In our daily Wake-Up Call, we get you ready for the day with a complete look at all things Pittsburgh Pirates.
It’s a little too quiet
The Major League Baseball offseason is barely a week old right now and everything is fairly still. I am not sure what moves the Pittsburgh Pirates will make this offseason but I am sure they will make many fans angry. That’s the reality when you’re coming off back to back losing seasons. To be honest, the Pirates are lucky fans even get angry anymore. Anger at least implies the fan base still cares but I’d wager we are one more poor season away from a return to genuine apathy.
In professional sports, anger usually still means people buy tickets and merchandise. However, if the fan base returns to ignoring the team, then we’re back in the dark ages. Think back the middle part of the 1993-2012 era and remember just how little people paid attention to the Pirates. I am not saying we’re about to enter 20 straight losing seasons again but unless this team either rights the ship or enters a true rebuilding process, you will see fans continue to not care.
Sports are like movies, either be great or be bad. The worst kind of movie is mediocre. People remember The Godfather and The Room, but they don’t remember We Bought a Zo0. I do not wish ill on the Pirates but the reality is, there’s no money in winning 78 games. You need to sell the present with a winning ballclub or you sell the future with a rebuilding one. However, don’t get stuck in baseball limbo, which is where the Pirates have been in 2016 and 2017.
RIP to a legend
I debated whether I wanted to talk about this in a Wake-Up Call but if you haven’t heard, former Blue Jay and Phillies pitcher, Roy Halladay was killed in a plane crash, he was 40-years-old. To baseball fans in Canada, Halladay was one of the only reasons to watch some fairly poor Blue Jays teams in the early part of the 2000s.
During his prime, Halladay was one of the most electric players to watch in all of baseball. I am not going to talk about any of his many accolades because baseball seems trivial in the light of a tragedy. Roy Halladay was so much more to the Toronto and Philadelphia communities than baseball and his death will leave a void that will take a long time to refill.
This section is going to be brief because I don’t think I can really put into words how shocking and sad this death is. Roy Halladay was simply a good man that was great at playing baseball but he was so much more than a pitcher. He was more than the sum of his achievements. The two Cy Young Awards, the Perfect Games, and the eight All-Star berths are merely footnotes to a well-lived life by a truly fantastic human being.
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