PITTSBURGH — Baseball is one of those sports where most fans head into Opening Day at least with a hint of hope. How else do you explain 48,000 showing up for the Rockies’ home opener? This year, the Pirates’ first game in Pittsburgh started with angry fans flying a plane with a banner over the PNC Park addressed to team owner Bob Nutting that simply read, “Sell the team, Bob,” a phrase that became a chant during the game and a rallying cry throughout the season.
On the field, the offense, which was scraped together at the free-agent version of Burlington Coat Factory, was breathtaking in its ineptitude. At one point, Pittsburgh had a streak of 26 consecutive games without scoring more than four runs, as they ended the season with a whopping 583 runs scored for an average of 3.60 a game—dead last in MLB. Slugging was even worse, with the team hitting an MLB-low 117 home runs, and Oneil Cruz accounting for 20 of those. Especially maddening was the fact that the Pirates’ pitching staff was one of the best in baseball, and it didn’t matter.
If it’s possible, the team was even more inept off the field. The first public relations nightmare began when fans arrived at PNC Park for that home opener and noticed the commemorative pavers known as “Bucco bricks,” which had been donated by fans and laid at the main entrance of the ballpark when the stadium opened in 2001, were gone. Although the team originally planned for the bricks to be made available to the families and organizations who donated them, they were instead shrink-wrapped in plastic and driven to a local landfill. When a local snoop ratted out the disposal location to Pittsburgh-based social media page OneBurgh, all hell broke loose, complete with an investigation by the Allegheny County Sports and Exhibition Authority.
Then there was the removal of the Roberto Clemente “21” logo which had adorned the namesake right field “Clemente Wall,” a 21-foot wall in honor of the Hall of Famer. The logo, which also had been a part of the ballpark since it opened, was replaced with an advertisement for Surfside hard iced teas. After fan uproar, the logo was restored, the ad was moved, and an apology was issued.
When the heat from this finally began to die down, an usher at PNC Park was suspended after he intervened in an altercation between a female stadium employee and a fan; the usher removed his belt and literally belted the guy. The encounter was recorded on video and resulted in most fans pleading for the employee to be reinstated since he (1) was helping a coworker deal with a confrontational customer and (2) was the only one in the ballpark who had hit anything worth a damn all year.
Weeks later, a 20-year-old fan accidentally tumbled over the Clemente Wall and onto the right field warning track, suffering injuries that included a fractured skull. He survived the fall, is still recovering from his injuries, and threw out the first pitch at the penultimate home game of the season, while his friend has been charged with furnishing him with alcohol.
In all, another typical Pirates season.
Over the course of this season, I’ve kept a watchful eye on the Pittsburgh Pirates—more specifically on their fans. I spoke to supporters at the handful of games I attended (every one of which they won, as the team did its best to not cooperate for this story), and spent hours on the phone with frustrated fans and former government officials. I’ve digested so much local sports talk radio that I know “Chuck in Uniontown” almost as well as I know my own wife. The question that I entered this project wanting answered is Why? Why continue to support something that seems disinterested in even supporting itself? Why be a Pirates fan?
The truth, as is the case with most volatile relationships, is that it’s complicated.
“We love the concept of Pirates baseball,” said Isabel Fisher. “What you see? Not so great.”
When I spoke to them in June, Fisher and her father had already used the MLB Ballpark Pass to attend over 30 Pirates games, making them either diehards or masochists.
“The stadium is super-chill some nights, and you can walk around, but then it gets sad,” Isabel said. “Everyone wants them to win, but then they just don’t. It’s defeating—to see other teams of the same market size get to the playoffs, and they’re not willing to do it.”
Former Pittsburgh resident Lela Means now makes her home in the Bay Area and attended all three of the Pirates-Giants game in San Francisco in her “Sell the Team” shirt. She became a minor celebrity, with expatriate fans posing for pictures with her and offering high-fives and commiseration. Means got hooked on the team as a small child in the late 1970s when her father took her to games to watch those “Lumber Company” Pirates led by Dave Parker and Willie Stargell, and remembers the bonding experience a championship was for the city. She moved away in 1989 and watched all three consecutive NLCS losses from her dorm at Williams College in Massachusetts before moving west after graduation, raising all four of her children to be Pirates fans despite the fact that they had never lived a day in Pittsburgh.
