My first reaction to the Royals sweeping the Orioles out of the ALCS and clinching a World Series berth last night was the same as any non-A’s/Angels/Orioles fan with a shred of decency and a sense of wonder: This is really cool. The Royals were pathetic for just as long as the Pirates were, and they were arguably hopeless for even longer. As Charlie reminded me last night, the fact that the Pirates and Royals were such a hilarious baseball punchline was literally the reason that people started to find this blog in the first place, and baseball has turned so far on its ear since 2006 that the Royals are in the World Series and the Pirates are riding a two-year playoff streak while the Yankees have missed the playoffs in both seasons. Baseball isn’t perfectly balanced, mind you (I am terrified of the future of the National League with Theo Epstein in Chicago and Andrew Friedman in LA), but at least at this point almost every fan base can at least remember their last playoff berth.
My second reaction to the Royals making the World Series last night was this: Goddammit, that could’ve been us. That’s “us” as in Pirate fans, and that’s not to draw any comparisons between the Pirates and Royals of 2014. That’s just to say that that very first playoff run is special and the longer it goes, the more special it becomes. As a Pirate fan watching the Pirates in the playoffs last year I felt, to borrow a word, unsullied. There were no expectations in April that they’d make the playoffs, and so it was great when they did. Everything that came after that — the win against Cueto and the Reds, the back-to-back wins to put the Pirates on the verge of the NLCS, the fleeting moments of hope in Games 4 and 5, all felt like gravy because I, as a Pirate fan, felt no pressure from underlying playoff narratives for the Pirates to do anything last year. If the Pirates had found their way past the Cardinals and Dodgers, it would’ve been indescribably sweet.
A year later, and some of that magic is gone. The next time the Pirates play in a playoff game, you’re going to hear how they blew a 2-1 lead in the 2013 NLDS and lost the 2014 Wild Card Game at home. If you’re my age or older, you’ll have a distant memory of more playoff failures to glom on top of 2013 and 2014. Unless you’re 10+ years older than that, playoff failures are all you remember. If/when the Pirates do finally make a World Series, it’ll feel different than it would have in 2013. That’s not to say it won’t be as good as it would’ve been last year (there is a conventional wisdom that these things are sweeter as a fan if you’ve seen your team get close and fall short once or twice, and while I have no idea how that applies to baseball, I can tell you as a Pittsburgher born in 1985 that Super Bowl XL was a pretty special moment thanks to 11 years of lost AFC Championships and Super Bowls), just that the experience of the Pirates making the World Series last year with an increasingly delirious fan base and literally almost all of baseball rooting for them was a unique situation that would’ve been amazing. It’s virtually impossible to recreate those circumstances for the Pirates now, and seeing Royals fans get that exact thing that we Pirate fans could’ve had a year ago makes it burn a little more that the Pirates fell short.
In the grander scheme of things, well, we’re about 14 hours away from an all-wild-card World Series. I don’t mean to completely discount Cardinal Devil Magic at this point; it’s just hard to imagine even Cardinal Devil Magic resurrecting a Molinaless team with a 3-1 series deficit against Bumgarner on the road one night after blowing a 4-1 lead. Last year it felt OK that the Pirates didn’t advance further because the World Series was the ultra-rare sort that featured the two best teams in baseball, but this year, well, there aren’t a whole ton of objective arguments to be made that either World Series team was a lot better than the Pirates during the 2014 season. This is the sort of thing that can be comforting if you live in fear of the coming dystopian DodgerCub future that awaits the National League, but it’s frustrating because you can’t see this and not wonder if the Pirates could be right where the Giants are if one or two things had broken differently down the stretch. So it goes, I guess.
