Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the seventh stop on the Road to 17: 1999. Perhaps the analogy I'm about to use is a bit of a stretch, but it's predominate in my mind at the moment so I'm sticking with it. On Sunday, I left Hermitage at 8 AM for my 8-hour trip back to North Carolina hoping to get back in time for most of the Steeler game. Thanks to a wonderful combination of a huge travel day and horrendously crappy weather, my 8-hour trip took almost 11 hours. The only positive thing was that the dense cloud cover from Washington, PA onwards somehow carried the 1170 signal with Bill, Tunch, and Wolf out of Wheeling (one that my dad says ...

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the sixth stop on the Road to 17: 1998. 1998 was, without a doubt, one of the two most disappointing years during this entire debacle. The Freak Show in '97 was supposed to be the rise of a core of young players that would lead the Pirates back to respectability. '98 was supposed to be the year that that young core broke through and brought the Pirates back to glory. They won 69 games and finished in last place in the NL Central, becoming the first sixth place team in the history of the Wild Card era (in 1998 the Brewers shifted to the NL to make room for the creation of the D'Backs and D-Rays ... both of ...

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the fifth stop on the Road to 17: 1997. If you want to know how screwed up the Pirates have been since 1992, let's start with 1997. Technically the most successful year for the franchise since Bonds left, the 1997 Freak Show was the worst possible thing that could've happened to the Pittsburgh Pirates as an organization. In 1997 the Pirates were a below average team that hit their ceiling by playing .500 ball. Unfortunately, they were run by a very poor front office that failed to recognize a team playing over its head. This, however, isn't about 1998, 1999, 2000, or 2001 **shudder**. This is abou 1997. An...

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the fourth stop on the Road to 17: 1996. While the early years of this losing streak all have fun stories about the strike or the All-Star Game or just being the first losing year in general, 1996 is momentous for something else entirely. 1996 was the first time in this unending losing streak that the Pirates front office looked at things and said, "Uh-oh. We're doing it wrong." This move was of course brought on by the acquisition of the team by Kevin McClatchy. After the strike the Pirates lingered in ownership limbo while the businessmen that bought the team from the Galbreaths in the 1980s attempted ...

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the third stop on the Road to 17: 1995. Above and beyond everything else in 1995, the one thing that I remember is Spring Training. With the strike spilling over from the year before, the owners were ready to do anything to prevent another season from being lost. "Anything" consisted of replacement players. The reason that this memory stands out so vividly for me is that the Pirates' team of replacement players steamrolled through the Grapefruit League that year (I've been digging for stats, but they're nigh impossible to find) and looked poised to improbably return the team to their previous glo...

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we hit the second stop on the Road to 17: 1994. 1994 means one thing to baseball fans: the strike. The horror of canceling the World Series over a labor squabble. I certainly didn't grasp the entirety of the situation at the time. I remember political cartoons with Don Fehr and Jerry Reinsdorf lampooning both of them for not being able to get anything done. I remember holding Barry Bonds up in my head as the icon of player greed after what he'd done to the Pirates. I remember it all seeming strange that there was no playoffs or World Series, even if I'd only really been watching the playoffs and World Series for ...

The Road to 17 is a longer-form look at each losing season that the Pirates have had since their last playoff appearance in 1992. The object is not to wallow in the misery of the Pirates, but instead remember just what it is that makes us Pirate fans in the first place. Every team has their great moments, the Pirates' are just fewer and further between. Today, we kick off the Road to 17 with the first year of the lot: 1993. I'm going to be sparse on the authentic memories from these early years. I was eight years old in 1993. I probably remember much more about my own youth-league team from that summer than I do about the Pirates. I played on a minor league (that's machine-pitch) team named "Joseph's Paint" that summer and we finished second in the league during the regular season and won the league playoffs, defeating our rival The Medicine Shoppe in the finals. In an odd and ultimately meaningless bit of foreshadowing, Joseph's Paint wore Carolina blue. ...