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Thank you, Buccos, for a great season

4 min read

In the end, the bats went dead, and so did the Pittsburgh Pirates’ hopes of topping the St. Louis Cardinals and advancing to the National League Championship Series.

Thursday was a day for postmortems and licking of wounds, but it also was a day of celebration, because after a period of wandering in the baseball wilderness that perhaps only Moses could appreciate, the Pirates are once again winners. They are relevant. They have reignited interest in baseball in a region that had placed them, in order of importance, light years behind the Steelers and Penguins.

Who would have thought, just a few short months ago, that the Pirates would be the talk of the town and the stumbling Steelers an afterthought?

For the past 20 years, Pirates fans – those who were left – spent the offseason hashing over what went wrong and vilifying everyone attached to the team. The players took some of the heat, and manager Clint Hurdle came in for his share over the past couple of seasons. But most of the vitriol in recent years was reserved for the guys upstairs, primarily owner Bob Nutting and general manager Neal Huntington, who was accused by some of having the baseball acumen of a banana slug.

There were signs of a turnaround the past two seasons, but both of those campaigns ended with monumental collapses, and there were calls for the heads of everybody deemed responsible. But the folks in charge steered a steady course, and lo and behold, when the 2013 season dawned, the Pirates were almost immediately playing good baseball. They had a solid, if unspectacular, April but were one of the league’s hottest teams through May and June, then played fairly steady ball through the remaining months of the season. Until the closing days of the schedule, there were hopes that the Bucs could win their division. They ultimately secured the first wild card position and thrilled the faithful with a victory in the wild card game over the arch-rival Cincinnati Reds. As an added bonus, the Reds quickly dismissed their manager, the hated – at least in Pittsburgh – Dusty Baker.

Next up was the Cardinals, a team with a much greater recent track record of success than the Pirates, and after the Cards clubbed the Bucs in the first game of the best-of-five series, many figured the rout was on. But as they did throughout the season, the Pirates proved to be resilient, roaring back to take the next two games before the offense disappeared and the Cardinals prevailed.

We’re saddened that the Pirates aren’t moving on to the next series, and that the good times will not roll on, but we’re heartened to think that for the first time in decades, the Pirates will enter their next season as, at the very least, contenders for a division crown.

For that, a debt of gratitude is owned to those who were scorned for so many years. Nutting, vilified for what many thought was a niggardly approach to paying for talent, has loosened the purse strings a bit, signing superstar Andrew McCutchen to a long-term deal and, when the season was on the line, taking on the costs of acquiring Marlon Byrd and Justin Morneau at the trade deadline. Huntington, whose moves in the offseason and during the season – especially the free-agent signings of starting pitcher Francisco Liriano and catcher Russell Martin – seemed to almost always work out, should be clearing space on his mantel for some awards this fall.

We would hope that Nutting and Huntington are not content to rest on their laurels. While the Pirates have a very solid core of players returning for 2014, there are still question marks, such as who will be manning first base and right field, and whether the Bucs’ emotional leader, pitcher A.J. Burnett, will be re-signed.

But those are questions for another day. For now, we’ll just say “thank you” to the Pirates for taking us on a wonderful adventure.

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