With a 3-2 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals this afternoon, the Pittsburgh Pirates clinched their record (as in, “all North American sports” record, not just Major League Baseball) 19th consecutive losing season. The Pirates have actually held this record since they clinched their 17th consecutive losing season in 2009, which broke the previous North American record of 16 consecutive losing seasons, set the Philadelphia Phillies between 1933 and 1948.
I suspect that I don’t need to actually say this, but one team having 19 straight losing seasons is a ridiculous absurdity. You can use any of methods to give perspective to this losing streak and they’re all staggering: the last time the Pirates had a winning season, they were eliminated from the playoffs about three weeks before Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush in the 1992 election. Most college freshman have never lived in a world in which the Pirates finished a season with a winning record. Personally, I was in second grade when the Pirates lost the 1992 NLCS and I’m in my fifth year of grad school right now.
It’s awfully hard to make a losing season disappointing when you’ve had 18 in a row already, but the Pirates managed to make the impossible happen this year. As recently as July 25th, they were in first place and six games over .500 at 53-47. Since then, they’ve gone 14-35 to sink well out of contention and into fourth place in the NL Central, just 1 1/2 games above the Cubs for fifth place. It’s one of the most preciptious falls from contention in the second half of a season in recent memory and it actually has some Pirate fans (like, say, the one typing this article) wondering of 2011 has been worse for the Pirates than the brutal 2010 in which they lost 105 games.
It’s not all bad for the Pirates. Expectations for this club were awfully low before their unexpectedly hot start, and it’s true that Andrew McCutchen is blossoming into a bonafide star on the PNC Park grass. In fact, the Pirates have more talented young outfielders than they know what to do with between McCutchen, Jose Tabata, Alex Presley, and prospects Starling Marte and Gorkys Hernandez (who seem to be finally making progress after years of hype followed by disappointments). That’s a good problem. They’ve spent a ton of money on the draft in the last four years and as a result, the lower part of their minor league system is jam-packed with talented young pitchers. Things are looking up for the Pirates.
For now, though, all that Pirate fans really have is what they’ve had for what seems like an eternity now: a bad team in Pittsburgh hope for a better future. What’s one or two more years at this point anyway?
