As a season ticket holder (STH), we consider it a right to cheer, boo, challenge and praise the Pittsburgh Pirates. Sometimes that all happens in the same game.

This year has some new wrinkles but also the same ones we have endured for most of the past 25. They have far too little talent to compete for even the playoffs and management continues to be embarrassingly cheap with player salaries.

As a STH, we get communications that other fans don’t but very seldom is it anything other than rah-rah let’s go team rhetoric. But during the postponement of the 2020 season the Pirates organization has actually made an attempt to provide some small points of value to us.

They send out emails frequently that have sites that will take you to where you can find puzzles, word games, printable games, and coloring sheets aimed at the 10 and younger age bracket.

They also have a PNC Park history highlight of the day that is a video of a highlight from the past 18 years since PNC opened. Mostly game ending homeruns and the couple of years they made the playoffs are shown. Nothing fantastic but an improvement over how this team and its owners traditionally ignore the paying customers.

But bad as they have been and are; they are still the home team and our team.

There are some lines from the movie “Field of Dreams” “that explain a baseball fan’s relationship with the game.”

“One constant through the years is Baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.

“But baseball has marked the times. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that is good and could be again. Ohhhh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”

Yes, “Field of Dreams” was just a movie but it does hold many truths. For us the ideal that baseball will always be a part of American youth and a true American game.

The number of kids participating in youth ball like Little League and girls softball are way down. Leagues have merged or stopped altogether. But somehow people still find their way back to the ballfields to watch a game, have a hotdog and a beer and boo the umpire.

Why? Because it’s baseball, that’s why. We may or may not have a Major League Baseball season this year. If we do, by the end of it, our STH sales rep will be ready to block my phone number before the season ends.

Seems we can never be satisfied with anything but winning once the game begins. That makes it seem strange that we miss it so much when the game has been taken away from us the way it has.

People are missing hockey and golf. People would miss college football and canceling the Steelers schedule would cause riots such as the world has never seen.

But even though our Pirates rival the Marvelous Mets of 1962 and some of the other hopeless teams assembled ( provide your own Cleveland Browns joke here) over the years summer will not be the same if we don’t have Pittsburgh Pirates baseball.

Usually we just hope in April for a turn of the weather to get rid of the last of winter and bring baseball season. This year we need a little more.

We need April showers and May flowers but most of all we need to cure this virus and bring back our chances for boys and girls to see their first Buccos game and shout out “Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Beat ’em Bucs!”