The pit and the Pirates

There’s a scene in The Dark Knight Rises that pretty accurately portrays what it’s like to be a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It’s right after Batman’s first confrontation with the movie’s villain, Bane – the fight during which Bruce Wayne gets tossed around like a ragdoll before Bane finally, with sickeningly casual ease, snaps his back like a branch across his knee. In the aftermath, Bruce is dragged off to be dumped into a prison somewhere past the ends of the earth; Bane follows him there to say a few words.

Ostensibly, Bane wants to gloat. Also, I’m pretty sure Christopher Nolan wanted to articulate the point of Batman’s punishment as concretely as possible, so that nobody would miss the metaphor.

It’s a very simple metaphor: The prison is, almost literally, a pit of despair. But it’s an open pit of despair.

At the top of the pit, the sunlight twinkles like the light at the end of a tunnel, and inmates are told that, if they can climb the walls, they can leave. Their freedom is visible – but of course, the cruel caveat is that the prisoners aren’t really free. The promise of freedom is just a mockery of the truth: Anyone can envision it, but nobody can make the climb.

(Well, almost nobody, but you get the point.)

And that’s where the scene takes place. Bane leans over Bruce’s broken body, and, with a smug disregard for the subtlety of metaphor, tells him exactly why he’s in the prison.

“Where am I?” Bruce asks, holding to the edge of consciousness and directing his question up at the looming Bane.

“Home,” Bane replies, “where I learned the truth about despair, as will you. There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth.”

He pauses, and if he’s capable of facial expressions beneath that old-time-radiator mask, he probably smiles. Then he delivers the punchline:

“Hope.”

Hope.

For most of my life, the Pittsburgh Pirates have been bad.

And to call them bad is to be generous.

I was born the son of a Pirates fan in November of 1992. I took my first breath about a month after the Braves’ Sid Bream beat home a mediocre throw from our then-left-fielder Barry Bonds, snapping the Pirates season short of the World Series by a margin of milliseconds. In the aftermath, Bonds left Pittsburgh to sign with San Francisco; he’d go on to develop a head the size of a beach ball and hit a billion home runs. The Pirates would go on to cut up their roster for a rebuild and make my dad really upset.

They had entered the pit of despair.

They lost 87 games the next year. They kept losing for a long time.

In fact, the Pirates would go on to have 20 consecutive losing seasons. It’s a simultaneously disturbing and impressive stretch of futility that happens to be a record for major sports franchises in the United States. It spanned the first 21 years of my life, and I hope, for the sake of unborn generations, that it’s never broken.

But baseball is intrinsically hopeful. It starts in the spring, and there’s always next year. You can forever see the light at the top of the pit.

So, despite the fact that I spent the first two decades of my life watching the Pirates lose with the regularity of the Earth’s rotation, I found myself sucked into my father’s fandom. I tracked box scores; I collected baseball cards; I found favorite players before they were traded away or lost to free agency. By the time I was 20 years old, I knew that the sun always rises and sets, the seasons always change, and the Pirates always lose more than 81 games.

And then, in 2013, things changed.

I was in college at the time, and I remember starting the fall semester with a feeling of uneasy optimism. For the few preceding summers, the Pirates had shown promise, carrying winning records into the second half of seasons before crumbling, inevitably, into losing streaks and irrelevance. We fans knew how things went. Winning was always within reach, but we were always poised for the hammer to fall.

But we were also burdened with hope, because that year, things felt different. For the first time in my lifetime, the Pirates had a true superstar in Andrew McCutchen. He batted .312, hit 21 home runs, and stole 27 bases. He had a cool nickname. He had awesome hair. He wasn’t just good for a Pirate; he was good. In 2013, he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award, and the Pirates followed his lead. Finally, on September 3rd, the team beat the Brewers for their 81st victory, guaranteeing that they’d have their first non-losing season in two decades. 

It felt like the earth had stopped turning.

Of course, it kept turning. The Pirates didn’t win their division (the Cardinals did – some things really never change), but they did win the Wild Card game. Then they went to St. Louis, where they took an improbable 2-1 lead in the best-of-five National League Divisional Series. My dad and I dropped everything to make it to Game 4 in Pittsburgh, where the Pirates had a chance to clinch the series. Instead, they ended up falling quietly, smothered with emotionless efficiency by Cardinal’s right-hander Michael Wacha over the course of a boring game that never really gave us anything to cheer about.

They ended up losing Game 5, too, snapping any fairy tale hopes. And that was about it. While they were a better team in 2014 and 2015, they haven’t won another playoff game since. In 2016, they lost 83 games. In 2018, they traded McCutchen.

Which brings us to today.

A couple of years ago, at the unfortunate nadir of the most recent losing-season streak, Bob Nutting, the Pirates’ tight-fisted owner, fired his entire front office – the GM, the manager, the ball boys, everyone. It was about the only thing he’s done that earned the fanbase’s approval, and it led to the hiring of Ben Cherington (who played a hand in building Boston’s championship teams) and a spark of public optimism that maybe, just maybe, more winning was possible.

The new management team brought in a seemingly-sensible plan. They traded veterans for prospects. They drafted at the top of the board. They stocked the farm system with high-ceiling guys. And this was supposed to be the year things started to turn for the better.

But the earth’s still spinning. Things have gotten worse.

Instead of showing improvement, this year’s team clinched a losing season with embarrassing promptness at the start of September. They’ve been so bad that opposing teams’ announcers have mocked them for rolling out a lineup that’s a “hodgepodge of nothingness”. They’ve made blooper-reel errors that casual baseball fans didn’t even know were logistically possible.

It’s bad. The Pittsburgh sports news outlet I follow is keeping track of how the team needs to finish to avoid the shame of 100 losses. As of this writing, they need to go 8-10 down the stretch – and based on their current winning percentage, it’ll be close. I think they’ll probably hit the mark.

But still.

Even though the Pirates haven’t won a playoff series in my lifetime, I can envision what it might look like if they did. They have a pitcher, Mitch Keller, who’s really putting it together this year. They have a few rookies who seem really good, including a 6-foot-7 unicorn-shortstop named Oneil Cruz who just hit the hardest ball ever recorded at 122.4 MPH. Sure, he has 109 strikeouts and he’s batting .220, but he’s hit 15 home runs, too.

I still read the game stories. I can always see the sun just above the pit.

After 29 years, I don’t really know if that’s a noble form of perseverance or a useless waste of my time.

But I do know that, in The Dark Knight rises, Bane was wrong. Ultimately, that light at the top of the pit really was the way out. Because, while hope can be a poison – while it can torture you, mock you, rip the ground out from under you and leave you grasping at air – it’s also the only thing that can save you.

I’m being overdramatic, of course. I know baseball’s not that important.

But man. I sure hope the Pirates win next year.