Gerrit Cole, Jameson Taillon: People Will Come

So that voice in my head that keeps telling me Jameson Taillon and Gerrit Cole are going to make all the pain go away, just got louder today.  It started after Cole retired the sixth consecutive Baltimore Orioles batter and didn’t stop until Team Canada’s Taillon stepped off the mound in the World Baseball Classic.

If the voice is right, Neal Huntington, Frank Coonelly, and a whole lot of good people at PNC Park are going to be really happy.  This whole losing streak will be like a bad acid flashback.

People are going to be coming to PNC Park again.  They will come to Pittsburgh for reasons they can’t even fathom.  They’ll turn up in Coonelly’s driveway praising his vision.  They will arrive at Federal Street longing for the days of old–the City of Champions will be a serious thing once again.  Fans will be back and of course the boys at PNC Park won’t mind if fans look around.  It’s only $20 per person.

People will start handing over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect Pittsburgh afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, like where they sat at Three Rivers when they were children and cheered their heroes.

And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come.  The one constant through the past twenty years has been bad baseball.  It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. The past twenty years is a wound in the hearts of Pittsburghers.  It’s made us say awful things and make promises we never wanted to make.  Yes, the game of baseball is a big part of Pittsburgh’s past.

It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.

Oh… people will come. People will most definitely come.

Wait, that voice is back.  Bob Nutting is going to build a football field?\n
_______________

Other great quotes from the Field of Dreams

PNC Park flickr pic