I hate this "Changing the culture" crap

I'm excited, I think I get to break out the way-too-rarely-used "rant" tag on this one. There's not really any one incident that's prompting this post, but rather a full winter of rage building inside of me that I finally have to vent.

Every time someone that hasn't worked for the Pirates for more than five months talks about needing to "change the culture of losing" in Pittsburgh, I want to vomit. It is a wonderful idea. It is something that needs to happen on Federal Street. At the same time, it's not something that you can do by talking about it and it's not something that people that haven't experienced soul crushing losing can quantify.

Sean Casey pledged to change the culture of losing in Pittsburgh. Jim Tracy promise to bring winning ways with him from Los Angeles. Lloyd McClendon's entire tenure was all about trying to do that. I think Dave Littlefield or Kevin McClatchy mentioned it at least once an off-season
every year from 2001-2007. When you suck as bad as the Pirates have, everyone wants to change the culture. The problem is that changing that culture in February seems easy and changing that culture on August 15th when you're 20 games under .500 with 40 to play is something else entirely. I know I've told this story before, but going in to my junior year of high school, our baseball team really believed we had a chance to be competitive, despite our 4-14 record the year before. We knew we had a major league prospect on the team and between a couple other pitchers with good arms and some decent role players, we felt like we could compete with the two teams in our classification we were up against for a playoff spot. Shortly. After about five losses, we were more interested in trying to figure out who was a scout to see our star player, pissing in bottles on the team bus, and trying to convince our coach that we smoked crack (we didn't). Practices was just an awful ritual we had to endure to stay on the team and the games were more depressing than just about any non-funeral situation I've been a part of in my life.

Simply put, everyone can talk about changing the culture of losing, but until the team actually starts winning, it's going to be really hard to change things. The one person that has to understand this is Russell after his season in AAA hell last year. Maybe he's got some secret that will keep the players playing hard in the doldrums of late July and August, but honestly, I'm not going to believe it until I see it.