Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 437: Charlie Wilmoth on the Pirates and the Psychology of Rooting for a Perennial Loser

Episode Date: April 28, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Charlie Wilmoth about his new book about the Pirates and the psychology of Pirates fans.

There are sweet, sweet days waiting there for you. Sweet, sweet days waiting there for you. Good morning and welcome to episode 437 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. We have a guest today. Very quickly, though, Ben, I've brought Matt Albers' status update. Do you have Ryan Webb's status update?

Ryan Webb finished a game on Sunday, which gives him 78 career games finished without a save. What is the Matt Albers update? Ryan Webb finished a game on Sunday, which gives him 78 career games finished without a save. What is the Matt Albers update? Well, Matt Albers remains on the shelf. However, the Astros had Raul Valdez close a game for them yesterday. And Raul Valdez is, I think that's his second career save. He has an ERA of nine. He is not what you'd consider a closer type. His one save came back in his rookie year in 2010. And so at this point, you'd have to say, they actually let Jerome Williams start the ninth inning after having thrown like nine and a half innings in the game already.

So you'd have to say that that closer job is wide open. And I would say that it is more perilous than we thought. Could be, but the lead is down to only five. One very quick thing. Do you remember how we used to discuss the evolution of pying or post-game celebrations, walk-off celebrations? So the Orioles did a thing this weekend where Nick Markakis had a walk-off single

and he was brought a pie which he ate from and then the mascot was pied. Yes. So that was an innovation in celebrations. It's only a matter of time until the pying is a flash mob. Right. Or it'll be like Joseph Gordon-Levitt will come out and start dancing, and there will be an animated bluebird.

All right, so our guest today is Charlie Wilmoth. Charlie is the founder of Buck's Dugout, the pirate's blog on SB Nation. He writes for MLB Trade Rum trade rumors and he just wrote a book uh... called dry land uh... which i read in uh... and a big fan of yeah it's a it's very enjoyable book uh... and so charlie's here to talk to us about uh... what it's like to be a person to that's what the book is that it's not so much

about pirates as about uh... kind of what it does psychologically to you to cheer for a team that's not going to win and to do that for 20 years. So Charlie, how are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. There were a lot of great details in this book and there were a lot of things

that I loved. There were sort of like kind of pre-internet bits of color that you don't necessarily always hear about when they happen, but particularly in the pre, I guess this was not pre-internet, but it was pre-this internet. So like Jason Kendall telling a teammate who had just arrived, welcome to hell, was a great detail. And Michael Keaton, when he had to throw out the first pitch, was a great detail. Michael Keaton, when he had to throw out the first pitch of opening day and gave an interview just before bad-mouthing the owner, was a great one.

So just a lot of great Pirates sadness involved. So I wanted to ask you, though, because you started writing this book before the 2013 season when they were still in their two decades long losing streak. And as you were writing it, they were winning and it probably, I guess, became clear that your narrative was going to change slightly. Did you consider it good or bad for your narrative to have them actually win a season? Some part of me was disappointed. Some part of me that likes really bleak, dystopian literature was kind of darkly hoping that this would be just a terribly bleak book about a terribly bleak time that went on forever. That seemed kind of interesting to me, but I knew that from the perspective of having a story that other people would want to read, it's much better that they won last year.

Is it? Because it seems to me that part of the tension in being a fan, particularly before you've ever won a World Series, is not knowing whether you're ever going to win a World Series. And for a person who's born, say, after 1986 or so, for a Pirates fan, maybe even a little earlier, there's this real tension of not knowing whether they will ever win before you die. To some degree, I wonder as a fan whether it sort of sucked a little bit of the air out of your balloon or whatever the metaphor would be. Yeah, maybe. Maybe from the perspective of just sinking really deeply into what all the losing meant,

I think it would have been better, in a sense, if they had lost last year. I'm not saying that as a fan, obviously. But I think that having... I had a reading in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, and to have people show up and to have... I read from the end end of the book and people cheered and got pretty excited about it. I mean, that obviously wouldn't have been possible without the winning at the end. So, you know, both as a fan and as a writer, I'm pretty grateful for it.

