Battling Bucs : The Defining Moment of the Past 20 Years

Baseball is a funny game.
Every new season starts with 2,430 games on the regular season schedule. Almost all of them will be lost to baseball history however one thing that makes baseball so wonderful is that any given game can produce something that will make it meaningful and memorable. In any given game a pitcher just may be perfect. In any given game a player just might belt 4 home runs or hit for the cycle. In any given game we might just see something we have never seen before. Also any given game can define an era of a franchise.
The last twenty years have been a unique and sad era for the Pittsburgh Ball Club. Each of the last twenty seasons has ended without a winning record, the longest such stretch in North American sports history. The Pirates despite not being the worst team in baseball over this particular stretch were a laughing stock and even in local Pittsburgh communities outward supporters of the franchise were put down. Certainly it has been difficult to be a Pirates fan these last two decades.
We have seen our share of disappointments: Sid Bream’s slide, the 1994 strike, the 1997 Freak Show losing out to the Astros, the clinching of our 17^th straight season without a winning record, losing 20-0 to the Milwaukee Brewers, the collapses of the last two years and so on but the one game that most defines how the last 20 years are and will be viewed is going to surprise most people.
The game in question didn’t occur during the streak nor did it even involve the Pirates. The game in question at the time it was played appeared destined to be just another game lost to baseball history. It was the second game of a double header on September 25, 1932 the last day of the regular seasons between two clubs, the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Giants, who were long out of playoff contention.
The reason why this game played over 80 years ago is the single game that most defines the last 20 years of Pirates baseball is obviously not too clear at first. Any reasonable person would conclude that the two events are in no way related but yet here they are forever tied together. The names of the players involved in that game and even the events during the game are irrelevant to this discussion but what has turned out to matter over 80 years later is the outcome. The Phillies after having lost the first game of the double header defeated the Giants in the second game by a score of 6-3.
The game’s score is yet another trivial matter but the Phillies winning is rather significant. At this time the Phillies franchise hadn’t had a winning season in the last 14 years and this win meant they had finished the year 78-76. Immediately following this year the Phillies franchise would go on to set the old record of 16 straight seasons without a winning record. Meaning that one win on September 25, 1932 prevented the Phillies from having 31 straight years without a winning record.
What if that seemingly meaningless game played over 80 years ago would have had a different outcome how would the last 20 years of Pirates baseball be viewed? No longer would their 20 season mark be a record and in fact it wouldn’t even be particularly close. Franchises without such a dubious record that still have some horrible stretches in their time aren’t viewed quite as negatively as the Pirates. Take the Royals the team with the worst winning percentage in all of baseball over the last two decades; they managed to have just about everything go right in 2003 and finished with 83 wins thus preventing them from having a streak comparable to the Pirates. Take the Steelers a storied franchise that once had a stretch of 37 years which saw only 7 winning seasons. Futility is fleeting. People don’t dwell on bad stretches in the history of franchise’s unless there is something very peculiar about it, such as the curse of a goat or in the Pirates case some sort of record.
One relatively meaningless game played over 80 years ago has shaped the perception of the last 20 years and one relatively meaningless game will ultimately end that perception. Two games will forever define a 3,171 game stretch in Pirates history. Today the particular events in those 3,171 games seem rather unimportant as today is all about just those two. It seems rather comical to me so much significance has been placed on just two rather unimportant games but I get it win #82 is important. It officially and symbolically ends a dark era in franchise history.
So to my fellow fans feel free to celebrate win #82. I get it there is significance to it for a lot of you but for me it is just another stepping stone towards where I want to see the Pirates go. To the team outside of possibly one individual this milestone should be as trivial as any other win up to this point has been. Us fans have suffered through 20 years of all this (some like myself admittedly less) but for the most these players, coaches, executives and even the owner hasn’t been a part of all of them. Its true Neil Walker was a Pirates fan growing up and has probably been in some way “involved” with a lot of these seasons but he isn’t the exception I have in mind. The exception is the bench coach, Jeff Bannister, who has been part of this organization for the last 28 years. If win #82 has some significance to him I believe that would be excusable seeing as he has been directly a part of it in its entirety.
However this write up isn’t about who is and isn’t allowed to place significance on what is in a vacuum an insignificant event. Anyone can feel free to do so or not. No what this is about is how one moment in time can forever transform something it would seem to have no relationship with. In the baseball world the 1932 Phillies and the 2013 Pirates would seem to be about as far apart as one could possibly get but yet here they are in an article together with the connection between them being discussed. Here we are celebrating an end of an era which these two teams will forever be indirectly tied to.
The streak is at long last dead. Feel free to celebrate. Just remember we have a pennant to win.
Pennant?
After twenty years that sounds a little odd to say but hey … Baseball is a funny game.