Time to Look Back

It is time to assess the Pittsburgh Pirates by looking back at the month-long tenure of the Pirates of Penance. When the Buccin' Ear began his commentary, the Pirates were a dismal 11-27, buried in last place in the Central Division of the National League, and on track for one of the worst records in team history. A month later, the team is 26-42, which means it went 15-16 over a month. That's the good news. The bad news is that they are on course for roughly 98 losses.

Since the last post, the Pirates have won one game (9-7 over the Cardinals in a win for Zach Duke, who pitched a bad game) and lost two (yet another one-run loss to the Cardinals and tonight's 4-2 loss to the Twins). Tonight's victim was Ian Snell, who continued his recent pitching mastery through six shutout innings, but faltered in the seventh, giving up three runs, which doomed him to a 4-2 loss.

How can one assess a team that is 7-20 in one-run games and, 8-25 on the road and 1-3 on the current homestand? The team generally plays well enough to lose. They insist, to a man, that they are close to being a team to be reckoned with. "Be patient," the team implores us. Sure, why not?

The Buccin' Ear asks himself why he continues to follow this team. Your faithful correspondent has not lived in Pittsburgh since the late '70s. He is not one of those transplants to Denver (his long-time residence) who pines endlessly for the city he left behind, although he continues to think of it fondly and enjoys it when he has had the chance to return.

In fact, the franchise puts the Buccin' Ear in mind of the Bernard Malamud novel The Assistant, vastly underrated and largely forgotten (total number of amazon.com reviews since 1997: 23).

In that novel, the Old World Jewish shopkeeper, Morris Bober, holds on to his store despite losing customers by the droves as the neighborhood declines. He is resistant to change and makes do with the occasional mid-day trickle of business that keeps him alive. He avoids selling the store, persisting in the the fading hope that the old neighborhood as he remembers it is still alive and that the business that sustained him will return.

In the opening scene of the novel, an old woman waits in the cold beside the bottles of mile for Morris to open the store. A Pirate fan today fulfills much the same role. You return to the old store even though the glittering shops on the outskirts of town beckon you to move on those siren shores. Wal-Mart has cheaper prices and the anchor stores at the mall have better goods and you damn well know it, but you keep going to the grimy store downtown, past the old shops (owned by the Royals and the Brewers). You are drawn back to the youthful place of memory, dead as you know that it is.

The Buccin' Ear has become that old woman in the novel, kvetching about the cold and demanding the seeded roll that she's gotten every morning in the past, ignoring the fact that the deli up the street has the same thing, and probably more, plus music and WIFI. Still, it's the store the Buccin' Ear goes to. It's Old World, and the Buccin' Ear loves it, but its time is probably past.