I've Seen the Pirates Become the Victims of a No-hitter for the First Time in My Life, and it Wasn't So Bad

I've always been petrified of bees or any sort of stinging insects. For the first twenty years of my life, I managed to avoid getting stung, but the day before my 21st birthday, my late grandmother asked me to go out in the shed and pull out a patio chair. As soon as I opened the door, a wasp came flying out and went down my shirt. It stung me right in the chest and stayed in my shirt for a few seconds while I jumped around and swore loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. As it turned out, it wasn't the end of the world. Despite all the movies about "killer bees" that I watched as a very young boy in the 70's, I didn't actually die from my wasp attack.

I introduced this piece with that little anecdote because, for all of the 40 years that I've been on this planet, my favorite baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, had avoided being no-hit in a baseball game. They came close numerous times throughout the years, but something or someone (Josh Harrison) prevented the dubious moment from taking place.

Last night, as I kept checking the online box score of the Pirates/Reds game, I noticed the it was getting pretty late and the Pirates hadn't had a hit against the Reds' Homer Bailey. I just shrugged my shoulders and said, "Someone (Josh Harrison) will come through with a hit.

However, at approximately 9:35pm, what I had feared all of my baseball fan life had finally happened: Homer Bailey had thrown a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in a 1-0 victory at PNC Park.

After Alex Presley popped out to end it, Bailey's Reds' teammates converged on him for the "cliched but ever so wonderful when it's your team doing it" celebration in the middle of PNC's beautiful diamond. It was a historic moment to see even if it sucked for Pirates fans. And you know what? I survived.

I always thought that being on the losing end of a no-hitter/perfect game was a sign of weakness, but that's not the case at all (although there are plenty of other signs of weakness for these 2012 Pirates).

Even good teams are the victims of no-hitters every once in a while. The Reds' Tom Browning threw a perfect game against the Los Angeles Dodgers about a month before they won the 1988 World Series. Heck, the Tampa Rays have been on the receiving end of  like 14,000 no-hitters/perfect games since 2009, and they've been a pretty competitive baseball team for the past few years. The last time the Pirates were the victims of a no-hitter, it was in 1971 against Bob Gibson at Three Rivers Stadium, and Pittsburgh would go on to win the World Series later that year.

The Pirates have been around for 125 years, and they've only been no-hit eight times. That's pretty amazing. I guess after 40plus years, the team was due, and with Pedro, Clint, Alex and Rod flailing away night-after-so many nights, it was just a matter of time before it happened in this era.

So, much like that wasp, Bailey's no-hitter stung a little as it was something I was trying to avoid witnessing, but I'm still alive today, and the Pirates actually have a couple of hits.

I will now concentrate on my fear of never seeing the Pirates in the World Series again in my lifetime.

Pirates Lose to the Mets, 6-0: Officially Eliminated from Postseason

Ever go back to an old neighborhood that you grew up in and find yourself disappointed because a place that was once so vibrant and full of life now is so empty and quiet?

Not to sound too dramatic, but that's how the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates baseball season has been for me and thousands of other Pirates fans out there. Two months ago, there was very real hope and excitement for a winning season and a postseason berth.

Well, we can officially forget about the postseason berth, and the hopes for the winning season should be dashed any day now. It's OK, though, because the Pirates aren't deserving of a spot in the playoffs or a winning season. Winners don't go into 16-35 "slumps," and that's the Bucco record since August 1st.

Now, at 76-79, we can only hope that they make it to maybe 80 wins, which would represent a high-mark for the squad since their last winning season in 1992. However, that would require a 4-3 "hot-streak," and I'm not so sure the Pirates are even capable of that anymore. They can't even win two-games in a row these days, let alone four games in a week.

I hate to question a team's heart, because it's impossible to determine, but how else can you explain such a lifeless team after such an energetic start to the season? I can't explain it. But then again, I've never been able to figure these guys out.

Oh well, we'll always have the memories of the once vibrant neighborhood.

The Packers Were Robbed on Monday Night Football, and Seahawks Fans Should Never, Ever Complain About Super Bowl XL Again

Seattle Seahawks fans always talk about Super Bowl XL with contempt because they maintain to this very day that their team was robbed of a championship. Things on their hit-list from that day: The offensive pass interference call on Darrell Jackson for pushing off during a touchdown pass from Matt Hasselbeck; the Ben Roethlisberger touchdown that was called, but should have been reversed, even though there wasn't any conclusive evidence to do so; and of course, the holding penalty early in the 4th quarter that shouldn't have been called because it wiped out a 1st and goal situation for Seattle. Seahawks fans have always been pretty adamant that all three of these calls should have gone in their team's favor even though you can make a case for all three going in the Steelers' favor, which of course, they did.

