At some point very early on in Neil Walker’s career, I think when he hit his first career home run to flip a 2-1 Cub lead into a 3-2 Pirate lead in the eighth inning of a pointless game against the Pirates and Cubs in June of 2010, it dawned on me how cool it was that Neil Walker was a Pirate. I was born in January of 1985, Walker in September. He showed up in 2010 wearing #18 and while I wasn’t sure if it was in honor of Andy Van Slyke or Jason Kendall, it didn’t matter much. It occurred to me that Neil Walker and I may have, at some point, been at Three Rivers Stadium or PNC Park together, watching the Pirates lose to the Astros on a hot Sunday afternoon.
As the Pirates got better from 2010 to 2011 to 2012 and finally to 2013, it was great to have Walker on the team as a proxy for the fans. That’s not to say that Andrew McCutchen or Gerrit Cole or AJ Burnett or Francisco Liriano couldn’t understand what it meant to Pirate fans to finally be watching a winning team, but understanding it and experiencing it are different. Walker got to be the intermediary: the player that helped the long-running franchise break their impossible losing streak, and the Pittsburgher that truly knew what it all meant. I don’t want to say that his presence made the last three years more special or better, simply that it made the entire experience different. A lot of people my age in Western Pennsylvania grew up watching Bonds and Drabek and Bonilla and Van Slyke, hearing about Maz and Roberto and Pops, hoping to be part of a future generation of Pirates that would add to those stories. Walker got to live it, and all of us got a small taste of what it would’ve been like to live it through him. It was a wonderful cherry on top of the sundae of relevant Pirate baseball.
That’s all over now, and that’s OK, too. It seems funny to me to view the Pirate/Neil Walker relationship as something that the Pirates owed to Walker to continue. A chance to play, to play well, and to play meaningful games for their hometown team is something that most athletes are never given. I’ve never understood the old Seinfeld trope that gets passed around when moves like this are made, that rooting for a sports team is just rooting for laundry. Of course that’s all sports is; that laundry is the connection. We see that laundry and it makes us feel a certain way, it reminds us of something, it connects me and the undergrad in a Pirate hat with a knowing nod 500 miles away from home in a way that not much else does; we both what it was like to watch a team lose 105 games, we both know what it’s been like to see Andrew McCutchen blossom into a superstar in front of our eyes, we both know Neil Walker is from Pittsburgh. That connection doesn’t cease to exist because Neil Walker’s hat changes; it just shifts for all of us.
Andrew McCutchen didn’t grow up dreaming of winning a World Series for the Pirates, but I’m sure it’s the only thing he wants right now. AJ Burnett would’ve never imagined the day that the Pirates traded for him that he’d be begging the Pirates to take him back three years later. Jung Ho Kang was 7,000 miles from Pittsburgh a year ago, and in October, the proverbial top blew off of PNC Park when he wheeled his broken leg onto the field to be part of the pre-game Wild Card ceremony. Walker’s Pirate story was special, but it ended yesterday and a new one will take its place. We were lucky to have a hometown player on the team to channel the experience of breaking the losing streak for us, but sometimes life has to move on. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
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