Yeah. So under the reign of Bud Selig, we basically had two franchises, maybe arguably three if you count the Orioles, that had essentially an entire generation lost, right? I mean, children raised and married without having ever seen a winning team for the most part. And so you've lived through this. Do you think that it's bad for baseball when this happens, or is this just kind of like there has to be an underclass for there to be an overclass? Is this sort of just a natural part of being competitive, and it's not necessarily a scar on Bud Selig's tenure? Well, I think that it seems, like judging from Bud Selig's actions throughout the years,

this seems to be the system he wants. Judging from Bud Selig's actions throughout the years, this seems to be the system he wants. He seems to want there to be teams like the Yankees that have a big advantage over teams like the Pirates. From my perspective as a fan, it definitely doesn't seem to be good for the sport. It seems wrong on some sort of moral level for the fans in Pittsburgh to have had to put up with what they had to put up with for so many years. So, you know, I'm biased certainly as a Pirates fan, but it doesn't seem very sporting and it doesn't seem right. How much of it do you attribute to these institutional disadvantages relative to, you know, bad decision making and mistakes? It's definitely both. I mean, there are obviously

there have been other teams that had similar disadvantages and didn't have any problem having at least one winning season in the past 20 years. And I think that, you know, fans in Pittsburgh really maybe even underestimated the degree to which the Pirates own bad decisions played a huge role in how long the streak went on. I mean, when Neil Huntington took over the team in 2007, fans got very frustrated with him very quickly. And it was hard to get people to see that it wasn't necessarily Neil Huntington's fault that the Pirates were losing in 2009 or something like that.

It was going to take a really long time for the Pirates to dig themselves out because they had been so many years under Dave Littlefield where, I mean, it's hard to even put a name on what they were doing. I mean, it was just not even resembling anything a competitive team ought to be trying to do. Is there one move from those regimes that stands out to you? Is it like the Matt Morris move that is just the emblematic of those years? I think, yeah, that's a good one. I mean, the Matt Morris move coupled with the selection of Daniel Moskos in the draft a month earlier, that really summed up what it was like to be a Pirates fan during that time. And the Pirates picked a reliever with the fourth overall

pick in the draft that year, which, I mean, picking a reliever with the fourth overall pick in the draft that year, which, I mean, picking a reliever with the fourth overall pick in the draft never makes sense, but especially doesn't make sense when you're a bad team with no real farm system. And then a month later at the trading deadline, they took on $13 or $14 million in salary in order to get Matt Morris, who was plainly washed up at that time. $14 million in salary in order to get Matt Morris, who was plainly washed up at that time. Whatever money they saved by not picking Matt Wieters or Jason Hayward or whatever, they just wiped it all away with this Matt Morris deal that made absolutely no sense at the time. I was blogging then. I'd been blogging for about three years. And I thought about quitting. And I know at least one other Pirates blogger, Pat Lackey, has talked about how he did too.

I mean, there just didn't seem to be any point in following the team. And, you know, throughout Littlefield's tenure, it was really you had to find reasons to root for the team. And after that happened, after the Morris deal happened, it was just like, wow, what are we doing to ourselves? And you wrote about how that works with the fans too, right? And what kept them coming back and the behavioral and psychological aspects, what the motivation was. So what conclusions did you come to about why Pirates fans remained Pirates fans? Well, it's really tricky i mean my own inclination is is to

not want to do the sort of woe is me thing that you'll hear fans of losing sports teams do uh... and and say you know we have free will you know we can do what we want if we don't want to root for this stupid team we can just stop uh... but there are a lot of us who just don't do that, even when the team seems to be going really, really badly for us. And I mean, I think it turned out from the people I talked to about the psychological aspects of it, when the Pirates fail, we really feel ourselves failing too. So in some sense, when the Pirates lose, we ourselves lose.