After her mother's death three years ago, Means was in town and had a chance to watch the team a bit more closely than she had been, and realized just how dire the situation is.
“Every fan that I know is frustrated and feels like Bob is not the steward he thinks he is,” Means said. “He seems like he really thinks he’s a good guy and doing a good thing for the city and the team, and he’s so clearly not.”
“It’s awful how it’s gone downhill,” said Jack Fayak Sr., who was at a late-June Friday night game against the Mets celebrating his 90th birthday. “We’re on the sixth year of a five-year plan and we’re in last place.”
Jack Sr. has a bit of history with the team, having been signed to a contract by the Pirates in the early 1950s. But when he attended his first spring training, an old high school football knee injury flared up. The X-ray found a torn ACL, for which there wasn’t a reliable surgery in those days. He returned to Western Pennsylvania and started a family and a career in coaching youth sports, but has always remained passionate about the Pirates, although even he admits it’s not a mutually beneficial relationship.
“I don’t even record the games anymore, because I know what is going to happen,” he said.
So why keep doing it? Fayak’s son, Jack Jr., feels trapped.
“We’ll never give up on the Pirates,” Jack Jr. said. “We are going to be here rain or shine. We just wish that it would shine a little bit more.”
“I come more for the ballpark than I do for the team,” said Isabel Fisher’s father, Scott. “You come to an evening game and sit there watching the sun set behind you and watching the lights come on in the city. It's just relaxing.”
Pittsburghers point to PNC Park the way that a proud parent shows off photos of their kid’s graduation or wedding. It is everything that Three Rivers Stadium wasn’t: intimate, picturesque, and sporting one of the best views of the city. The team proudly refers to the 38,000-seater as “the best ballpark in baseball,” and you won’t find a lot of disagreement. It’s also a park that is uniquely Pittsburgh, from the Clemente Wall to nightly pierogi races to the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” being led on the scoreboard by a bouncing smiley-faced cookie—the hallmark of local restaurant chain Eat’n Park.
It is a welcome view on a summer evening after a Pittsburgh winter, when a heavy gray blanket arrives around mid-November and usually doesn’t depart until sometime in early May. The ballpark is so beautiful that it is easy to forget just how close Pittsburgh was to never building it in the first place. Where would the Pirates be then?
In 1985, a year in which the Pirates would lose 104 games and many of its current and former players would testify in court about their cocaine use, the team was put up for sale by owner John Galbreath, a horse racing investor and real estate developer who had owned the team since 1950. As out-of-town buyers lined up to try and purchase the team and possibly move them to cities like Tampa, Denver, or Portland, then-Mayor Richard Caliguiri built a coalition of local businesses who purchased the team from the family, allowing the franchise to remain in town and locally owned. Named Pittsburgh Associates and including corporations like Alcoa, Mellon Financial, and PPG, the group was meant to be a temporary fix while permanent ownership was secured. Three years later, with the Pirates showing signs of life under new manager Jim Leyland and a young nucleus of Barry Bonds and Andy Van Slyke, Caliguiri died and 70-year-old city council president Sophie Masloff was sworn in as the city’s first female mayor.
Every few months, Joe Sabino Mistick, who had worked as the executive secretary for Caliguiri and took on a similar role with Masloff, was hearing from a corporate leader who was leaving town. Gulf Oil, Rockwell International, Westinghouse. A city that once boasted the third-most corporate headquarters behind New York and Chicago was down to 10.
Having worked in city government during the city’s "Renaissance II” phase, which ushered in a building frenzy that resulted in the landmark structures like PPG Place and Oxford Center, Mistick felt the city needed another big project to generate momentum. In 1991, he read that Baltimore was constructing a new baseball-only stadium for the Orioles and quietly investigated the feasibility of Pittsburgh building something similar. Although Mistick had stopped following baseball the day that Roberto Clemente was killed, he still had a vision for what he wanted in a ballpark—natural grass, a retro look, and open-ended so that the fans would have a view of the city.
One afternoon, he hopped on a police boat with planning and development officials, scudding up and down the river looking for the ideal location for a ballpark. The location that they settled on is almost exactly where PNC Park resides.
