For the record.

My last post was a bit of a rant. Let me try to be clear here. (Crap, I just used an Obama-ism.)

Baseball, in and of itself, is hardly dead to me. I was honestly in a bit of a hurry last night and just wanted to get the rant off my chest, so I got it off and didn't really even look over it. I even forgot to give the post tags. But yeah, baseball as a sport is still alive and well.

It's Major League Baseball I couldn't give two flying flips about.

It seriously is a big joke now. Whereas in the NFL and the NHL, you have a wonderful parity among teams so that pretty much any team has the potential to affect a turnaround within a season or two and become competitive, MLB simply is not and probably never will be like that. You've got the Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, Dodgers, Angels, Giants... these are your teams that get all the spotlight, all the attention. Screw the Tampa Bay Rays, no one really cares about them. The Arizona Diamondbacks down here were being picked as a possible Wild Card team, if not to give the Dodgers a run for the division title. Here they sit, instead, doing worse than the Pirates this year.

But of course, the Pirates are the laughingstock. Har har.

Maybe it's because the Pirates are in fact from Pittsburgh, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Penguins, two of the best teams in all of sports. The poor Pirates are like the black sheep, the kid the family doesn't like to talk about holed up in the attic. I actually thought maybe the Pirates would see the other two teams winning their sports' biggest titles and suddenly be inspired to actually try for once.

Silly me.

And it really kills me, because I really love going to Pirates games. When the Pirates came down here to Arizona to play the Diamondbacks, I really wanted to go to a game. I have been to more Pirates games than any other sporting event, by quite a landslide (probably about a 25-1 ratio), and in that time they've probably won about 90% of the time. I always used to say I needed to get season tickets because the Pirates always did so well when I went to see them. So I knew what they were capable of. I knew they could win.

And besides the fact that the Pirates had a ridiculous win percentage when I went to see them, I actually enjoyed going to the games regardless. I have a lot of really fond memories in Three Rivers Stadium and PNC Park with my family, and particularly my dad, watching the Pirates. Win or lose, I watched every game eagerly, watched every pitch in earnest, cheered for long hits to clear the wall. I got to see Mark McGuire hit home runs during practice warm-ups. I witnessed, in person, the 1997 combined extra-inning no-hitter pitched by Francisco Cordova and Ricardo Rincon. These memories have no less magic for me now than they did previously.

Just right now? This Pirates team? In this Major League? Dead to me.

Call me in about two or three years, really. Once this reconstruction process really starts to take shape (if it does, in fact, actually take shape), I may find myself hopeful again. It's just really hard to care about my team when it's not only admitting utter and total defeat by trading virtually every player it's acquired over the years away, but it also exists in a league where only the bullies with the deepest pockets are able to tower over the others.

And to top it all off, the steroids thing is completely tainting the Red Sox's two World Series wins. Just how many players on those players were on the juice? I was enthralled by the Sox back then, since my sister Caryn is a Sox fan, and so I took on the Sox as my second team, rooting for them to reverse the curse. And so they did. But apparently steroids helped fund it. Does that mean the curse isn't really reversed? Could the Sox ever win without steroid-enhanced players?

It just... the whole mess disgusts me. And I'm done with it. In a few years, when the so-called "Steroid Era" is really ebbing, and the Pirates are maybe starting to figure out how to run a baseball team, hopefully (and I do very much hope) I'll be able to care about baseball again.

For the time being, there's still two championship caliber teams in Pittsburgh well worth rooting for. Now if only we could manage to attract an NBA team...

Song stuck in my head: All I Wanna Do is Have Some Fun - Sheryl Crow