Ready for spring and baseball
Springtime is here. You can tell by the way the weather messes with us.
March temperatures can bring warm weather close to 80 degrees or it can bring temperatures in the teens and an inch of snow day after day. Flowers start to bloom. Those who aren’t fixated on March Madness start to daydream of America’s pastime, which would include Pittsburgh Pirate Baseball.
Well, sort of.
Most Major League baseball fans enter the middle of March with great anticipation for their favorite teams, while others start placing wagers on how soon the local team will be eliminated from playoff possibilities or how many games they will lose this season.
One group of fans meets every Tuesday night at the 11th Frame in Butler. Pirate Baseball is not their main purpose for meeting, but the local ball club often comes up for discussion, if not for anything else at least for the Mendoza Line (if you don’t know what that is, look it up).
This season, the same optimists, as usual, have posted rosey projections, while the characters who love to make jokes of the ineptitude of the Pirates save ink by writing smaller numbers.
Here are some examples.
Keith, our car enthusiast, doesn’t waste time following the Bucs, and he gave them a very optimistic number of 96 wins. Maybe he was adding in the Steelers for next season and the wins the Penguins will get in the playoffs.
Scott, Leigh Anne, Jeannine and Lisa all see the Pirates winning at least as many as they lose with win totals in the 80s. Scott may reconsider his number after he sees the Red Sox opener at Boston’s Fenway Park and thaws out.
Bob is both a very knowledgeable student of baseball and devoted Pirate fan. Bob wants the Pirates to do well. He hopes his son will someday see the Pirates at the World Series without the players having to buy tickets to get into the game. Bob can still only stretch his hopes to get them 78 wins.
Pat and Lee are realists, and set sites for a mediocre 75-76 wins, and Ron is the jerk who most often has the bottom number and lowest expectations for anything owned by Bob Nutting. His prediction was a low forecast of 70 wins. That would require only 12 wins per month, or less than 3 wins per week. Yet, he will watch almost every game he can.
Lastly is the most avid fan we know. She knows all about “chicken on the Hill with Will,” a #9 can of Golden Bantam fly balls and basket catches — and she knows the difference between a bug on the rug and a dying quail off the bat of Maz or Roberto. She still hears the Gunner’s voice and remembers the Grave Digger tugging at his jersey in the batter’s box before setting to hit. Her prediction for 2023 is a mere 72 wins — only two more than predicted by the doomsday fan of the group.
Now, none of these prognosticators claims to be another Punxsutawney Phil, but they didn’t get here by laying up and are willing to go out in a blaze of glory if they are wrong.
Here’s hoping that Keith is right, and that Grace has her faith restored in the Green Weenie.
— RV
