Abandon All Hope, Ye who Enter Here

I generally consider myself a pretty reasonable fellow. I take alot of things in stride and try to handle situations as they arise in a calm and rational manner. However, there is something about the major league team absolute joke of a pathetic franchise that inhabits my fair city that drives me to the point of stark, raving lunacy.

I grew up loving the Pirates and the sport of baseball. I am not ashamed to admit that as an 8 year old lad, on October 14th, 1992, at 11:52 PM, I bawled my eyes out when He Who Shall Not Be Named hit a line drive into left field and BLB couldn't throw out The Mustachioed Gimp With Two Bad Knees.

My world came crashing down that night, but as a young boy I was encouraged that there would always be hope for next year. Yes, the team would change, and maybe have to rebuild with some of my favorite players leaving, but that in baseball, spring training and a new season always meant a new hope.

We here in Pittsburgh have been robbed of such hope. Anybody who conjures up lofty expectations for this team every April is either delusional or on the payroll. This is not the fault of Major League Baseball, the fans, or the players the team currently employs until they are inevitably dumped off for more prospects.

So please understand that we here of the Mutiny are not anti-baseball, anti-Pittsburgh, or even anti-Pirate. We are anti-Pirate Management, plain and simple. We despise them for their lies, hypocrisy, greed, and manipulations that allow them to continue to drag a profit out of the team while never, ever trying to field a competitive major league club.

The Pirates front office is full of lying liars who lie about lying. I do not believe a single word that exits any of their yap-holes. Every year it is the exact same message about how they have turned a corner, and this is the year the upward trend begins, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah.

This is from the Lying Liar at the start of the 2011 season, but it can be cut and pasted with a few words changed around each year of the past 18: "This is the first time I've gone into a season excited about our major-league team," he said. "Our first year, there was a little uneasiness about where we were going. If that team had shown us it was ready to compete, we were ready to add to it. It didn't, and we knew the transition had begun."

This particularly drove me nuts. It reeks of overarching smug, unjustifiable arrogance that permeates the organization. That they know something that we don’t, us peons, us peasants who line their fat-cat pockets with shillings and sheckels from peanuts, popcorn, and beer at their inflated prices inside the confines of their pristine slaughtering ground upon the Allegheny. They view us as cattle who will line up willingly for another season of losing, hope, and empty promises about a future, that I am more and more convinced every year is never coming from them. There is no future. There is no hope. It is doom and dread, a lifeless corpse of a once proud franchise that inhabits our fair city.

Here is another example of the management's true intentions to always dangle hope out there, but at the end of the day, they pull the rug out from underneath their most committed (and by that I do mean insane) fans:

Pirates Prospects: ``Would the Pirates be able to afford a $70M to $80M payroll, in present-day worth, if this current group of players were competitive enough to merit additional outside free agents?’’

Lying Liar: ``Today, no, but we will be able to support that payroll very soon if our fans believe that we now have a group of players in Pittsburgh and on its way here in the near future that is competitive. We need to take a meaningful step forward in terms of attendance to reach that payroll number while continuing to invest heavily in our future, but I am convinced that the attendance will move quickly once we convince our fans that we are on the right track.’’


Being a Pirate fan is like living in a dystopian world where Love is Hate, War is Peace, and Losing Baseball is Hope For the Future.

This is a disingenuous, deceitful franchise that is well vested in using Orwellian goodthink to continue upon its drifting aimless course of constantly futile major league baseball with vague assurances of a future that is always, always, always, at least 5 years away.
When I imagine the future, I imagine a boot stamping on a human face- Forever.