If you’ve been a long-time reader of WHYGAVS, you probably remember the Andy Van Slyke quote that used to adorn the header of the blog (and is now on the About page):
Every season has its peaks and valleys. What you have to try to do is eliminate the Grand Canyon.
The running tagline underneath the quote read, “In the Canyon, XX years and counting.” When I started WHYGAVS, that number was 12. Now, 5+ years and six nearly full seasons later, it’s 18 and this 18th year has been the worst of them all; the Pirates have lost more than 100 games for just the second time since before my dad was born, they’ve clinched the first overall pick in the 2011 draft, and most Pirate fans have become so used to losing that we all mostly agree that it’s a good thing that at least this year they had the decency to suck enough to have the pick of the litter in June. This truly is the Canyon.
I am nothing if not logical. I know why turning this team into a 75-win team would’ve been bad for the future of the club and meaningless in the present. I know why having the first pick in the draft is a good thing, especially if Anthony Rendon is healthy. I’m legitimately more interested in this team, with Pedro Alvarez and Jose Tabata and Andrew McCutchen and Neil Walker and James McDonald and, yes, Charlie Morton, than in just about any Pirate team in the last ten years. This losing streak, though, is truly Brobdingnagian. How many things have to go wrong for a team to have 18 consecutive losing seasons and for the 18th season to be the worst of them all?
You could really turn things all the way back to the the steel industry collapsing in the 1970s and 80s. Pittsburgh’s population has been more than halved since 1950 and what was once a booming city and market isn’t even in the top 20 now. The team nearly moved out of Pittsburgh twice and in short order, Pittsburgh became one of the markets that wouldn’t be able to sustain itself by signing free agents or by keeping their star players around for a career in black and gold like Clemente and Stargell before them.
By 1990, though, the foundation laid by Syd Thrift in his short time as the club’s general manager took hold and the Pirates were in contention for the first time since their World Series in 1979. Thrift’s successor Larry Dohety made a huge mistake that year that Pirate fans often forget about, even though it played a huge role in their future misery. He made a deal with the Montreal Expos to acquire veteran starter Zane Smith for Willie Greene, Scott Ruskin, and a player to be named later, but he included young outfield prospect Moises Alou on the list of players to be chosen and promptly lost him to the Expos. The Pirates were trading youth for wins without building a dike against the inevitable future.
Smith helped the Pirates win the old National League East in 1990, though, and even though the Pirates lost the NLCS in six games to the Reds it seemed like the start of something. It was; they won the East again in 1991 and a third time in 1992, even after Bobby Bonilla left Pittsburgh to sign what was then the richest contract in history with the New York Mets. They never got over that final hump, though. They held a 3-2 lead in the 1991 NLCS but failed to score even one run in Game 6 or Game 7 at home in Three Rivers Stadium. They fell behind 3-1 in the 1992 NLCS, but came all the way back to hold a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 before suffering one of the most heartbreaking collapses in the history of baseball.
Maybe if they’d found a way to beat the Braves and take the final step the Braves couldn’t (they lost both the 1991 World Series in seven games and the 1992 series in six), things would be different. That didn’t happen, though, and so the Pirates began 1993 with no Doug Drabek, no Moises Alou, and no Barry Bonds. They still had some fixtures of the playoff teams, though, and with Andy Van Slyke, Jay Bell, Orlando Merced, and Jeff King the ’93 Bucs weren’t awful. Unfortunately Van Slyke broke his collarbone and all but ended his career and the team never quite recovered. Something else happened in 1993 that would doom the Pirates’ franchise in the distant future, even if no one could see it coming. General manager Ted Simmons (who took over for Dohety, who had been fired for, among other things, the Alou fiasco) had a heart attack and quietly retired. His top lieutenant, Cam Bonifay, took his job. What kind of GM would Simmons have been? Since he’s never taken another GM job I guess we’ll never know, but it’s hard to imagine he would’ve hurt the team more than Bonifay did.
Everyone remembers the story from here. The club was put up for sale in 1995 and nearly sold to Adelphia founder John Rigas, who’s now in federal prison. A move seemed imminent until a young California newspaper man named Kevin McClatchy built up a team of investors and bought the club. He promised to do for the Pirates what had been done in Cleveland; build a new ballpark and a winning team to go with it. The first wave of rebuilding — Merced, King, Bell, and Carlos Garcia — was torn down to make way for a new rebuilding effort. That started off with a bang when the club nearly won the 1997 NL Central with the Freak Show and their sub-$10 million payroll, but it slowly collapsed as the 2001 deadline approached and Bonifay panicked by handing out bad contracts left and right and making bad trades to try and scrape together a contender.
He was fired in the middle of a disastrous 2001 campaign, one that resulted in 100 losses in PNC Park’s first year, and replaced with Dave Littlefield. Littlefield’s first job was to free himself of Bonifay’s awful payroll obligations and on top of that, he was handcuffed by a very real financial crisis in 2003 (if the opening of the books made anything clear, it’s that the club really was in trouble the year they dumped Aramis Ramirez off to the Cubs). In the end, Littlefield built a team that strongly resembled the dismantled 1993-1996 Pirates: some nice talent, some decent likable players, but no real chance of contending and a definite expiration date as the entire core was slated for free agency after 2008 or 2009.
And so Bob Nutting, who had probably been planning his move since floating McClatchy a loan to bail him out of the 2003 mess, pushed McClatchy out in 2007 and replaced Littlefield and a real rebuilding plan was put in place. The roster that Dave Littlefield left was expiring faster than milk on a hot day, and Neal Huntingtons’ Pirates starting lineup in 2009 bore little resemblance to the first lineup he put in the field in 2008. Then, he traded almost the entire 2009 starting lineup for one that struggled mightily to begin 2010. That new lineup was overhauled halfway through the year with young players, some of whom were obviously a bit over their heads at the Major League level.
And so here we are, 18 years after Sid Bream slid past Mike LaValliere and still unable to point out exactly when the Pirates’ next winning season will be. There’s a good chance that it’ll be in 2012 or 2013 and though I don’t think many people that know me would classify me as an optimist, I’m pretty sure the Pirates are going to be better in 2011 than people realize right now (though that really just means 70-75 wins). But it’s still far from a sure thing and it might not happen, even if the front office does lots of things right.
Don’t get me wrong; I understand the difference between the first pick and a top five pick. How much more optimistic would we be about the Pirates’ chances if they had Stephen Strasburg instead of Tony Sanchez? (And there’s not even anything wrong with Sanchez, who I like a lot.) I’m happy the Pirates will get to do a full evaluation of Anthony Rendon’s health and that they’ll be able to pick him or anyone else they want if he can’t get healthy. I can’t celebrate getting the first pick, though. Not after everything the Pirates have put me through.
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