![]() 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. No longer would it seem as if there were more Chicagoans than Pittsburghers in the grandstand when the Cubbies come to town. 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. In my own two decades in Pittsburgh, the Bucs have had winning seasons only four times. ![]() Your Maple Leafs are accustomed to the opposite ratio. Here two-thirds of our Pirates, entering the Jays series on a four-game slide, nonetheless are playing above reasonable expectations. Pittsburgh Pirates legend Dick Groat dies at 92 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. 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. 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. Especially the line that went: “Here’s what we call our golden rule/Have faith in you and the things you do.”īut the faith grew fainter, and the faithful grew fewer, as the ranks of the Steelers stalwarts and Penguin partisans grew bigger, and louder. (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. ![]() 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. Its Pirates were in the first World Series (they lost to the Boston Americans, now known as the Sox). Pittsburgh once was a baseball town, long before Toronto had a Red Sox farm team. It was so long ago that all but two of the Maple Leafs that season were Canadians. Jimmy Carter was president, Joe Clark prime minister. The Pittsburghers haven’t won a playoff series since 1979. 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. Then again, the optimist among us knew the team was on the upswing. The old Pirates, which is to say last year’s edition, broke our hearts 100 times – the number of games they lost. 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. 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. ![]() Log In Create Free AccountĪ delegation from Toronto flies into town this weekend, here to do baseball battle with the Pittsburgh Pirates. ![]()
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