I am a new writer to the Pittsburgh Pirates page but not a new writer to this site. I have lived in Pittsburgh all my life and have only been a Pirate fan for three years.
I am 20 years old and soon to be 21 in August. As everyone knows about the losing streak, that means I don’t ever recall a good Pirates team.
I got hooked on the Pirates when I bought a 10 game pack and started to attend games in 2008. Funny enough I originally got the 10 game pack to make sure I would have a ticket to one of the Yankee games.
Back to the main point though. I found out that baseball is a great game to watch, and believe it or not the Pirates are fun to watch.
Quickly I took to players like Jason Bay, Nyger Morgan, Matt Capps, Xavier Nady, and Nate McLouth in the first few years of my fandom.
When Duke came up I followed the Pirates very briefly and learned quickly that they weren’t good and they didn’t have many good players. So even though I liked these players it was always done with some reservation.
I knew they wouldn’t be around for the long haul and they certainly wouldn’t be around when we were finally winning. In the time I have been attending Pirates games there have been a lot of bad ones.
Hell I was in the stands when the Cubs made sure we were losers for the 17th straight year. We lost a game 20-0, we were outscored 54-3 in that series, and now we are losers of 10 straight.
Yeah it was frustrating and it was annoying to listen to everyone complain and generally crap all over the Pirates. There was always one thing that made it bearable, the future wasn’t here yet.
Once Andrew McCutchen got called up we got to see the first piece of the future. Then we made a lot of trades and our farm teams had hope again.
We then got to the 2010 season and our farm teams were stacked and the future was primed to come up and make an impact. Well last night Wednesday, June 16th ,2010 the future arrived.
With the arrival of Pedro Alvarez the biggest and best prospects we have now are up. The lineup of Jose Tabata, Neil Walker, McCutchen, and Alvarez represent something new.
They represent “Our Team”, the team that we can fall in love with and not hold back. This is the team that will be together when we win.
This team has a lot of work to do. We need to assemble a pitching staff and we need to assemble a better, younger bullpen. We have another few years ahead of us no doubt.
The new refreshing feeling is though this team is our team and we are going to go through the highs, and more often than not the lows, together for those few years.
Alvarez didn’t do anything spectacular in his debut. He went 0-2 with one strikeout, a lineout, and a walk with one run scored.
Tabata had the best night of the young guys when he went deep for the first time. Alvarez although not wowing on the field did something for all of us fans.
He made this team “Our Team” he made the core of young players here. Tonight wasn’t about our 10th straight loss, it was about this team becoming ours.
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