Then I give up, call them an idiot, and walk away.

to talk to convince thickheaded yinzers. Just nod and make a sarcastic comment if/when you choose to do so

Its a bar right? My first recommendation is a beer or 2 from the tap to ease the sting. Might I recommend Blue Moon? You can throw every statistic in the book out (my usual stat is OPS since its easy to understand/explain), but it won’t make a difference to a thickheaded yinzer. Just smile and nod, praying they get drunk enough to leave a huge tip. What restaurant do you run?

until they get so pissed off that they just shut up.

Once I had a guy tell me I used too many facts.

Yinzers have no answer for the fact that we are paying the rest of Jack Wilson and Ian Snell’s salaries just to get rid of them. It just doesn’t compute.

More than anything, I think a lot of Pirate fans are being brainwashed by the media. For example, when the New York Times repeatedly claims there are WMDs in Iraq, most people believed it (at least in the beginning). Similarly, when everyone at the Post-Gazette cries “salary dump” for every single move the Bucs make the past 2 years, many of the sheep take it to heart.

Just get them to talk about the Steelers or Penguins instead.

Pittsburgh gets credit for having knowledgeable fans, but the fact is that nobody in that city knows anything about sports. This is the same short-sighted fanbase that throught at various points that Ben Roethlisberger should have been benched for Charlie Batch and/or Byron Leftwich.

Just because we have good teams doesn’t mean we have smart fans.

you could add a 15 % Yinzer tax on their drinks. they would probably not even notice it.

You could start short-pouring them….

The Yinzers have forever convinced themselves that the Pirates dealt Hanley Ramirez and Tim Lincecum to Seattle, Chase Utley to the Giants, and Jon Papelbon/Zack Greinke to the Cubs. There’s really no reversing this mindset in 99% of cases.

Last summer, I had a Steeler fan I talked to at a store here in Iowa tell me “The Steelers aren’t going to win another Super Bowl” because Mike Tomlin and Ben Roethlisberger just aren’t the right guys to do it and that they’ll always be a 12-4 or 11-5 team that just won’t win big games. He based that entirely on the playoff game they lost. I bet he’s still complaining.

Personally, I don’t pay much attention to the Steelers before the first week of the season. I don’t even know who they drafted yet. I think it’s mostly that I trust the Steelers completely to do the right thing because they’ve earned that trust. The Pirates haven’t yet. Sorry to say it, but I still don’t trust them. Probably won’t until they win as much as the Steelers and Penguins. I’m sure if I didn’t pay attention at all to the Pirates, I’d be just as angry as any yinzer fan out there complaining about the trades this week.

Where is this bar/restaurante located? Maybe we can have a “gathering” of knowledgable Pirate fans one day.

but Freddie, Jack and Jason Bay were All-Stars!!!!!!!

Seriously, they have to be awesome, and we traded them for Minor Leaguers???

It’s amazing how people judge these transactions.

People don’t pay attention to the game. They just read the updates in the newspaper and see the sports segment on TV. They then call in to sports talk radio and all the idiots who pay lip-service attention to baseball trade wisdom like “It’s a salary dump again.” And they are all brilliant and know what they are talking about.

I deal with mine on-line, so I send them links to the other teams fans freaking out about how they got robbed. that usually shuts them up or gets the “they’ll just trade them when they get good so it doesn’t matter.” Then I point out that that is what the Indians (the team they threaten to root for, because they “do it right”) do every year, and remind them the Indians traded Manny Ramirez and still won.

Then they are left with the “our guys are worse though, they’ll screw it up.” Even if you point out NH was doing it in Cleveland.

Gah.