Pittsburgh Pirates third baseman Ke'Bryan Hayes (13) slides safely into home plate as Tampa Bay Rays catcher Christian Bethancourt (14) attempts to tag him out during the fifth inning at Tropicana Field.Kim Klement/Reuters
A delegation from Toronto flies into town this weekend, here to do baseball battle with the Pittsburgh Pirates. They should feel at home. Just as the Maple Leafs (finally) have won an NHL playoff series, the Pirates, who for decades have defined futility, are having unanticipated success, finishing April with the best record in the National League.
The old burgh at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers has come alive in support of its once-lowly and, if you were at a near-empty PNC Park of a Tuesday night the past few years, the once-lonely Bucs. The old Pirates, which is to say last year’s edition, broke our hearts 100 times – the number of games they lost. Then again, the optimist among us knew the team was on the upswing. It lost 101 times the year before.
The Pirates’ playoff fortunes arguably have been even worse than the Leafs’, who before this spring’s triumph against the Tampa Bay Lightning hadn’t won a playoff series since 2004. The Pittsburghers haven’t won a playoff series since 1979. Jimmy Carter was president, Joe Clark prime minister. It was so long ago that all but two of the Maple Leafs that season were Canadians.
Pittsburgh once was a baseball town, long before Toronto had a Red Sox farm team. Its Pirates were in the first World Series (they lost to the Boston Americans, now known as the Sox). The left-field fence of the old Forbes Field, where Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series defeated the hated New York Yankees, is a civic shrine; the old ball yard may be gone, but the brick wall remains, and home plate is encased in glass in the first-floor lobby of the University of Pittsburgh’s Posvar Hall. (Step alongside it and you can almost hear the whisper of Maz himself, imploring “Don’t tread on me.”) The Pirates of the fabled 1979 season transformed the Sister Sledge hit We are Family into a civic theme song. Especially the line that went: “Here’s what we call our golden rule/Have faith in you and the things you do.”
But the faith grew fainter, and the faithful grew fewer, as the ranks of the Steelers stalwarts and Penguin partisans grew bigger, and louder. Once the Steelers drafted Mean Joe Greene in 1969 and the Pens acquired Mario Lemieux (1984) and Sidney Crosby (2005), the Pirates slid into third place in the city’s sentiments. The trope around town after the Steelers won the Super Bowl and the Penguins took the Stanley Cup in 2009 is that a sign should be erected outside the Fort Pitt Tunnel, which leads to downtown: Welcome to Pittsburgh – City of Champions and Home of the Pirates.
Take note of this, however: The Home of the Pirates will permit Canadians to buy tickets for this weekend’s series with the Blue Jays – a marked improvement over the Florida Panthers, who allowed only Americans to enter the early sale for tickets for the Leafs series.
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Here two-thirds of our Pirates, entering the Jays series on a four-game slide, nonetheless are playing above reasonable expectations. Your Maple Leafs are accustomed to the opposite ratio.
In my own two decades in Pittsburgh, the Bucs have had winning seasons only four times. The old-timers insist that if the Pirates start winning, Pittsburgh will show its real character: preoccupied by baseball the way Toronto is by hockey. No longer would it seem as if there were more Chicagoans than Pittsburghers in the grandstand when the Cubbies come to town. No longer in last place, the Bucs no longer would be spoken of in the past tense – the past being the long-ago glory years of the team, the tense being the way local fans await the inevitable slide from meteoric hopes to melancholy mediocrity. Hope springs eternal here only because hope usually flourishes only in the springtime – the way Maple Leaf hope evaporates most springs.
Over the winter the Pirates re-signed their most popular player, our own version of Connor McDavid. Andrew McCutcheon was the National League MVP in 2013 and received warm welcomes when he returned in the reviled raiments of the Philadelphia Phillies, not like the burst of boos former Leaf Bryan McCabe received when he returned to Air Canada Centre in 2009 in a Florida Panthers sweater. When McCutcheon cut his dreadlocks in 2015, he had them auctioned, the proceeds going to Pirates Charities. Born in Florida, he has brought springtime sunshine to dreary Pittsburgh, which with its lake-effect clouds has about the same hours of annual sun (2,021) as Toronto (2,066).
How much does he represent the soul of Pittsburgh? He named his first child Steel. The only time he disappointed me was when his second child wasn’t named Coal.