It brings us down um and so it is sort of striking that that so many i mean a lot of fans some fans did leave or maybe fade away and become less passionate fans but a lot of fans did stick around do you did you reach a point where you started to uh in in essence root against the team because you were so opposed to the moves they were making. Like, basically, in other words, the GM makes a move, you decide it's idiotic, and you get so invested in sort of that GM being an idiot and being wrong that you actually don't want to see it work out.

Did you ever cross that sort of line? Yes, absolutely. And, I mean, it might sound ridiculous to fans of teams who haven't been through that, or it might sound sort of sacrilegious, but it's almost something you have to do. You sort of have to root ironically, because if you take all these moves at face value, you take every game at face value, it's just going to bring you down so much. I mean, I didn't want to spend 20 years of my life being miserable so i continue to watch the team but i would ruin

sort of an ironic way or or like you said maybe uh... try to find ways of of rooting with i want this outcome so that the gm for learns that this movie made his for i mean if you can look at you know for example the pirates signing jeremy brittn Burnett and Joe Randa in 2006 and having them block younger players and Craig Wilson and Freddie Sanchez, who were much more interesting. You know, even if those moves have worked out, if Burnett had had a good season

and Randa had had a good season, that wasn't a good team. I mean, what was that team going to do? Win 79 games or something like that if those two players turn out really, really well? So, you know, what's the point in rooting for players like that? I mean, it's just going to reinforce the GM's basic strategy of pursuing those types of players which is a losing strategy. And so, you know, as a fan, why should you root for them? So it got really complicated on a sort of at-bat, by-at-bat level to figure out what

I was rooting for to happen. I wasn't just rooting for the team to win. I was rooting for this player to get a hit and this player to make an out, and it became this really complicated thing. Is there not sort of a bonding aspect to it when you go through this much losing? I mean, I see it in New York with Mets fans who almost seem to take some pleasure in being fans of this team that seems to do embarrassing things from time to time or has a lot of things go against them. And in a way,

it brings them together and they can sort of snark about it. And maybe if you're snarking about it, it means that you still care on some level. So is there sort of a gallows humor bonding aspect to it also? There's definitely a gallows humor aspect. I don't know. I mean, I guess sometimes there's the bonding aspect too, but I mean, Pirates fans spend a lot of that time really at each other's throats, and it goes beyond some of what's happened with the Mets or what has happened with the Cubs in that it was just reality

sort of beating you down on a day-to-day basis for 20 years. It wasn't just like the team's not in the World Series this year or the team's had a couple straight losing seasons. This team has been really bad for 20 straight years, and that has a different effect. And so Pirates fans really were pretty argumentative during the streak. When the Pirates finally ended the streak, that was when I really felt that bonding started to occur. And you had people saying to each other, hey, man, we got through this. And I know that when the streak ended, I personally felt glad to be alive because it had just taken so long.

And I felt glad for the other people who had made it through the streak alive, who had made it through a quarter of their lives and they were still here. And I felt a bond on that level. But while the streak was going on, yeah, maybe there was some bonding. But I think that took a backseat to certain other aspects of being a Pirates fan at that time. So I want to ask you about the Astros because the Astros are also in a terrible position, as the Pir pirates were for a long time and uh... if the pirates kind of uh... recurring sin was to think that they were or i guess to invest slightly too much in a bad team the astros i guess if they have a sin right now it's investing not enough in just basically

uh... you know turning their games into something like a farce with the promise that uh... in the long run this will keep them from losing an entire generation. So do you find yourself sort of sympathetic to what they're doing? Do you think that this is like a just and a merciful thing that they're doing? Or do you, I guess, is there any part of you that thinks that having gone through this and persevered through it, that it's kind of more just to just keep pushing until you finally emerge on your own? I think different Pirates fans would have different answers to that question.