Well, I don't know if it'll make up for Super Bowl XL, but last night, on Monday Night Football, the Seattle Seahawks were the benefactors of maybe the most obvious blown off in the history of the NFL, when Golden Tate was credited with a last-second, game-winning touchdown catch on a Hail Mary pass from Seattle qb Russell Wilson in a 14-12 victory over the Green Bay Packers. 

Tate was credited with the touchdown for having simultaneous possession of the football with Packers defensive back M.D. Jennings, but it clearly looks as if Jennings has full control of the football and an interception, while Tate just appears to reach over and grab the ball after Jennings had already established possession.

One official signals a touchdown, while the other appears to be getting ready to signal a touchback. It is finally ruled a touchdown on the field. The play is reviewed, as all scoring plays are these days, and even though the replay officials cannot make the call for the referee, it's pretty obvious on tape, and it's just a matter of the ref simply correcting the mistake and the Packers win the game.

Not so fast.

For reasons only known to him, the referee concludes that the "simultaneous possession goes to the offensive receiver rule" is in play and doesn't change the call.

Wow!

It's fair to point out that these were replacement officials, and that's an element that you cannot ignore. But replacement officials or not, everyone has eyes, and it clearly wasn't simultaneous possession.

These might be replacement officials, but these games still count in the standings, and this could forever alter Green Bay's season.

Last week, in this article on Behind the Steel Curtain, I predicted that the replacement officials would screw up the end of a game with one of their blown calls. I just didn't think that it would happen in such an obvious way, and that the Seattle Seahawks would so greatly benefit.

 Seahawks fans need to be very quiet now.

Steelers Start off 1-2 After Loss to Oakland. I Blame the Defense

Remember back to the 2009 season, when the Steelers seemed to lose in one annoying way after another? Well, that's kind of how I felt around 8pm on Sunday, when Raiders kicker Sebastian Janikowski kicked a 40 yard field goal as time expired to give Oakland a 34-31 victory.

That '09 team was never out of a  game, and often, they led in the fourth quarter, but if it wasn't an ill-timed turnover that did the team in, it was a kickoff return for a touchdown. And if Pittsburgh was able to overcome those two things, the defense picked the fourth quarter to do its impression of swiss cheese.

The 2009 Steelers season was maybe the most frustrating for me as a fan, and the end result of all of those break-downs I described above was a 9-7 record and a seat in the peanut gallery for the playoffs.

The 2010 campaign was obviously pretty awesome, as the team made its 8th Super Bowl and came within a drive of winning its 7th Lombardi. And last season's 12-4 record was an acceptable follow-up to a Super Bowl season, despite the depressing loss in the playoffs.

But now at 1-2, things look like they've come full-circle to what we were seeing three years ago. But unlike the '09 team, I don't really blame the offense, or even the special teams for their mistakes on Sunday. I blame the defense, because it's just not getting the job done in terms of pressuring  the quarterback and taking the football away.

When Bruce Arians was Pittsburgh's offensive coordinator for five seasons, people said they wanted an offense that possessed the football and scored points, and they often blamed Arians for his shortcomings in those departments--Pittsburgh led the league in time of possession last season, btw. Well, under new offensive coordinator Todd Haley, the Steelers have scored 77 points in three games, and they've possessed the football for just under 36 minutes a game. Yet, they're 1-2.

I know Harrison and Polamalu have been hurt  this season, but there is still enough pedigree on this defense to make a better accounting of itself, even without two former Defensive Players of the Year.

I know it's early, but it already has the makings for another annoyingly frustrating Steelers season.

Stick a Fork in 'em, They're Done--Pirates Blow 7-4 Lead, Get Swept at Home by the Brewers

What more can be said about the second-straight, second-half collapse by the Pittsburgh Pirates? It's getting to the point that even talking about them is an exhausting endeavor. I didn't want to believe that the slow slide of the team in August was the beginnings of a collapse, but here we are with just 13 games left in the season, and the Pirates are one game below .500 for the first time since June, losers of 31 of  their last 45 games. If that's not a collapse, I'd really hate to see one.

A lot of Pirates fans will tell you that even approaching 80 victories is a show of improvement. I agree to an extent, but it's all relative, and I think the fans were expecting a little more down the stretch after such a promising first 104 games.

Everytime you think things couldn't get any worse, and the hole can't get any deeper, the Pirates seem to dig a new low. Take today's game for example. After falling behind, 4-0, to the Milwaukee Brewers this afternoon at PNC Park, I didn't have much hope that the team would salvage the final game of the three-game series. However, thanks to Andrew McCutchen and, yes, Clint Barmes, the Pirates actually stormed back to take a 7-4 lead. I've all but lost any hope in a postseason berth, but a nice Thursday afternoon victory similar to the one against the Dodgers on a Thursday afternoon at PNC last month that salvaged the final game of a four-game series would have at least been something. And it would have inched them a little closer to that 81 win mark (I don't even care about 82 wins at this point).

