Pittsburgh Pirates Poll: Which NL Central Team is the Biggest Rival?

The National League Central has often been one of the toughest divisions from top to bottom over the last decade.  Who is the Pittsburgh Pirates biggest rival in the division?

Which team in the National League Central would be considered the Pittsburgh Pirates biggest rival?  This was a question that we posed on the Rum Bunter Twitter account yesterday and to our followers credit, received a lot of good feedback too!  After all it is Steelers-Ravens week, so it only seemed naturally to look at the Pittsburgh Pirates biggest division rival.

We posted the poll yesterday morning and let it run through the night.  Overall, nearly 1500 people voted in the poll.  This was the highest amount of voters we have ever had on a Twitter Poll, so thank you to everyone who voted.  Here are the final results from the poll:

These results were not necessarily surprising, although I thought it would have been more balanced between the four teams.  The Reds clearly are viewed as the Pittsburgh Pirates biggest rival with over 700 people voting them as such.  This makes sense as there has been a lot of parts to the Pirates-Reds rivalry over the years.

The early part of the decade saw the Reds and Pirates have heated games with playoff implications.  Often there were players being thrown at or yelling matches.  Of course there was also the big game when Cueto dropped the ball.  Then, in more recent years, it has been two bad teams taking their frustrations out on one another with Amir Garrett charging the Bucs dugout in 2019, among other incidents.

The Cardinals as the second team on the list also makes sense.  This is not so much out of hate, but out of frustration.  It is tough to be a Pittsburgh Pirates fan and watch everything always fall into place for the St. Louis Cardinals.  It is easy to not like them because they just always find success, something the Bucs have struggled to do.