By TYLER KEPNER
September 1, 2013
PITTSBURGH — The lights go down on the makeshift studio behind Section 103 at PNC Park. The fans are long gone, the postgame show is over, and Kent Tekulve undoes his tie. It is light blue, not black and yellow, but otherwise, Tekulve looks about the same as he did when he threw the final pitch of the 1970s, the one that made the Pittsburgh Pirates champions.
“Fastball,” said Tekulve, still bespectacled and gangly at 66. “Well, straight ball. After 101 games, there was no fast left in it.”
The ball, which settled into an outfielder’s glove, is lost to time. Tekulve’s cap, the pillbox style with little yellow stars all around, is in Cooperstown. The memory of the scene at the Pittsburgh airport, where the Pirates returned from Baltimore, remains.
Some 60,000 people, Tekulve said, enough to fill Three Rivers Stadium, had gathered to greet their heroes at 3 a.m. The steel industry was in steep decline, but the Pirates had joined the Steelers atop the sports world. People were proud.
“It was almost like a birthright here,” Tekulve said. “You felt like, well, our teams should be in the postseason because we’re from Pittsburgh.”
Yet the Pirates have not returned to the World Series, and the postseason has been a dream for two decades. Since losing three National League Championship Series in a row to start the 1990s, the Pirates have endured 20 consecutive losing seasons, a record for futility in the major American professional sports.
The streak, at last, should end this week. The Pirates are 79-57, tied with St. Louis atop the N.L. Central. Their pitching staff ranks among the best in the majors, and last week, they acquired Marlon Byrd from the Mets and Justin Morneau from the Minnesota Twins, two sluggers to fortify the middle of their order.
Clint Hurdle, the Pirates’ manager, saw tailgaters outside the ballpark when he arrived six hours early for Saturday’s 7 p.m. game. Morneau came later, checking the score when his flight landed, listening to the broadcast in the car and, finally, emerging through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, where he could see the lights from the sold-out stadium. He scrambled to find the clubhouse and reported to the dugout by the sixth inning.
“You’re trying to get out there as quick as you can,” Morneau said, “because you want to be a part of this.”
The Lowest of Lows
There was a time, a famous Pittsburgh native said, when baseball and football were equal here.
“I remember back when I was growing up, Willie Stargell lived next to my grandmother when they played at Forbes Field,” said Dan Marino, 51, a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. “It was the city of champions. The Pirates were just as big as the Steelers then, and they had some off years.”
The low point, and the rebirth, can be traced in some ways to Sept. 10, 1985. That was the Pirates debut of Sid Bream, a young first baseman who, seven years later, would send his old team into despair by sliding home with the pennant-winning run for the Atlanta Braves.
The Pirates were lurching toward 104 losses in 1985, and an announced crowd of just 3,133 showed up to see that game at Three Rivers, a multipurpose bowl that blotted out the skyline views that would make its successor a jewel. The sagging attendance cast doubt on the future of the franchise.
The cover of that week’s Sporting News showed a sparse Pittsburgh crowd with the headline “Empty Hopes, Empty Seats” — and that was not the worst of it. That day, in United States District Court in Pittsburgh, Dale Berra, one of several former Pirates who had admitted to using cocaine, said that Stargell had given him amphetamines.
In the midst of all the gloom that day, Neil Walker was born in Pittsburgh, which was something of a miracle in itself.
Walker’s father, Tom, had been a major league pitcher. After his rookie season, 1972, he had played for a winter league team in Puerto Rico with the Pirates superstar Roberto Clemente.
On New Year’s Eve, Tom Walker helped Clemente load supplies into a plane for a relief mission to help earthquake victims in Nicaragua. Walker offered to go, but he was single, and Clemente told him to stay in Puerto Rico and enjoy the night.
The overloaded plane crashed, killing Clemente and four others. Clemente’s casual gesture saved Walker’s life.
“My dad says he remembers going to celebrate, then waking up the next day and it being like the pope died in Puerto Rico,” said Neil Walker, now the Pirates’ second baseman. “He said there were people on the beaches for days upon weeks, looking out, just waiting for something, for part of the plane to rise up from the depths.”
As he spoke, Walker sat on a chair in the Pirates’ batting cage while his brother and his nephew took swings. The wall by the door lists the Pirates’ batting champions, and Clemente’s name appears four times. The Pirates honor him with a right-field wall that stands 21 feet high to match his uniform number.
Andrew McCutchen, the Pirates’ star center fielder, who could win the N.L. Most Valuable Player award, wore a shirt in the clubhouse for the campaign to retire Clemente’s number throughout the majors.
“I think I’m here for a reason,” McCutchen said, tapping the 21 on his chest. “To be wearing Clemente, to wear the same uniform, to represent the same town he did, definitely means a lot to me. It’s great to be a part of this team.”