But at the same time, I also had that sense of dread that the Brewers were just waiting for the once dominant Pirates bullpen to collapse, and their patience paid off. The Pirates relievers, led by Chad Qualls and Chris Resop, gave up four runs in the 8th inning and another in the 9th as the Pirates fell, 9-7.

Where do the Pirates go from here? Who knows? I do know that for the 20th straight season, there won't be anything for Pirates fans to feel proud of--even if they manage to finish with a winning record. An 82 win season would still mean a 22-36 finish.

Doesn't feel like a winner to me.

The 1983 Pittsburgh Pirates: A Team that May Have been Even More Schizophrenic than the 2012 Edition

There is no doubt that the post-100 games portion of the Pittsburgh Pirates 2012 season has been a huge disappointment. After going on a 40-20 run to achieve a 60-44 mark and a four-game lead in the National League wild card standings, the Pirates have since gone 14-29 and are only still in "contention" for a wild card spot because MLB decided to add a second spot, and because the teams that they are battling are also kind of mediocre.

As high as the highs were in June and July, that's how low the lows have been in August and September. One might say it's a tale of two teams, and one would be right. Nobody seems to be able to put a finger on the 2012 squad, and perhaps even more frightening, regardless of how the reminder of the schedule plays out, nobody knows quite what to expect in 2013.

However, as schizophrenic as the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates have been, they may not even come close to the emotional ebbs and flows that fans of the 1983 Pirates must have been feeling.

I've followed the Pirates quite closely since 1984, and in that entire time, I've witnessed four, count'em, four winning seasons (hopefully, it'll be five after this season, but I'm not holding my breath). The 1983 Pirates have always fascinated me a bit because, even though Willie Stargell had retired by that point, guys like Dave Parker were still around, as were other '79 World Series heroes, such as Bill Madlock and Kent Tekulve. Even though the roster wasn't quite the same as those late-70s squads, I'm sure the standards were still pretty high for the Pirates at that time. The '83 edition finished in second place in the NL East with an 84-78 record. But like this year's team, they were kind of contenders but not really, and how they got to that 84-78 mark was quite the roller coaster ride of ups and downs all throughout the year. Pedro Alvarez would have loved playing for the '83 Pirates because even though the end result was a pretty decent record, consistency wasn't their trademark.

Below is a recap:

I wasn't following baseball then, so why the Pirates opened up the season with a one game "series" in St. Louis to face the World Champion Cardinals is beyond me. However, they won that game, 7-1, and then went to Houston and swept the Astros in a four-game series. 5-0 is a start to the season that any fan would take, and even though I realize that the Pirates weren't exactly the number one team in town in the early 80's, the Bucco faithful had to be pretty excited. How did the team reward this excitement? By losing 14 of their next 18 games to fall to fourth place in the National League East, and 5.5 games out of first place.

After starting out 9-14, things sort of settled down a bit, as the Pirates went 9-9 over the next 18 games and were 18-23. They were still in fourth place, and 6.5 games out of first. Pittsburgh then lost six games in a row, and then seven out of 12 to fall to a pretty crappy 23-36 and were now in fifth place, 8.5 games out of first.

Were there calls for Chuck Tanner, still manager at that time, to be fired? Who knows, but if there were, the team answered the bell by going on a nine-game winning streak, including a four-game sweep in St. Louis. At 32-36, the Pirates were back in fourth place and had made up three games in the standings. Not bad.

The Pirates then lost four-games in a row, including a three-game sweep to the Cubs at Wrigley Field, and had slipped to eight games under .500 at 32-40. After going 4-3 over a seven game stretch, the Pirates went on an eight-game winning splurge, including a three-game sweep in San Francisco and a four-game sweep in San Diego--if only the 2012 Pirates could have played the '83 Padres.

The Pirates were now 44-43, in second place in the division and only one game out of first place. I'll bet pennant fever had gripped the city of Pittsburgh by that point. If there was a fever, the Pirates kept things warm by winning 10 of their next 14 games to move to 54-47 and 1.5 games up in the NL East standings.

Unfortunately, the fever subsided, as the Pirates lost seven out of nine games, including a three-game sweep at Three Rivers by the Montreal Expos, to fall to 56-54 and had slipped to third place in the standings.

Fear not, fans of the '83 Pirates, because after losing two of three in Philadelphia to the eventual NL Champion Phillies, the Pirates went on a five game winning-streak, including a sweep of the Expos in Montreal, and were in second place with a 62-55 record. The Pirates were only one game back in the standings, and things were only going to get better from there, right?

