Moving Day

So I'm in West Virginia on my way to Chapel Hill for grad school. If you're a regular reader, you knew this was coming. If you've been worried, this does not mean an end to WHYGAVS, at least not in the immediate future. Writing this blog is one of my favorite things to do and I'm going to keep doing it for as long as I can (or until Dave Littlefield trades Ian Snell for some peanut butter crackers). Anyways, realizing that it may be a year before I get back to PNC Park and that my yearly consumption of games in person will drop from 15-20 to 1-2, I want to do a bit of a retrospective. It's mostly for my own sake, but I'm going to drop my personal embargo on writing about my personal life and posting it here because I think you guys will enjoy it, too.

A little over four years ago, I was facing a choice. It was a choice that millions of 18 year olds make; I had to pick a college. My choices were pretty slim, Duquesne or Penn State. I only applied to three schools and only got into two. I had a nice scholarship to Duquesne that made money not an issue in my choice. Both my parents went to Penn State and bleed blue and white. They have the whole happy story, met as RAs, started dating, got married, etc. From a very young age we made lots of trips to Penn State to visit family or just see the town. Penn State and JoePa always rule Saturday afternoons at my house and it's been that way for as long as I could remember. Clearly, PSU was a natural choice for me. Still, it was a bit farther from home for me (about three hours compared to Pittsburgh's one) and mind bogglingly huge for a kid that had graduated from high school with 77 other kids. And on top of that, Duquesne had something else that not even the call of Penn State football could overcome, the lure of PNC Park a mere 15 minute walk away. That's right, I picked my college based on the Pirates. And all-in-all, I couldn't have made a better choice (though the Pirates ended up having very little to do with that).

Some people love to count the games they go to and keep a running tab. I've never been a fan of that. I have no idea how many games I've seen at PNC Park. I know that since the park opened in 2001, my dad has had 2 seats right on the wall in right field for about 8 games a year and I go to most of those games with him. I also know that since I went to Duquesne in 2003 and lived there for two summers, I've seen more baseball games than I could count. The actual number is neither here nor there. Sitting in right at PNC last night, I couldn't help but think of all of the great memories I'll always have of the park, no matter how bad the Pirates are. Here's what I could think of, just off the top of my head.

I remember the breathtaking beauty of the park the first time I set foot inside of it. "How could a bad team ever play here?" I wondered. Most of my memories of Three Rivers are faded. I remember my first game ever, I remember a 19-2 thrashing of the Mets in late '92 (Lloyd McClendon hit a grand slam!), I remember Game 3 or 4 of the '92 NLCS (whichever one that Smoltz pitched and we lost), and I remember going to a ton of games with a friend whose family had a daylight games package. We would sit in the heat of Sunday afternoon and watch the Astros beat the bejesus out of the Pirates behind Shane Reynolds and Doug Drabek. But PNC, this place would be different.

I know it hasn't, but I've seen a ton of great games at PNC. I've seen lots and lots of bad games, but who remembers those? I remember the game after the trading deadline in 2003. We'd just made the awful Ramirez trade and Tike Redman was back up in Pittsburgh to fill Kenny Lofton's shoes. The Pirates were playing the Rockies and sucked all night long, going into the bottom of the 9th down 11-6. Before the inning started, my dad idly commented, "Well, if we get back to Kendall, we'll win." Kendall had just ended the inning before. Improbably, the Pirates made a charging comeback, spearheaded by Tike Redman's second triple of the night, and Kendall hit a walkoff single for the 12-11 win. Amazingly enough, two summers later I saw Tike spark another improbable comeback, this time down 5-1 with two outs in the ninth against the Mets.

I stood in the rain for two hours the night before my high school graduation with my dad hoping to see the Pirates play the Red Sox, but instead seeing a rainout. I was there a year later on the day Garrett Mackowiak was born and Rob Mackowiak had what I can only assume was the most amazing day of anyone's life, ever (a walk-off grand slam in one end of a double header, a game tying homer in the ninth inning of the second leg, and the birth of your healthy first son, what a day). And my dad called that one in the car on the way down, too. I saw Matt Stairs swing so hard I think a button came off his shirt as he rolled a homer into the river. I saw Randall Simon assault one of the Pepsi signs above the grandstand in right field, which was in foul territory (of course). I saw Jose Castillo hit a home run off of the third level of the rotunda. I've seen Oliver Perez strike out 14 batters (or maybe 12), but lose 1-0 on a Chipper Jones homer because we couldn't score on like 12 hits off of Russ Ortiz. I saw Josh Fogg out duel Randy Johnson.

I have a million bobbleheads and even though I don't want any of them, I'll never throw them out. I've frozen during home openers, I've melted during the summer, I sat through fifteen innings of the Pirates and Astros on a school night, and I've seen dozens of fireworks shows. Although I can't verify this, I'm almost certain I've seen Mike Williams, Jose Mesa, and Salomon Torres all blow saves. I've gone to games with parents, brothers, cousins, uncles, friends, girlfriends, and strangers. One time I was kind of drunk and screamed the answer to "Know Your Buccos" out at the top of my lungs only to realize that the guy heard me, answered the question right, and won home plate club tickets (the answer was Jose Bautista). It is quite possible that the best date I've ever been on took place at PNC Park, even though it happened on the freezing night that Torres blew a 2-0 in the ninth and the Pirates lost in 12 (that was this one, if you're wondering).

Finally, my love for the Pirates and my proximity to PNC Park lead me to start this blog. Much to my own surprise two and a half years later and I'm still writing. I never, ever though that would happen and I've never, ever done anything this long on my own volition. That's because through WHYGAVS, I've realized that there are countless other Pirate fans out there just like me. I don't know how you guys feel about it, but it's really a very comforting feeling to know that not every Pirate fan takes the words of Dave, Greg, Kevin, and Bob as gospel, even though the mailbag at Pirates.com and the callers to most of the radio and TV talk shows might seem to indicate otherwise. Thank you.

And so here we are, seventeen years after my first Pirate game, fifteen years since they've mattered, six and a half years after PNC Park opened, and four years after I started at Duquesne, and it's coming to an end. I'm going to miss a lot of people in Western PA (and you all know who you are), but as insane and improbable as it is, I'm going to miss PNC Park and the Pittsburgh Pirates.