Nothing had been proposed to Masloff yet, but as an upcoming capital improvements presentation loomed, Mistick and the administration realized they didn’t have any other ideas to share. So he pitched the ballpark. Masloff peppered him with questions—how would it be financed? How long would it take to build? What about the future of Three Rivers Stadium and its other tenant, the Steelers? After she had some tentative answers to give the press, she ran with it and held a press conference introducing a proposal for “Clemente Field,” which was Mistick’s suggested name. Masloff even called Roberto’s widow in Puerto Rico before the presentation to tell her the news.
"This project must be started as soon as possible," Masloff said in her prepared remarks. "And I believe that if we do build it, we will finish the job of securing the Pirates' future in this city."
Masloff was known for her malaprops—once referring to the English rock band The Who as “The How”—but with this one, people assumed she had completely lost her marbles. Political opponents on both sides of the aisle seized the opportunity to criticize not only the idea of a new stadium but the mayor directly.
“Some of it was sexist and ageist,” Mistick said. “This was a 70-something-year-old Jewish grandmother proposing a baseball stadium.”
“People thought she was crazy,” said Mulugetta Birru, who worked for the Urban Redevelopment Authority in the early 1990s and currently serves on board of the Sports and Exhibition Authority. “Some thought she was brave, but many people said, ‘How can the public afford to build a stadium?’ You know, we had one stadium for two teams, and now we're going to build one for only baseball. That was very unique in the country. Not many had done that.”
In December 1993, two years after Masloff’s pitch and the public’s guffawing, Tom Murphy was in the Pennsylvania State Capitol building, finishing up his duties in Harrisburg as a member of the state House of Representatives before being sworn in as mayor of Pittsburgh the next month. Pirates team president Mark Sauer arrived to deliver a letter. As part of the ownership consortium Caliguiri had brokered, the group was required to give government leadership a nine-month notice of an intention to sell—and it was doing so now.
“So there I was, a brand-new mayor, owning a baseball team,” Murphy said.
One thing Murphy learned very quickly was that when you have a sports team for sale, the millionaires come crawling out of the woodwork. The city wanted an ownership team that would keep the team in Pittsburgh but were also financially solvent, especially considering the 1994 strike had left the team approximately $60 million in debt. When Kevin McClatchy, a Sacramento-based businessman and heir to the McClatchy Newspaper chain, arrived in Murphy’s office, he appeared to be 0-2, possessing absolutely zero ties to Western Pennsylvania and even less in the means of liquidity.
But as McClatchy continued to meet with local officials and talk about his vision, they realized that he wasn’t a carpetbagger, that his intention truly was to keep the team in Pittsburgh. A plan was hatched to build an ownership group around McClatchy, as city and Allegheny County officials essentially played the role of matchmaker and paired him with area businessmen and corporate entities who could provide the funding. One of the original investors was G. Ogden Nutting, father of Bob and owner of the Ogden Newspaper chain based in West Virginia.
“I really did not expect to like Kevin McClatchy, because I thought he was a rich kid from the West Coast and he was going to take the team to Sacramento where he's from,” said former Allegheny County Commissioner Mike Dawida, who was elected in 1995 and immediately found himself in the middle of the ballpark battle. “He became a tremendous, tremendous asset to the region and he really fell in love with Pittsburgh and he definitely wanted to stay.”
“He was young and very enthusiastic,” Birru said. “He really started to love Pittsburgh, and he looked like he was the future [Art] Rooney of Pittsburgh. You could see him really becoming a Pittsburgher.”
With MLB adding a stipulation that a new ballpark would be required as a condition of a sale to McClatchy, Murphy launched a task force to explore building “Forbes Field II,” a modern version of the Pirates’ home from 1909 to 1970. The decision was ultimately made to take on three major construction projects downtown: a ballpark for the Pirates, a football stadium for the Steelers, and a new convention center across the river. To fund the construction, a referendum was put on the ballot in 11 counties asking voters to either approve or deny a sales tax increase. Despite spending approximately $7 million on advertising, the 1997 referendum was defeated decisively. Not one of the 11 counties that had the initiative on the ballot voted in favor of the tax increase—not even Allegheny County.
Realizing that the referendum was heading toward defeat, Murphy and the county commissioners had already begun work on a Plan B, which was literally what the funding plan was called. Bob Cranmer, a Republican who had originally been against the project, changed his mind and joined Dawida to secure funds already being generated by the county’s one-percent sales tax surcharge which went to the Regional Assets District—which funded libraries and parks as well as maintenance and upkeep at the existing stadium.
