Hey you. Yeah, the guy with the "Cole 45" t-shirt you bought two weeks ago and just tweeted that the Pirates are collapsing, let's have a chat. I get it. It hasn't been the best 20 years to follow baseball in this town and to make it more recent, the past two seasons of your Pirates. The last half of June had fans and newcomers on cloud nine. A nine game winning streak got the baseball mojo going for a third straight season. The Pirates are in first place and even had the best record in Major League Baseball. Is this real life? Well, yes. It is real life. Because as some random person said once, "all good things must come to an end," the Pirates lost on July 2 and since then have dropped five of their last seven, which now has Pittsburgh on a three game losing streak. In most baseball cities, this is a minor bump in the road with almost three months of baseball left to play. In Pittsburgh, it is a special exception that brings out the pessimistic, Xanex popping mentality of a fanbase that has high expectations for the football and hockey teams in town, but always expect the worst out of its baseball club and the word "collapse" spills out more than the F word in a Martin Scorsese film. I'm no Sigmund Freud or Frasier Crane, but that sounds crazy. This is how crazy some of you are. A team that has been 21 games over .500 this season, and despite a recent drawback over the past week, are still 18 games over, and .5 games back of the Cardinals. Raise your hand if you saw this happening in July. I can't see you, but there are many of you, myself included, with your hands down. The Pirates have to beat cellar dwellers like the Cubs and Mets, and win games against Oakland this week and St. Louis later this month to be taken seriously as a contender. That's baseball logic 101. It seems that some fans are hanging on for dear life, waiting for that monumental collapse and not enjoying positives of this Pirates team. Pitching has been phenomenal. While the offense can be on and off, Pedro Alvarez is finally hitting the ball after a slow start and four, count it, four Pirates are going to the All Star Game this year. As Eric Idle said, "Always look on the bright side of life." Life is too short to sit around counting the days to when the Steelers hit camp in Latrobe and anxiously awaiting the Pirates to dissipate into the irrelevancy of the late summer, early autumn. You never know where this team will be in a month. Maybe you're right about a third straight year of heart breaking results. The Pirates have disappointed in the past and seem to be the kings of collapsing, but screaming the word "collapse" is a little premature with 74 games left. So, calm down. Yell all you want about having Brandon Inge and Michael McKenry in the lineup still while Tony Sanchez sits in Indianapolis, but hold off on the apocalyptic-like phrases for now and enjoy a little Monty Python.
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