Thoughts from a Random Mets Fan

appropriate free agents whose names don’t rhyme with Yeromy Zermitz

One thing I will say about the Pirates sucking this long: it really seems like everyone wants us to succeed now. It’s a pity thing, I suspect. Almost like seeing the kid that got picked last score with a home run in kickball. Even the other team applauds it.

Even my friend, a Cubs fan, wants the Pirates to be good again. That goes directly against his best interest. If I were in his position, I’d want us to suck as long as possible.

The term “y’inz” is commonly used around Pittsburgh to mean “you guys”, in an almost identical manner to the southern “ya’ll”, of course just much more obnoxious and much less eloquent. This is the most commonly recognized dialect of “Pittsburghese”. A typical Pittsburghese phrase may sound something like this:

“Hey, yinz guy goin dahntahn n’ at to see the Stillers and drink pop?”

Translation:
“Hey, are you guys going downtown to see the Steelers play and enjoy sodas?”

Yinzers are the people who know very little about the Pirates, but claim to know very much. They often times have a similar opinions to the commentators you have described in your post. One experience I had with a yinzer at PNC Park was when I heard this yelled during pre-game warmups:

“Hey Garrett Jones, you better stop hittin’ all ’em homeruns n ’at or yinz guys gonna get traded too!”.

The internet really cannot do this quote justice. I don’t believe this person used a complete word in their sentence. But the yinzer believes that if Nutting would just sign a few huge name free agents to go along with all the “hall of famers” we have traded away, we’d have about 4 or 5 WS titles by now.

My personal opinion is that the term yinz (and all other Pittsburghese really with the exception of maybe a few words) in general sounds very uneducated, and thus yinzers are uneducated baseball fans who are very loud and vocal about their opinions.

You cannot make incremental changes to a team that is over 100 games below .500 total over the last 4 seasons. The Bay/Nady/Wilson/Sanchez/Snell/Gorzelanny core was not a piece or two away from contention. I don’t care if the pieces were Albert Pujols and Hanley Ramirez.

Mostly, it’s because of all the idiotic things that get said about the Pirates by dumb commentators. And let’s be completely honest here, the analysts on BBTN don’t have a full box of crayons between them, but they manage to take that lack of inspiration to a new level when discussing the Pirates. The Freddy Sanchez deal was described as “Freddy Sanchez to the Giants for a minor league pitcher.” Which, put that way, does sound like a complete rip-off. Obviously, not all pitching prospects are created equal.

There’s just a complete lack of recognition among prominent sports personalities for what’s going on in Pittsburgh. You’ll hear someone recite that great litany of players who have been traded away over the past two seasons, without looking at the 2007 Pirates and saying, “Hey, that team that HAD Jason Bay, Xavier Nady, Nate McLouth, Freddy Sanchez, Jack Wilson, Adam LaRoche, and Nyjer Morgan won only 68 games-perhaps they weren’t very close to winning a championship.” And look, the current incarnation of this team is in total rebuilding mode and on a pace to win about 70 games, the most in five years.

Many of these same airheads will be talking about the “surprising” Pirates who in 2012 “came out of nowhere.” There will also be a ton of revisionist history taking place as analysts ripping these trades will be talking about how they were “building a solid foundation” two or three years from now.

and not being a dick.

We appreciate it. Really. No sarcasm.

And, as you’ve become an ancillary Pirate fan, so much the better.

Now, if we can wean you from you high-payroll fixation…

Oh mah Gawd! Whah’re yinz askin’ abaht the accent, ya nebby jagoff? :)

As a transplanted Pittsburgher, I honestly miss the accent. As far as whether it sounds uneducated: trust me folks, nobody likes the accent of the city they’re from. I live in Boston, and “Fack you! Go Sawx!” doesn’t sound any more refined than what comes out of Pittsburgh.

And I feel your pain re: trying to explain what an actual rebuilding process looks like to Boston fans. I like the way NH is handling this, and I think there’s a good chance we’ll have a pretty excited team in a couple years.