Wrong! The Pirates proceeded to lose six of seven games at home to fall to 63-61. However, you 2012 Pirates fans will appreciate this: The Pirates managed to actually gain a .5 game in the standings because the first place Phillies were even more awful during that stretch.

Pittsburgh then won five of their next six games to improve to 68-62. More importantly, they had moved into first place and had a two-game lead. It was time to leave the rest of the field in the dust!

Not so fast. The Pirates then lost eight of their next 12 games, including two of three at home to the Phillies, to drop to fourth place at 72-70. That record looks a little familiar, doesn't it, 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates?

All hope was lost, right? Wrong again! The Pirates won their next six games to improve to 78-70 and found themselves in a tie for first place with those Phillies. It sure was going to be an exciting finish, right?

I think you know where this is going. The Pirates went 6-8 down the stretch, and that may have been all right if the Phillies had stuck to their '83 script of being sort of mediocre up to that point. Instead of that, however, the Phillies finished out the year by winning 13 of their last 15 games and won the NL East by six games over Pittsburgh.

So there you have it. I don't know what was going through the minds of Pirates fans during the team's '83 campaign, but it may have been even more frustrating than what this year's team has done to our collective psyche.

As most fans probably know, the Pirates '83 run was the end of a great era of winning baseball, and the team soon sank to lows it hadn't seen in decades; lows that threatened the very existence of the franchise in Pittsburgh.

One might say that the schizophrenic nature of the 1983 Pirates was that of a veteran team on its last leg. Let's hope the schizophrenic nature of the 2012 Pittsburgh Pirates is that of a young team that just needs stronger legs to stand on.

Steve Sabol of NFL Films: 1942-2012

Since I was born in 1972, I was way too young to know or worry about the National Football League or those legendary Steelers Super Bowl teams from the 70s. However, thanks to Ed Sabol, the founder of NFL Films, and his son, Steve, I was able to learn about the great game of football and those Steelers teams by watching the countless shows that NFL Films has been producing for the better part of five decades. Steve Sabol, the president of NFL Films who died yesterday of brain cancer, was the driving force and the vision of the company for many years. It was fitting that Ed Sabol founded a company that produced football footage, because once he handed the football off to his son, Steve, he never stopped running with it until he was finally tackled by the ravages of time.

No blog entry I write about the man will do Sabol as much justice as what Homer J of Behind the Steel Curtain wrote in this wonderful tribute piece.

I never realized that Sabol was an art major in college, but that may explain so much, because, above everything, an NFL Films production is artistic in style. It captures the game of football with a sense of cinematic flair, and that was all Steve Sabol. NFL Films innovated such things as the close-up on a football as it spiraled through the air as well as fitting players and coaches with microphones to help capture the drama on the sidelines and on the field.

Did you know that the late Bill Saul, a Steelers middle linebacker in the 60s, was the first player NFL Films fitted with a wireless microphone during a game?

NFL Films is also known for its great narrators, and there was none more legendary than the late John Facenda. He was called "the Voice of God" for his ability to bring features to life with his deep voice and slow and deliberate style. That link is titled "The Autumn Wind," and it was written by Steve Sabol, and it may be the most popular narrative in the company's storied history.

And did you hear the musical score? Oh, those musical scores that NFL Films produces. I still get goosebumps when I watch an NFL Films piece from the 70s, accompanied by one of those classical scores.

I consider myself a bit of an NFL historian these days, and a great deal of the history that I learned can be attributed to the many NFL Films productions that I've watched all throughout my life. I grew up watching NFL Films productions like NFL Yearbook, a highlight package show about each team's previous season; NFL Films Football Follies; the NFL Game of the Week; and, my favorite, the Super Bowl highlight shows.

I think what makes NFL Films so great is that it captures the game of football on, well, film. As I said, I was too young to watch any of those 70s Steelers teams, but the great thing about Youtube and DVDs is I get a chance to watch the occasional network broadcasts of those old games today. However, no offense to network footage that is produced on video tape, but it just doesn't seem as dramatic to me. Here's footage from NBC's broadcast of the Immaculate Reception, circa 1972. Not bad. Now here's an NFL Films production that chronicled the event that forever changed the fortunes of the Steelers franchise.

Which one gives you goosebumps? Yeah, I like the second one, too. It captures the drama that led up to the event, the controversy surrounding the play, and oh, that music. That glorious music.

NFL Films had a way of making players, coaches and teams from bygone eras seem almost mythical to me by the time I learned about them as a kid, and that is something to truly treasure.

Not too many people get to realize their vision, but Steve Sabol did, and millions of football fans around the world are forever grateful.

RIP, Steve.