“So, there's a pot of money that comes from the RAD tax that goes towards maintaining the stadiums and it was already there,” Dawida said. “So, we didn't make this one up. It was already there helping the stadium that existed. To this day people do not understand that we didn't raise their taxes to build the stadiums. I very seldom run into anybody that knows what we did.”
Murphy was able to secure state funding, and the Pirates kicked in $40 million for the $262 million project, which would be named PNC Park after the financial institution purchased naming rights. Mistick’s dream of having the field named after Clemente was dashed, but he did get a consolation prize: The bridge that leads across the Allegheny River to the stadium, which is closed to car traffic on game days, was renamed the Roberto Clemente Bridge. When he visited the construction site for the first time, Mistick got the first glimpse of his vision.
“Look at that view,” Mistick said. “You know, this is exactly the way we wanted it to be.”
Knowing the financial health of the Pirates, the Sports and Exhibition Authority went into lease negotiations with a much different tenor than they did the Steelers, who were a national brand in a league with a national television contract and a waiting list of thousands for season tickets. Really, they were just looking to give the baseball team favorable terms in order to become competitive again.
“Turkey used to be called ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ and the Pirates were like the same man of the sports teams in Pittsburgh,” said Birru, who worked on the lease negotiations.
“It was a kid-gloves kind of thing with the Pirates,” Cranmer said during an interview this summer. “They were kind of on life support. There wasn't a whole lot they could do, and the whole thing was initiated to begin with to get a ballpark to keep the Pirates in town. The Steelers, on the other hand, they were big business. They had a lot more money to bring to the table than the Pirates did. The Pirates had no money. They were broke.”
Multiple people involved in the discussions told me McClatchy spoke about having a five-year plan to ramp up payroll after the ballpark opened. But that didn’t happen, and in 2007, he sold his interest to the Nutting family.
Both Cranmer and Dawida found their jobs eliminated in the next election cycle, when Cranmer led an initiative to change the county government structure, a self-immolation of his own political career in some ways. Dawida lost a primary for the newly created county executive position in 1999. Murphy survived a while longer, earning re-election in 2001—the same year that PNC Park opened and the Pirates lost 100 games.
The new ballpark was expected to accomplish three objectives: Keep the Pirates in town; prime the pump for development on Pittsburgh’s North Shore, which previously housed Three Rivers Stadium, a warehouse for local department store chain Kaufmann’s, and a sea of parking lots; and help the organization become more competitive.
With Bob Nutting, son of Ogden Nutting, chairing the current ownership group since 2007, stories of the team being sold or moved are a thing of the past. Anchored by PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium, the North Shore (Or “Nor’side” in Yinzer) is a bustling mix of bars, restaurants, hotels, residential buildings, and a live music venue. And the team itself?
The Pirates have not been merely bad ; they have been consistently and historically terrible. This year’s 91 losses marks the 12th time in the 25 seasons since PNC Park opened that the team has finished with 90 losses or more, including four seasons in which they lost 100. Eight of those 90-loss seasons have occurred since Nutting assumed control of the team.
Multiple requests to speak to Pirates executives for this story were ignored. But the day after the season ended, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article in which players were given anonymity to discuss the team’s struggles. They spoke candidly about the ownership’s frugality, stating that the Pirates don’t have some of the same data and technology that other teams have to prepare for upcoming opposing pitchers. When hitters complained that they were struggling to see the ball and requested the team paint the batter’s eye black, the request was denied. No word on whether or not the whirlpool at PNC Park is powered by an outboard boat motor.
“We laugh at all of this [expletive] behind closed doors,” one player was quoted as saying. “It’s just a bad organization.”
All of this has Cranmer and Dawida wondering if they gave the Pirates a bit too light of a treatment with the stadium deal. Could they have gotten a commitment in writing that ownership had to invest in the roster? Could it have been enforced?
“This stadium makes money for the Pirates and it is a beautiful place, and it allows for a wide variety of different people who would want to go there,” said Dawida, who said he rarely watched fewer than 50 games a year in previous years but is so disgusted by the product that, when he moved into a new apartment building this year that required him to buy an extra cable package to watch games, he didn’t bother. “But you're coming close to burning that bridge, and I would say I'm extremely disappointed in what they have done. I don't think they've met their side of it.”