A Rebuilding Strategy
McCutchen, a Gold Glove winner, hit .384 in August with a league-leading .483 on-base percentage. He was the 11th overall pick in the 2005 draft, a year after the Pirates took Walker in the same spot. They were two of the few building blocks Bob Nutting inherited when he took over as the principal owner in January 2007.
“There was a lot of talk about small market: can you compete; how does it work?” said Nutting, who is also the chief executive of Ogden Newspapers Inc. “I think we made a commitment right from the beginning that we would never use any of those kinds of excuses. We came in with the confidence that we were going to find a way to make it work, because if you can’t, there’s no reason to be in this game.”
The major league payroll stayed below $50 million through 2011. But the Pirates plowed money into the draft and international free agency in the final years before the collective bargaining agreement essentially capped teams’ scouting budgets.
Picking near the top of the draft several times, the Pirates reversed an organizational trend by taking the best players available instead of ones who could be signed easily. Two Scott Boras clients — third baseman Pedro Alvarez, taken second over all in 2008, and starter Gerrit Cole, taken first in 2010 — received more than $15 million combined and have justified the investment.
Alvarez has 32 home runs, and Cole (6-7, 3.80 earned run average) has held his own in a stingy rotation. The Pirates have closely monitored Cole’s workload, but General Manager Neal Huntington said Cole would be an option for potential starts in October.
Much of the Pirates’ core still comes from players acquired elsewhere, and Huntington, nearly six years into his tenure, might have had the best off-season of any general manager. He traded for reliever Mark Melancon, who became an All-Star, and signed catcher Russell Martin and starter Francisco Liriano, who have made a major impact. It is a welcome change from the early years, when Pittsburgh regularly unloaded veterans for prospects.
“When I first got here, you’re walking to the bullpen, and there’s people with ‘Trade Me!’ signs and paper bags on their heads,” said Jeff Karstens, an injured pitcher, who was dealt from the Yankees in 2008. “You’re like, ‘This isn’t what baseball’s supposed to be like.’ But over time, it’s developed and developed, and you see what happens when everything works together.”
The Pirates had a franchise-record $66 million payroll this season, and Nutting added to it by absorbing more than $2 million left on Morneau’s contract. Frank Coonelly, the team president, said the Pirates expected the payroll to rise again in 2014.
Generating Interest
The Pirates are averaging 27,288 fans a game, the second-highest figure in their history behind the attendance of 2001, the team’s first year at PNC Park. Even after last season, when the team ended the year with a 16-36 skid to finish four games under .500, season-ticket sales rose by 15 percent. Only Detroit, St. Louis and Cincinnati have higher local television ratings, Coonelly said.
“What I see is that fans are again proud to call the Pirates their baseball team,” he said. “We had lost that, justifiably so. All they wanted was to be able to wear their Pirates gear proudly and say, ‘This is my team.’ ”
To sports executives, apathy is worse than anger; at least angry fans care. When the Pirates lost Barry Bonds and Doug Drabek after the 1992 playoffs, and Andy Van Slyke two years later, interest plunged. The Pirates finished last in the league in attendance in 1995 and 1996, and they averaged fewer than 20,000 as recently as 2010.
Walker, the second baseman, has been to two Steelers Super Bowls and has seen the Penguins in the Stanley Cup playoffs. He was 7 when the Pirates’ losing streak began. He said he did not stop to notice it until he was playing in the minors.
“It wasn’t something that people talked about, but at the same time, baseball wasn’t really the thing to do around here,” Walker said. “As kids growing up, in the summer months, it wasn’t the big thing to get a group of people to come down to a game.
“You did that with the Steelers; you did it with the Penguins; you did it with Pitt sports and things like that. But after ’92, it just kind of died down around here. Nobody really cared that much about baseball.”
Jay Bell, the hitting coach and a former shortstop, has reminded players that this team is not his team from the early 1990s or the team that folded down the stretch the last two seasons.
These Pirates can carve their own legacy, and a simple winning record is not the goal.
Tekulve said his son, who is 35, wanted to be there for the Pirates’ 82nd victory, to see the losing streak end. It will be a catharsis for the city, Tekulve said, a tangible sign of progress but nothing close to the feeling of a championship.
For the first time in decades, a title seems realistic. A winning record is just a milepost along the way.
“We’re not going to go running around high-fiving,” Nutting, the owner, said. “Is it a step we need to take? Absolutely. Is it better than not doing it? Good Lord, yes. But is it what we’re headed toward? Absolutely not. The minute we stop and say, ‘O.K., we’ve hit a small goal,’ I think you take your eye off the prize.
“This is a team that can really show this city and this league something, and that’s what I’m excited to see.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 1, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated a tunnel in Pittsburgh. It is the Fort Pitt Tunnel, not the Fort McHenry Tunnel.
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