction to Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson (and seriously, have we come to this, people?) or going near-catatonic over a humiliating playoff loss (like I did after the Falcons' atrocious showing against the Giants last year), the idea that we would emotionally invest in people and their exploits with virtually zero reciprocity is counterintuitive to the point of foolishness.  We cede certain territories of our souls to the objects of our fandom, and ask that they keep those fiefdoms in good repair.  Sometimes they're kind enough to oblige.  More often, those little geographical soul-areas are left with the weeds choking out all other flora and covering over the dilapidated buildings.  And yet, we keep going back to the well. 

We do this because, especially in this age of internet unilateral consciousness cum digitized isolation, we badly need real-world affirmation.  The nod to the person on the street wearing the same ball cap we're wearing.  The high fives with the random people in the stadium or the sports bar after a big play.  Fandom, even the long-suffering variety, is a balm for the countless bruises we sustain on our hearts and minds because we can share it.  Perhaps especially when it's also the cause of said bruises.  This paragraph is overwrought and a dead-horse-beaten reprisal of a thousand just like it, but it's that way because it is rooted in truth.  Fandom matters because it imparts a fundamental sense of belonging to the fan.    

Of course, there are also the contradictory tendencies that come with devotion.  Most common and identifiable is the "player you hate now but would adore if they were traded to your team."  (Copyright: Bill Simmons.)  I mean, I'm fairly certain Cole Hamels is an irredeemable d-bag, but if I woke up tomorrow and he was miraculously on the Braves' playoff roster, I would go buy his jersey immediately.  (Obviously, there are exceptions for people like John Rocker.)  It really is incredible how the name on the front of the uniform can eradicate any negatives associated with the name on the back.

But this kind of thing is mostly harmless, and also falls into the shared experience category.  It's when you isolate us, when the act of rooting becomes a solitary thing, that the emotions that find release and reflection among our fellow fans turn inwards and can lead to the more illogical extremes of rooting.  When you can't vent with or express you opinions to other people about what's going on in the game, things can take a bizarre turn.  

Last night, I had possibly the most viscerally irrational moment of my sports fan life, and that, folks, is saying something.  

Here I was, alone, in a dark car at night.  After a ten-hour work day, all I wanted was to get home, crack a beer, catch the end of the Braves game, watch the second half of Bears/Cowboys, and go to bed.  Unfortunately, I was stuck in a torrential downpour of the sort that grinds traffic to a crawl because no one can see out of their windshield for the rain, creeping down 400 South at eight miles an hour.  So I was already tense and cranky.  On the radio, Don Sutton and Jim Powell were narrating as the Braves struggled to stage a late-inning rally on the Pirates.  Since the Nationals were losing to Philly, we still had a shot at the division.  We win out, they lose out, presto: NL East title. 

Now, here's where things got strange in my interior fan dialogue.  (Or, you know, sad.)  Instead of getting upset at our anemic bats for failing to get anyone across the plate, I became absolutely furious at the Pirates.  Their season, after all, is over.  These last few games are a formality as they stagger to another sub-.500 finish, when even a month ago their playoff hopes were so vividly alive.  They don't have any dignity to play for.  Sid Bream took it with him when he left the visitors' clubhouse in Three Rivers Stadium in '92, and it hasn't been back since.  There was nothing in this game for Pittsburgh ... so why didn't the bastards have the decency to roll over and lose?  Why did they insist on fucking up our season?  Why?!?!?!  I started muttering snide and petulant asides every time a Pirates batter stepped into the box.  "I bet your OPS is terrible, Josh Harrison.  I've never even heard of you.  And you're probably lousy at Scrabble, too."  I was trying to be funny for the audience in my empty passenger seat, but I swear to Craig Kimbrel, there was real vitriol behind every thought and word.  For whatever reason, I simply could not fathom why the Bucs wouldn't lay down and die, and it incensed me with rage.

Two things about this: First, it is likely better for the Braves that we lost last night.  We can rest Chipper, Mac, Prado, and anyone else who needs a breather.  We can set the postseason rotation.  We can focus on scouting the Cardinals as fully as possible.  We can take a beat, let the kids on the bench get some time without it being critical, and see where they're at.  Tactically, this is a superior position to mad-sprinting and nail-biting our way towards an almost certainly unattainable division title.  And I knew that last night.  I knew losing that game would probably be better for the Braves in terms of the postseason, yet I still desperately wanted us to win that game.     

And second, why on earth should I want or expect the Pirates to just give up?  Truthfully, I'm afflicted by far more saccharine sentimentality than a proper 21st-Century sports writer ought to have.  I confess that to a great extent, I love all the "spirit of competition" and "majesty of sport" and "triumph of human will" jazz that gets spouted in the form of tacky aphorisms by certain ESPN personalities or in the pages of SI.  The thought of striving in the face of long odds or playing out the string for the love of the game fills me with warm fuzzies.  (Yes, I am a sap.)  In any other circumstance, I'm sure I would have thought the Pirates quite noble for playing hard even in the ashes and wreckage of another lousy September, made all the worse because things looked so promising for so long this year.  

But I didn't.  I was just pissed that these clowns were actually trying.  Again: I ascribed zero blame to the Braves' hitters who kept leaving runners stranded on base; it was all on the opposition for actually, well, opposing us.  And it occurred to me that I would never have felt this way if we were playing, say, the Brewers.  Because Milwaukee has been a pretty good ball club these past few seasons.  It was the notion of a lesser team, a weaker team, having the gall to step into our path.  In a brief moment of utter madness, I had become a bourgeois fan.  I felt entitled to my team stomping all over someone else purely because they were supposed to.  God help me, I'd turned into a Yankees fan.

I have no idea what possessed me.  Normally, I'm passionate but not irrational in my fandom, and not prone to these sorts of bile-fueled funks.  For whatever reason, last night set me off.  My neural pathways were shorted out, and temporarily replaced with idiocy.  Being a fan is strange that way, sometimes.