For a very long time, it would’ve been easy for a completely uninformed outsider to determine that the Pirates were the red-headed stepchild of Pittsburgh sports teams simply by attending games and looking at the fans. I don’t mean attendance, but simply demeanor and attire. Go to a Steelers game and you see Roethlisberger and Ward and Polamalu jerseys everywhere. Go to a Penguins game and you see Crosy, Malkin, Staal, and Fleury. Go to a Pirates game and you see no jerseys, except for a few Clementes and Stargells.
Monday, I got to PNC for the first time in 2011 and it felt like my first Pirate game ever. Federal Street was packed and everyone I saw had on McCutchen and Walker jerseys and t-shirts or Hanrahan shirts from T-shirt Fridays or homemade Garrett Jones shirts or Tabata jerseys and shirts. After hearing stories about how Philadelphia and Boston fans overran PNC, PNC was packed to the gills for an afternoon game and there wasn’t an Astro fan to be found. I’ve been to plenty of sellouts at PNC before, but I’ve never seen a crowd like the one at the park on Monday.
For a while, though, it looked like the Pirates were going to give a performance more fitting of past PNC crowds. In the first 2 1/2 innings, the Bucs ran (or slid) into two outs on the base paths and were credited with three errors in the field, while another misplay by Josh Harrison had lead to an Astros run in the first inning. I was in the stands at that point feeling like I was watching a game I’d seen a million times: the Pirates were outhitting the Astros and Paul Maholm wasn’t pitching poorly, but stupid plays had given the ‘Stros a 3-1 lead and it seemed like the game was going to slip away.
It never did, though. Hurdle got Josh Harrison, who hurt himself with a poor slide/collision attempt while getting thrown out at home plate and the main culprit in the field today, out of the game and the offense kept clicking and a game that seemed to be destined early on to be a frustrating loss turned into a relatively easy 5-3 win.
The Bucs had 15 more hits, seven from the first three hitters (three for Presley, two apiece for d’Arnaud and Jones), plus four more from the five and six hitters (two apiece for Walker and Overbay). That means that Andrew McCutchen was the only batter of the club’s first six today without multiple hits, and he added a huge double in the bottom of the third that helped the Pirates tie the game up.
We can (and will in the next few days) spend hours and hours talking on this blog about whether the Pirates are for real right now and what that might mean and how the front office should be reacting to this unexpected turn of events, but this much is clear to me after my weekend in Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh as a whole thinks this team is for real. With the Steelers locked out and the Penguins making an early playoff exit this year, the door was open for the Pirates to get people to pay attention to them when they normally wouldn’t. The Pirates have responded with wins, and Pittsburgh is noticing. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
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