Pittsburgh Pirates: A Message to Disgruntled Fans

Lastly, the fans do deserve better.

I’ve been a Pirate fan since I was born, which was March 7th, 1998. I attended my first game at Three Rivers Stadium on April 11th, 1998 (a 7-6 win over Jim Leyland and the Florida Marlins). My family has had season tickets since 1994, so there aren’t a lot of people who have put more money in Kevin McClatchey/Bob Nutting’s wallet than we have. There are Pittsburgh Pirates fans who support this club twice, even three times as long as I have.

I know what it takes to be a real fan. I know about all the BS that we have had to suffer through since our last world championship in 1979. Fans like me have every right to rant, rave, laugh, cry over the teams we love. But at the end of the day, I put the fans last on my list of people who deserve better because, in the grand scheme of things, the success of our baseball teams is very, very small in the story of our lives.

Our Twitter Message

One of the recurring themes of this baseball season regarding Rum Bunter is our twitter accounts constant emphasis on fans who take the game of baseball too seriously, and I could not agree more. Many people invest heavily into sports yet they have absolutely no control over. None. Zero. Nada control over. I used to have this problem. In the past, I have cried hubcap-sized tears over the Pirates. I’ve broken the back case on my phone over the Pittsburgh Pirates. There has even been more than one occasion where I took every bit of Pirates memorabilia that I owned and threw it outside. In short, I’ve had every single emotion expressed over this baseball team.

But somewhere along the line, I realized how stupid I was being. I realized that, while PBC is still my favorite club to root for in any sport, they are just a baseball team, and as beautiful as sports can be, there are so many things in the lives of us who don’t choose to make them our livelihood that matter so much more. The fact that there are so many people on Pirates twitter, some maybe 3x my age, that don’t appear to have learned this lesson, is nothing more than pathetic.

It is just sports!

A real fan should know that people like him/her are essential to the club that they root for financially and morally. But a good fan should also know that sports are not life or death. If you don’t like the way a game is going, leave the stadium or turn off the TV/Television. When the Pittsburgh Pirates become painful to watch, don’t look at them. If you are the type of person who can seem to talk about anything Pirates related without complaining about Bob Nutting’s cheapness, then don’t make him any richer by buying tickets. All of these are options that us fans can turn to anytime we are not happy with the product. The members of the organization do not have said options, because it is their livelihood.

Vince Lombardi once put his players’ lives into three big categories; God, Family, and the Green Bay Packers. That’s the way a lot of professional athletes/executives live their lives. Sure, we the fans have been pulling for the Pirates longer than most employees have been working for them. But we also have more time to root for the Pirates. If an MLB player is lucky, his career will last 15 years. I can’t speak for anybody, as I am not a former professional baseball player, but I’m sure when players retire, they don’t usually become die-hard fans of one of their former teams unless the circumstances are unique (Derek Jeter). In short, the players, the managers, the scouts and even the broadcasters dedicate their lives to the Pittsburgh Pirates. We the fans just root for them.

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