Saturday’s edition of was billed as a homecoming for Pat McAfee, the former West Virginia special teams star who grew up outside of the city. McAfee paid tribute to the city’s impressive sports history.
Of course, the modern Pittsburgh sports landscape features both one of the most electrifying athletes in the country—Cy Young winner Paul Skenes—and his otherwise disappointing franchise, the Pirates.
“We even have baseball history,” McAfee said. “Paul Skenes just won the Cy Young, he’s the best player in baseball. That’s sick.”
Cheers for Skenes quickly turned negative, and as McAfee began to address the Pirates struggles, saying, “And although the team may be absolute …” the Pirates fans in attendance came close to drowning him out with loud chants of “Sell the team!”
“Yeah, that’s what they’re saying,” McAfee continued after cutting himself off.
“What’s going on with the Pirates is they don’t spend any money and they don’t actually win, you see, so we have Paul Skenes go on a historic run at PNC Park, the most beautiful ballpark in of MLB,” McAfee continued, acknowledging the fan base’s complaints before kicking it to Kirk Herbstreit for a quick history lesson about great Pirates players and teams of yesteryear.
“Sell the team” chants have become commonplace in Pittsburgh, with Skenes addressing them—and putting the responsibility to win on his own shoulders and those of the team’s players—all the way back in early April. The Pirates would finish 71–91, the franchise’s seventh consecutive sub-.500 season. Pittsburgh last reached the playoffs in 2015, the last of three straight postseason bids for the franchise. The ‘13 trip to the NLDS broke a 20 year streak without playoff baseball.
As we’ve seen in recent days with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, fan outrage can make impact with a struggling sports franchise. Ousting an ownership group that doesn’t feel incentivized to invest in a winning ballclub is a much more difficult undertaking, even with pressure coming from the set.