I think for me, being a Pirates fan automatically became a lot more interesting when Neil Huntington took over and you could see what they were doing in terms of investing a lot of money in the draft and pursuing some of the specific strategies that the Astros are doing now. I think for younger fans that's often the case. Younger fans especially find losing, they're better at finding losing to be interesting I think, whereas older fans are maybe a little bit less patient with it and aren't necessarily as interested in, you know, Mark Apella or whoever is coming up through the minor leagues. So it may be partly a generational thing.

So if the Pirates had lost, say, 445 games over a four-year period, but you knew all along that they were essentially tanking for the greater good, say, between 2003 and 2006 or something. Would you have been thrilled? Do you think you would have been excited by this, or would it have been more depressing for you? It would have been less depressing. I mean, certainly, there's no getting around that watching a team lose 445 games over the course of four years would have been less depressing. I mean, certainly, I mean, there's no getting around that, like, watching a team lose 445 games over the course of four years would have been awful. The Pirates never, they never really sunk to those depths.

But, you know, watching a 90 loss team is not, I would submit that I don't think it's that much worse than watching a 102 or 103 loss team. 102 or 103 loss team. So if I could see something interesting going on there, I wouldn't want to see them losing in the meantime, but I would know how to deal with it. And I talked to fans, and there was one 21-year-old fan who I interviewed for this book. He said that he would rather have the Pirates win the Organization of the Year award than win a World Series.

And that really just blew my mind when he said that because, you know, people would accuse certain types of Pirates fans of thinking that way, of being so oriented toward the future that they don't care whether the Pirates win or lose. But it was striking to hear him say that. And I think a lot of fans during the streak, especially ones who didn't have much of a memory of the Pirates winning before, I mean, they were thinking of this in terms of, you know, things like fantasy baseball or things like running a video game on

franchise mode. And it seems like that's, I mean, what the Astros are doing now is very much like that. It's the franchise mode where you're just trying the craziest strategies and seeing if they work. Would you expect the Astros to lose any fans when they're competitive again? Do you expect that they will have

fans that can't thaw, I guess, that they just never get back because of this period? Or in your experience, do the guys who 20 years ago were cheering for a winner immediately come back when it's a winner? I think that whenever there's a group of fans that go away, some section of them will stay away. But I think that there's also new fans who will come back. So it's hard to generalize. And I think that the level of excitement we saw for the Pirates during the wild card game last year

was pretty much as high or higher than any Pittsburgh sports moment that I can think of in my lifetime. So my guess is that the Astros can come back and have sustained success after all this, they're going to be just as well off for it. We ran an excerpt from the book at Baseball Perspectives on Friday, so people should check that out. And one of the things that you said in there was that one of the reasons Pirates fans kept coming back is that they convinced themselves or they talked among each other and said that when the next winning season did finally come,

it would be that much sweeter for all of the losing seasons and the payoff would be so great, the reward would be so great. So was it, in retrospect, looking back at last year, was it every bit as delirious as you had hoped and expected? Yes, honestly. And I think that any time you don't win a World Series, you can always find reasons to look back with regret. But I think that thinking about the wild card game and fans going nuts when Johnny Cueto dropped the ball and then allowed a homer to Russell Martin the very next pitch, and all these fans dressed in black and just going nuts when Johnny Cueto dropped the ball and then allowed a homer to Russell Martin the very next pitch and all these fans dressed in black and just going nuts.