“Nutting has just been a wet blanket on top of the Pirates,” Cranmer said. “It's terrible. We need to trade him. We need a real owner that's committed to baseball and committed to winning.”
There was a sliver of hope in the middle of the last decade, which fans still talk about the way a weekend hacker continuously retells the story of the time they almost made a hole-in-one. Not just about how good and fun those teams were, but also how great the atmosphere was in the stands, that a ballpark usually only full for bobbleheads or fireworks was jam-packed to see Andrew McCutchen, Neil Walker, and Pedro Alvarez. After teasing the fans with a 79-82 performance in 2012, the team was 20 games over .500 by July the following year and the stands looked more like something you’d see across the parking lot at a Steelers game.
“What I most remember about it was that it had been so long since there had been winning baseball in this town, it seemed much more like a Premier League crowd than a baseball crowd,” said Randy Baumann, longtime host of the morning show on rock station WDVE. “Chants you’d be more likely to hear at hockey games broke out, huge flags being waved in the crowd. It really was just bedlam in the stands in the best possible way.”
A prime example of this happened in the 2013 wild card game against the Cincinnati Reds, chanting “Cueto, Cueto, Cueto!” at Reds pitcher Johnny Cueto, who dropped the ball and watched it roll off the mound. This just further amped up a fanbase decked in all-black, and when Russell Martin deposited the very next pitch into the left-field stands, 20 years of suppressed passion was released with the energy of a neutron bomb.
Baumann was hosting an event across the parking lot from the ballpark during that game. He had been giving score updates throughout and, when he notified the crowd of the Martin home run, they erupted like they had witnessed it live.
“I remember the night of the ‘Black Out’ game and I thought, ‘This is just the beginning,’’ said Gabe Mazefsky, a fan who attends about a dozen games a year. “There was so much talent on that team that this was going to be one of many years of an extended run. And ultimately it peaked that night and headed downhill.”
The Pirates’ rise came when the Cardinals were at the tail end of their mini-dynasty and the Cubs were beginning an ascension that culminated with a 2016 World Series win. As good as those Pirates teams were—and they were damned good, winning 98 games in 2015—they never won a division title or a playoff series. By 2016, many of the key pieces of those teams had left in free agency, the Pirates fell to 78-83-1, and haven’t sniffed the postseason since.
“And that’s why everyone is so angry now,” Baumann said. “Nutting had the perfect opportunity to capitalize on that moment and that roster, and all he did was cash out. … [H]e’s been despicable at every turn. Most apt that he owns the Pirates because he’s been robbing this town for years.”
This year, a group of fans decided they had seen enough. Carter and Canyon Swartz arranged a protest at city hall that drew a small but encouraging crowd. Last winter, they created the website Ourteamnothis.com and launched a fundraiser for “Sell the Team” billboards.
Mazefsky learned about the group, found their website, and kicked in a couple hundred bucks. They erected a few billboards, passed out T-shirts with the same message at PirateFest, and flew the sign over PNC Park to promote their desire to see Nutting unload the team. They’ve even attended Sports and Exhibition Authority meetings and demanded local leaders play hardball in the next round of negotiations for a new lease, with the current one set to expire after the 2030 season. They want Nutting to either be mandated to invest in his business, or see the team’s rent raised to help fund civic projects.
“It’s a weird thing trying to root for your team on the field while trying to put time and energy and focus into fixing the real problem that exists in the owner’s box and in the game and in the game’s economic system,” Mazefsky said.
Many of the Pirates fans who remain are reminiscent of smokers or drinkers who know it is a bad habit they should probably quit. But they can’t give it up cold turkey, so they cut back on how much they consume—bad baseball in moderation is preferable to having it control your life and wallet.
Even Mazefsky can’t quit Nutting. After a two-hour talk about his frustrations throughout the years, he concedes that he still holds out a sliver of hope the owner will make the necessary changes. When I texted him a photo from my seat where I watched Paul Skenes pitch against the Diamondbacks in July—a game that the Pirates won, 7-0—he texted back, “I’m in Section 319.”
It's hard to walk away from something you’ve been obsessed with since you were a kid—poring over box scores in the newspaper and falling asleep listening to the games on the radio you snuck into bed. He was in junior high school when the Bonds, Bonilla and Van Slyke teams won three division titles. Mazefsky still savors the memories of the 1992 team that came within one fatal inning of reaching the World Series. The following year, Bonds and starting pitcher Doug Drabek would be gone and Murphy would be getting a letter delivered to his office.
