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82 wins

  This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop stream of questions about the Pirates/Phillies game on the TV. Or maybe this is how it starts: in a parking lot at Three Rivers Stadium where the same little boy is tailgating before his first-ever Pirate game, eating food out of the back of a car, then watching the Pirates dismantle the Expos 6-1 with his favorite player hitting a home run.  Or maybe it starts in the second floor hallway on the morning of October 15th, 1992. That's where he finds out that the Pirates blew the 1-0 lead they when he went to bed the night before in the most painful way possible and that, for the third season in a row they will not go to the World Series. The worst is yet to come, though, and no one has any idea h
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81 wins

  Good evening, good night, good morning, whatever. It is September 4th, 2013. The Pittsburgh Pirates are 81-57. The last countdown ran its course, so let's do things this way:  70 wins ,  71 wins ,  72 wins ,  73 wins ,  74 wins ,  75 wins ,  76 wins ,  77 wins ,  78 wins ,  79 wins ,  80 wins . I'm not even sure where to begin. My plan for these last two posts has been to give "81 wins" the historical context and "82 wins" the personal context. Maybe that's not going to work. I'm going to do my best. Starting in 2011, which was the first year in the PNC Park era that the Pirates legitimately contended beyond the end of May and threatened to break .500 well into the summer, this question has existed: Is a .500 season something worth celebrating? Is an 82 or 83 or 84 win season really an achievment if it doesn't result in a playoff berth? My personal view has always been this: a .500 season or 82 wins should never be a baseball team's
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80 wins

  Good morning. It is September 3rd  2013. With last night's win, the Pirates are 80-57 Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 80 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 , 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 . There is another way to write that list up. It could be written like this: 1993-2012. It's fitting that the final years on the countdown are 1997 and 2012, because there are not two more memorable years that the Pirates have had during their 20 year losing streak. The 1997 season was, of course, The Freak Show. As previously discussed , the Pirates jettisoned their entire post-Bonds core of talent over the end of the 1996 season and the following winter. The 1997 Pirates were supposed to be a lousy baseball team that would lose a bunch of games in the interest of laying a foundation for the 2001 Pirates, who would usher in a new era of Pirate baseball at PNC Park. The Pirates starting lin
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