Story time!
Way back in the cold hinterlands of Pittsburgh Pirate history known as 2001, we Pirate fans had little we could do other than accept on faith that Dave Littlefield could not be any worse than the man he was replacing (Cam Bonifay) and that he was about to set the Pirates on a course that brought them back to contention. If you followed the early years of Neal Huntington’s time in Pittsburgh, you likely recall that there are moments during rebuilds in which there’s simply no way to tell if it’s going to work; the new GM comes in, talks a big game, enacts a plan, and then you wait while everything takes place. I think that a lot of us were awfully concerned as late as 2013 that Huntington’s plan wasn’t going to be effective as we hoped, and we turned out to be wrong.
Dave Littlefield’s first big task as a GM was to move Jason Schmidt. Schmidt was a heck of a talent with the Pirates, but he had control problems and wasn’t really in shape and I honestly don’t even know where Ray Searage was a this point in time, but he certainly wasn’t working his magic on the Pirates’ pitchers. Littlefield traded Schmidt with John Vander Wal (Vander Wal was, you may recall, one of the best pinch hitters of the late 1990s who was playing every day for the 2000 and 2001 Pirates because they were the 2000 and 2001 Pirates) out to the Giants, getting Armando Rios and a pitching prospect named Ryan Vogelsong back in return. Rios played in literally two games with the Pirates before tearing his ACL, and Vogelsong pitched in two before needing Tommy John surgery (they both beat out Jody Gerut by a slim two games for the quickest a Dave Littlefield trade acquisition suffered a catastrophic injury; I am not exaggerating or kidding about this).
Vogelsong missed all of the 2002 season recovering from his surgery and pitched sparingly in 2003, but in 2004 he set the Grapefruit League on fire. I was so excited about him, I spent most of the spring telling my friends at Duquesne that he was going to be a breakout for the 2004 Pirates (to be fair: I said the same thing about Craig Wilson that spring and he went on to hit 29 homers and I’m pretty sure his catcher eligibility won a friend a fantasy league). I thought Vogelsong and Wilson and Jason Bay and Oliver Perez and Jack Wilson were going to lead the Pirates to the promised land of, well, I mean, back then even 79 wins would’ve been solid.
Vogelsong was not good in 2004. By 2005 he was more or less a punchline. In 2006, he was literally a punchline in the oft-referenced WHYGAVS (although nobody called it WHYGAVS back then) Live Blog (this was a thing we did before Twitter) of a terrible Pirates/Royals game that got linked to on Deadspin and transformed this site from a goofy little time waster into something that people actually read. In 2007, he was in Japan. He didn’t wear an MLB uniform again until 2011, when he became an All-Star with the Giants. This remains one of the most inexplicable and frustrating occurrences during all of The Streak for me, if we’re being honest. Vogelsong obviously had the talent (he was a good prospect with the Giants the first time, and his stuff was often tantalizing with the Pirates), but the Pirates could do nothing with it. His return with the Giants validated all of it.
Tonight, Ryan Vogelsong makes a start for a very good Pittsburgh Pirate team that is expected to contend for a playoff berth. I would tell you that I always thought this would happen, but that would be a crazy lie. Back in 2004, though, I did hope for something like this. I just didn’t think it would take 12 years.
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