April 21, 2013
Pittsburgh Pirates 4, Atlanta Braves 2
Living in Vienna, West Virginia, we’re within reasonable driving time (three to four hours) of three Major League Baseball cities: Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Cincinnati. About six hours gets you to Washington, D.C., Baltimore or Detroit. Tack on another hour or two, you could get to Chicago.
Of those cities, Pittsburgh is geographically the closest. And I like Pittsburgh. It was an incredible surprise 15 years ago, the first time I visited the city.
If you ever had any outdated “dirty, steel city” images of Pittsburgh in mind, they don’t work. The first time I drove through the Fort Hill Tunnel and exited to simultaneously see the three rivers (below), the city skyline (straight ahead), and Heinz Field and PNC Park (to the left), I was stunned. The view was breathtaking - and I was hooked.
My daughter Kati moved to Pittsburgh five years ago. She’s works and lives downtown, as well as attends grad school at Pitt. Kati was born in the Deep South (Georgia) and spent her middle school, high school and undergraduate years in West Virginia, but now you couldn’t pry her from Pittsburgh with a forklift. Although she’d never seen a hockey puck before moving there, she lives and dies emotionally with every Penguins game. It’s an astonishing phenomenon.
Kati told me that in 2009 after the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, a bunch of players supposedly took the Cup down to Carson Street on the South Side and hopped from bar to bar. That’s a small town and a city rolled into one.
Pittsburgh also has a hipness about it. You can’t keep up with all the movies filmed or set in Pittsburgh. Hundreds upon hundreds. Kati can actually take you on a personal downtown Batman Tour. Much of “The Dark Knight Rises” was filmed downtown.
For the record, my personal favorite Pittsburgh movie is “Wonder Boys.” Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr., Frances MacDormand and Katie Holmes.
Anyway, that said, on April 21 Penny and I headed to PNC Park for a Pirates game. It was actually our second trip to PNC. My favorite team is the Braves, so we had taken in a Saturday night game against the Braves at PNC in 2012. This time we went to a Sunday afternoon game, again with the Braves.
Kati joined us.
PNC Park is beautiful. If we have a “home” park, PNC would be it. The stadium sits just north of the bend where the three rivers intersect (actually the Monongahela and Allegheny come together to form the Ohio River).
Many of the seats have stunning views of the Pittsburgh skyline over the right- and centerfield seats. If you sit high enough, you’ll see the river(s).
PNC is also distinctively local at the concession stands. In Pittsburgh, they’re big on putting fries on sandwiches. Arguably, the most noted local joint for this is Primanti Brothers. You can get one of their sandwiches at the park.
You can also get pierogies, which are potato-filled dumplings. I never understood the attraction, to be honest, until Kati insisted that I order some fried pierogies one day when we went to dinner at Fat Head’s Saloon on Carson Street. That pierogi had cheese with the potato and a sour cream dip. It was outrageously good.
One reason I mention peirogies is because, believe it or not, mascot pierogies race at Pirates games. When I first saw it, I was mesmerized. I understand that the racing peirogies are Pittsburgh’s answer to racing sausages in Milwaukee. I’ll just say it’s not as lame as it sounds.
So here’s a question: Why is it that the racing presidents in Washington seemed extremely lame, while watching racing pierogies in Pittsburgh was entertaining?
The game itself was a snoozer, a 4-2 win for the Pirates. The Braves had started the season 12-1, but a brief slide was starting. They won the first game of the series, but the Pirates win on Sunday was Pittsburgh’s third straight in the four-game series.
For two years in a row, the Pirates have been a strong first-half-of-the-season team before collapsing. Again, they looked good in an early-season game.
One thing that interested Penny was the difference in the crowds from the Saturday night game a year ago to the Sunday afternoon game this season. A year ago (also an early-season game), during the night game, the energy in the stadium was high. There were a lot of Braves fans in park, and they made plenty of noise. And the crowd interaction all night was lively. The evening had started with an hour rain delay, but after that the weather had been pleasant, almost cool. (Maybe there was a lot of beer consumed during the rain delay.)
But this year’s game featured a laid-back Sunday afternoon crowd. They weren’t going to get excited about much of anything.
The temperature was in the low 60’s, so it was cool in the shade, warm in the sun. The crowd was 20,800, small but not unusually small by Pittsburgh standards.
One last thing about the Braves and the Pirates. History.
As I’ve mentioned, I grew up a Braves fan. I watched a lot of bad baseball teams in Atlanta before 1991 came along. That year, Atlanta – miracles of miracles – got high-level good and has stayed anywhere from respectable to really good every year since. The Braves had finished last in the division in 1990, but they won it in 1991.
To me, the real miracle started in Pittsburgh. In the National League Championship Series, the Braves were down 3 games to 2 when the series headed back to Pittsburgh (Three Rivers Stadium). But Atlanta’s Steve Avery and John Smoltz threw two straight shutouts, and Atlanta won Game 6 1-0 and Game 7 4-0.
What I remember most is that final game of the series. Smoltz was a beast. For some reason, that Game 7 wasn’t a sellout. Late in the game the cameras panned the upper deck, and there were what looked like thousands of Atlanta fans doing the tomahawk chop and singing that war chant that the fans stole from Florida State (allegedly in honor of Deion Sanders, who was a Brave at the time).
It got even worse for the Pirates in 1992 when the two teams met again for the pennant – and again they went seven games. In Game 7, the Braves were down 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth. With the bases loaded and two out, Francisco Cabrera hit a single to left field. David Justice scored from third and Sid Bream – a Pirate the year before and one of the slowest players on either team, playing on a bum leg no less – scored from second, sliding under a throw from left field to score the winning run. Braves 3, Pirates 2. (The left fielder, by the way, was Barry Bonds and his throw from left had the authority of a limp dishrag.)
Pittsburgh fans I know will never forgive the Braves for winning that game.
No comments:
Post a Comment