“I remember my parents saying, ‘Remember this, because it’s about to end,’” Mazefsky said. “We’ve been stuck right there. We’ve had some blips on the radar, but this is Year 33 in the wake of that.”
The most recent blip has been the drafting of Skenes, who was taken with the first pick in 2023 and called up in May of last year, with a crowd of 34,924 showing up to watch him strike out seven over four innings.
Isabel Fisher made sure she and her dad got there early for that one. They watched people pack the patio near the bullpen just to watch the guy warming up.
“What we experienced that day, it was incredible. Seeing how passionate people were and seeing how excited they were,” she said. “They really thought that was going to turn it around. And that excitement continued for a couple of weeks.”
Almost everyone interviewed for this story compared seeing Skenes take the mound to Mario Lemieux lacing up his skates for the Pittsburgh Penguins. The words “generational talent” were tossed around like cornhole bags at a tailgate. Nights that Skenes pitched became events, with attendance for his starts averaging almost 8,000 additional fans per game. During the four games I went to this season, I’d estimate half the jerseys I saw in the crowd were throwbacks, and half were Skenes. And the phenom has delivered, posting an earned run average of 1.96 in his rookie season before watching it jump in his sophomore campaign to a whopping 1.97.
Most fans believed that surely even Nutting might see what he had on his hands and couldn’t screw it up. So far, he’s not exactly capitalized, keeping payroll at $87,645,246 for 2025, good for 26th of 30 teams. Fans were frustrated but far from stunned.
Then, the anger was amplified when the Clemente Wall and bricks fiascos made the press—with one of the pavers that was discarded coming from the Dawida family.
“All of a sudden I'm watching TV one day, and they said the bricks are in a yard somewhere and it's gone,” Dawida said. “I don't know what to do, but I think it's about the worst thing I've ever seen any business of any sort do to its fanbase.”
“It was just stupid. As if people didn't have an attachment to those bricks that they spent money on,” Murphy said. “I mean, it epitomizes the attitude of this owner about the team.”
“Sell the team” became Western Pennsylvania’s version of “Go Birds.” The chants were so audible early in the year that the team was caught muting crowd noise on the radio and television broadcasts. Fans were heard intermittently shouting it out after tee shots during the U.S. Open up the road at Oakmont, and last month a guy traveled 23 hours from Japan to attend a game holding up a sign that said “Sell the Team” in both English and Japanese.
What’s the old saying—the first step is acknowledging you have a problem? The Pirates have at least done that, engaging in a mild public relations rehabilitation campaign. When fans lined up three hours before the Pirates' April game against the Cleveland Guardians for a Paul Skenes bobblehead—which were originally supposed to be available to the first 20,000 fans—Nutting saw the logjam as he was driving to the park and announced that everyone in attendance would receive one. The team also sent replica bricks out to the fans they had records for, with a note from the owner (as of the writing of this story, Dawida had not received a brick).
They even extended an olive branch to Charles Conko, better known as “Chuck from Uniontown,” who religiously calls the post-game show on 93.7 FM and airs his opinion on the state of the club. Conko, who has cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair, was invited to a July game as a guest of the team. That hospitality didn’t stop him from blasting the Pirates two weeks later when they traded away David Bednar, Bailey Falter, and Ke’Bryan Hayes for prospects at the deadline.
“They get an ‘F’ from me,” said Chuck, mere minutes after the deadline had passed. “Where are the big-league ballplayers that we were supposed to get? We got nothing but more junk.”
With the door officially closed on this season, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the upcoming offseason might be the most critical of Nutting’s tenure as owner and Ben Cherington’s as general manager. The team has Skenes for one more season before reaching arbitration, and could be staring down the barrel of a potential labor stoppage looming in 2027.
The next step after anger is apathy, and, with attendance dropping another 11.4 percent this season, Nutting needs some positive publicity after a season from Hell. More importantly, even the fans who have put up with so much need some hope every once in a while to keep them going.
“I will never give up on the Pirates because I love the Pirates. I don’t care if they win or lose,” Jack Fayak Jr. said. “And I think that is what they’re relying on. They’re relying on people who are going to be diehard fans until the day they die. Sooner or later, there is going to be a generation that says, ‘Enough is enough. You don’t deserve my loyalty.’”
