Pittsburgh Pirates: 17 Years of Suck

Yesterday, while the Yankees were busy putting a stranglehold on the American League East, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost to the Chicago Cubs, ensuring a 17th consecutive losing season, the worst such mark in all of professional sports. All of four of them. I can’t say I’m necessarily surprised at the Pirates two-decades-long futility. Even their promotional gigs and Hot Stove reports are a joke. The Pirates are seemingly redefining the definition of bad. In this decade alone, they’ve lost at least 87 games a year, bottoming out (at least thus far) at 100 losses in 2001.

The last time the Bucs were good was in 1992, when Atlanta’s Francisco Cabrera singled off Stan Belinda to score David Justice and Sid Bream for the tying and winning runs, respectively, in Game 7 of the ALCS. To put that into perspective, 1992 was the same year Pearl Jam’s Ten and Radiohead’s Pablo Honey debuted. And Bill Clinton was still a month away from winning his first term as president. After the ALCS, the team went into a protracted rebuilding phase, letting Barry Bonds sign with the San Francisco Giants, among other questionable moves. They’ve yet to recover. Ron Cook, a sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, sums it up nicely:

Here's one final depressing way to blow the Pirates' ignominious march to history into perspective: Kids who graduated from college this spring aren't old enough to remember when they had a winning team.