Not Just a Game

Not Just a Game

Appeared in the September 25, 2009 edition of The Cabinet

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Call me a small-town boy, but I’m still getting used to being two stone throws and a river away from a major metropolitan city. It may have something to do with the fact that my town’s movie theater was closed down more than it was open, the nearest mall was an hour and a half away, or that these factors merely nurtured the virtue of being far too easily amused. Regardless of the reason, being so close to so much has continued to remain a novelty to me.

The best part about big-city life for an above-average sports fan like myself is how sports culture rides shotgun (or drives maniacally, depending on your level of cynicism) to the entirety of Pittsburgh society. It’s impossible to evade the onslaught of people sporting Big Ben jerseys and waving their Terrible Towels on Sunday morning, and that’s even before you leave church. However, my favorite part about the Steel City is their lovable losers of baseball, the Pirates.

Shocked? You’d be justified if you were. In case you haven’t heard, the Pirates just set a record for consecutive losing seasons for a professional sports team – ever. That means that if you’re a college freshman or sophomore, you probably haven’t been alive for a winning season. If you’re a junior or senior, you sure can’t remember one.

Then you may ask, “What’s the big deal about the Pirates?” The most obvious reason, my friends, is that I can go to a game without having to take out a second mortgage for tickets. For most, getting to go to a Steelers’ game is a gargantuan experience, an eagerly anticipated, mind-numbing event. I love Pirates’ games because they don’t have to be. I think it’s great that I can decide on Thursday to go to a Friday game, pay $9 for seats in right field (PNC Park has no bad seats) and still feel secure that my kids’ college funds are still intact.

Another reason I love the Pirates has to do with continuing a simple love of the game. One of the first memories I have is as a four year-old, going to a Minnesota Twins game when we visited my uncle in St. Paul. I remember happily guzzling down apple juice boxes they wouldn’t let us bring in the Metrodome, and wondering why we didn’t catch a foul ball in the nose-bleed section of the upper-deck.

My brother Phil idolized Twins superstar Kirby Puckett, so he decided to send him a baseball card for him to sign, along with a self-addressed envelope, a necessity mandatory for any legitimate piece of fan mail. I wrote to Twins no-name outfielder Pedro Muñoz because his was the only Twins’ card in my possession. A thousand birthdays and Christmases could not contain the excitement I felt when I got my signed Pedro Munoz card back two or three weeks later. Phil never heard back from Kirby Puckett.

For Phil and me, baseball was what we lived and breathed for during some key years in our childhood. We spent so many hours in the backyard coming up with ridiculous “unhittable” pitches, looking for balls that got hit over the gravel road by our house that was our home-run fence, patching up holes in the rusty old bed frame that served as a backstop, and playing with my mom’s piano students when they came for lessons. I’ll never be sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the piano students enjoyed playing with us more than playing the piano.

Even with this intense love, growing up in southwest Iowa made it difficult to choose a professional team to root for. I followed the Seattle Mariners the most intently because of the cool swagger and carefree love of the game embodied by “The Kid”, Ken Griffey Jr. However, the local radio station carried Kansas City Royals’ games, my grandpa from Colorado was a Rockies fan from their inception in 1993, and I would pull out my Atlanta Braves batting helmet (found at a garage sale) as a rally cap every time they were in a playoff pickle.

Being a Pirates fan is more than just continuing a lifelong love of the game of baseball. It’s about having something to claim as my own, having a place to belong to and being a part of something bigger than myself. The Pirates serve as the intersection between my passion for the sport and my desire to fit in somewhere as a “man without a team.”

You can argue all you want about how terrible the Pirates are this year (or even the last twenty), but to me, that’s inconsequential. I’ll be at the ballpark, enjoying my $9 tickets out in right field.