I mean, it was a very real experience. And to talk to fans at Pirate Fest a couple months later and to hear them ask questions of Neil Huntington and Frank Coonley at the Q&A at Pirate Fest and to just have the tenor of that be completely different than any Q&A that I had ever seen with those people in the past. It was an amazing thing. I mean, the change of mood was really something to behold. So yeah, I would have to say that in the end, it does pay off. So my math is going to be wrong but i i think if you start from scratch and have you know um you know just start going into the future the odds that uh any one team will win the world series um oh i guess the average team will wait like 20 years or something like that like basically

the odds are that that everybody listening here the average fan will celebrate a World Series within 20 years, but then half of them won't. I phrase that so, so, so poorly. I got you at the end, I think. All right. The question, though, is that the Pirates are not the average team, and they will always have some institutional disadvantages. And so I just wonder, do you expect to win a World Series in your lifetime? Do you feel like it's likely? And does it sort of fill you with existential dread, thinking that you might go into the great beyond without having ever celebrated a World Series? Well, I mean, I guess it sort of does, but I think it's pretty easy to travel into the great beyond or travel into this existential despair when you think about what might not happen for you in the next 50 years. I guess it's probably somewhat unlikely that the Pirates will win

a World Series in the next 50 years, which is interesting for me because I was born the same week the Pirates last won the World Series in 1975. Sorry, in 1979. Before or after? The week before or the week after? The week it was happening. So before the actual World Series win. Three days, I believe, before they actually won the last World Series. So you're good. Yeah, I was technically alive for that. But I don't know. I like to think that I ultimately define myself not by the baseball team I root for but by other things that are going on in my life. I think that that's healthy for

all baseball fans and it's something that all Pirates fans had to come to terms with. When you look back at these last 20 years of your life of the Pirates not having won, how are you going to think about it? Are you going to be like, wow, I was miserable because my baseball team was bad? Or are you going to be like, no, I did a lot of interesting things, and maybe the Pirates are just a peripheral part of the picture. So if the Pirates go through the rest of my life without them winning a World Series, I'm okay with that. If we can ask about the 2014 team for a moment, they are now 10-16. ask about the 2014 team for a moment. They are now 10-16. They're eight and a half back in the Central already after getting blanked by the Cardinals on Sunday. And before that loss,

their VP playoff odds were down to 11.4%. Of course, they started out lower than maybe most people would have pegged them. So what is your feeling about this team? Are you more optimistic than those playoff odds would suggest? And if you're not, if you don't think they'll make the playoffs, what is the psychological reaction to that? If after the 20 years of waiting, you get the one appearance and then it's gone again, is that more depressing? Or is there a sense that if you miss it this year, it's not necessarily the same as when you missed it in 2002, that you might actually be back sometime soon regardless? Yeah, I mean, the Pirates entered this season with a very highly

regarded farm system and they have Gregory Polanco about to come up and start in right field for them. They have a number of other potential impact prospects too. And so I think Neil Huntington looks at it like it's not like the Pirates have a one-year window here. It's not like they have to succeed in 2014. And I try to look at it from that perspective. Like Andrew McCutcheon is going to be with the team for the next several years. They have Garrett Cole and a whole lot of other interesting young players who could make this a very good team in 2015 or 2016 or whatever.

But it was also very frustrating to basically have the Pirates, and I don't want to use the word not try, but it almost felt like they didn't really try very hard this offseason. They could have had A. jay burnett back for reasonable price but they didn't extend them a qualifying offer even though to me it seems like that back caliber picture is worth one year fourteen million dollars uh... they've been weren't really connected to any

impact free agents to speak of and it seems like what happened is that you know how to just didn't have the budget you would hope a winning team would have to upgrade this offseason. And it's frustrating that the Pirates really didn't upgrade much. I mean, they brought in Edinson Volquez, who has pitched well, but that's one signing for $5 million. So there was a sense of frustration for me heading into the season.

And then to see that the team come out of the gate the way they have, that's pretty frustrating too. All right, so the book is called Dry Land, Winning After 20 Years at Sea with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The author is Charlie Wilmoth. You can get it at Amazon. We'll also post a link on our page and on the Facebook page with a link that gets a and on the Facebook page with

a link that gets a little bit more of the profit to Charlie so if you can use that link and Charlie what is your Twitter account Wilmoth C W-I-L-M-O-T-H-C yeah and in the meantime everybody go subscribe to

Play Index $30 for a year subscription with the discount code BP, and we'll be back tomorrow.