I think I was somewhere in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in the early-1990s, perhaps at Mooney’s Pub on Flatbush Ave., when someone fulfilled all obligations of the neighborhood and eventually quoted Che Guevara: “Live your life not celebrating victories, but overcoming defeats.” This to a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. This by a smug, emasculated hipster who’d named his three cats Charlotte, Emily and Anne (after the Bronte sisters, of course!). He took up space at the crowded bar despite his allergy to alcohol.
In the first week of April, just a few days shy of my 61st birthday, my 61-year-old ex-wife was found dead in her rental home in upstate New York and my 95-year-old mother expired from long-anticipated kidney failure in Ohio. Both had visited, at one point in their lives, my Bucco Brick outside PNC Park in Pittsburgh, PA. Both myself, and the brick, have been cleared of foul play, according to authorities.
The Pirates franchise has spent the past two weeks suffering yet another public relations black eye by tearing up the promotional bricks sold back in 1999, many of which were used to memorialize Pirates fans by their loved ones, and dumping them in a recycling center in suburban Pittsburgh. Our ultra-cheap owner Robert Nutting had already passed on extended wunderkind pitcher and PR goldmine Paul Skenes to a contract extension, then suffered another PR nightmare by replacing a Roberto Clemente commemorative retired number sign on the PNC Park right field fence with an ad for an energy drink. None of this is surprising to any Bucco fan who’s paid attention. Many times I’ve been threatened with ejection from the Pirates spring training stadium in Bradenton, FK, for publicly outing the owner to clueless fans sitting right next to him. Now, years later, he can’t walk among them anywhere without a “Sell the team!” chant arising from the masses. So now I adjust my Che Guevera beret, and remain open to gratitude from the Pittsburgh fans who took so long to get on the anti-ownership bandwagon.
In the past few weeks, the owner was forced to apologize for the brazen and insensitive removal of the promotional/memorial bricks which surrounded the famous Honus Wagner statue behind the home plate entrance to PNC Park in Pittsburgh. It was the first online purchase I ever made. It was 1999, and I was working at the Classic Sports Network on Park Ave. South in Manhattan. We had dial-up internet. I think I was the fourth person to plop down $75 on a credit card for a commemorative brick. Proceeds went to a Clemente charity, if I remember correctly. Instead of memorializing my grandfather and father for their decades of Pirates fandom (too many letters for the brick), I chose a more succinct promotion of the fanzine I was publishing at the time. It was called Murtaugh and it combined the spirit of the former Pirates manager from the 1970s with then-present day punk rock DIY ethos.
Jocks and punks didn’t mix much, but I wanted my zine to bring them together. I think I enjoyed some degree of success on that front. If memory serves, the “MURTAUGH RULES –Spike Vrusho” brick was the fourth one purchased and therefore got great placement near the Wagner statue. I was proud of that, and, given my job as a writer for a sports nostalgia outfit, the whole exercise was probably a tax write-off. Being cheap, the Pirates didn’t engrave the bricks but instead opted for some type of plastic lettering which wore down under the tread of fans. Even their low-attendance hordes managed to wear the bricks out twice, as the front office claims they were replaced twice since 1999 before being unceremoniously dumped in a recycling plant a few weeks ago.
My mother Ruth, like only a very few ushers still working for the Pirates, had watched Bucco baseball live at three stadiums dating back to Forbes Field with her father, Three Rivers Stadium with my dad and a young Spike, and many visits to PNC Park on the north shore of the Allegheny River in the past decade with all my rowdy friends. It was a summer highlight to take mom to the stadium with old pals and even my oldest brother who was impressed with my heckling skills as we suffered through horrendous professional baseball.
My ex-wife was from England and was over the “yobbo” culture of sports fandom, mostly rooted in soccer support over there. But she took the marketing angle and wondered if my Bucco Brick improved circulation for my zine, which it might’ve. Who knows, especially with zines?
Most of the bad publicity for the Pirates over the Bucco Brick removal has involved families who used the promotion to memorialize loved ones who suffered through fandom of professional baseball in small-market Pittsburgh. Most of these were hard-living Germanic Lutheran types prone to a steady diet of pierogies, kielbasa and beer. And polka. And Steelers football, which was probably the true key to their longevity. But that’s another story altogether.
The Pirates team brass has hastily avowed now to rearrange the 10,000 bricks into some type of vertical signage behind the Bill Mazeroski statue outside PNC Park. Much like selling Tommy Pham as a great offseason acquisition, that’s easier said than done. Like the Apostle Thomas, true Pirates fans doubt the validity of these front office claims.
Death descends in early-April, with my team 25,000-to-one odds to win the 2025 World Series. Crazier things have happened. My mom was a big fan of Andrew McCutchen. My ex-wife once bought me Kent Tekulve’s game-used bat from the 1979 World Series. McCutchen’s still at it on the roster, thank God, and the Tekulve bat is in storage unit in Red Hook, NY.
Crazier things have happened.
That $1 bet could turn into 25,000. Maybe it should, given the grief of this month so far.