CUTCH

 

I’m not a man who dwells on the past.

            That’s a bold-faced lie.

            I think a lot about the past.

            At times, I can become a man consumed with the past.

            There are slights from grade school that I still ponder.

            So, it’s no surprise to me to hitch upon the fact that this coming President’s Day marks 20 years since my, now wife, and I signed a lease for an apartment in Brooklyn. Or the fact that come this April 5^th, it’ll be 20 years since I left my home city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Twenty years since she and I packed up all of our meager belongings and two cats, ranted a U-Haul, dealt with a sudden gall bladder surgery, and hightailed it out of the only home I’d ever know, save one strange year in West Virginia.

            Twenty years.

Time flies when you’re trying to live a life.

But it kind of seems like yesterday to me.

I could give you all of the gory details: the cockroaches, the rats, the upstairs neighbor who’s teenage son couldn’t get enough rap music; the bar we claimed as home base, only to have someone there steal my fiancé’s wallet; the bas temp jobs; the bad actual jobs; my fiancé’s dad’s stage four cancer surgery; more cockroaches; more rats; the casual President’s Day weekend in 2004, where we horrifyingly watched a white Pitt Bull murder a German Shepard from our living room window; the gang members; the Guardian Angels on my block.

But this is a blog about baseball cards.

And, aside from two other years in Buffalo, I’ve made Brooklyn my home for 18 of those last 20 years.

So, it couldn’t all be bad, right?

The Pitt Bull murder…that was bad.

You gain a lot when you leave home. New experiences. New perspectives. You get to see how other people live. If nothing else, New York City was an absolute SHOCK to my system. I’d been there a few times. I’d never envisioned moving there. I was always going to end up on the West Coast. But then there I was, half-drunk on the F train at two in the morning, on a train packed full of drunken people, watching some homeless dude eat a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while drinking a gallon whole milk.

To paraphrase Dorothy Gale, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

This isn’t to say anything bad about Pittsburgh, or that it was cornfed: a run-in with a pimp at two in the morning in Downtown Pittsburgh stopped me from such idyllic thinking as that. But I was spinning my wheels in Pittsburgh. I was working a drone job. My fiancé and I spent our weekends doing the same thing: basically, going to malls and strip malls in the suburbs. I’d stop going to museums. I’d stopped going to shows. I’d stopped even bothering to try and write. I was on the cusp of twenty-nine-years-old, floundering and sinking and I didn’t even realize it. When my mom suggested that my fiancé and I look for a home in the Pittsburgh suburb of Edna, we nodded our heads in blank resignation.

Because wasn’t that what we were supposed to do?

But my future father-in-law’s cancer diagnosis changed all of that.

You lose a lot when you leave home. Familiarity. Repetition. Routine. The constant presence of family and friends in your life. Of all of the things that I gained and lost in moving from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn, I lost a closeness with my Pittsburgh Pirates. Granted, baseball is probably not to most important component here. But this is a baseball card blog, and we’re going to eventually discuss baseball and look a baseball cards.

So, let’s pretend the loss of access to the Pirates was epic in my life.

I mean, it was…to an extent. I was, and still am, a HUGE Pirates fan…although they’ve barely given me reason to be over the last, oh, three or four decades. But I’ve proudly watched a lot of bad baseball. Rooted for a lot of bad players.

Put mediocrity on a pedestal because we didn’t have much else to cheer for.

***Okay, brief aside, Jason Kendall and Brian Giles are not mediocre ballplayers. But Kendall was a 

solid defensive catcher, who hit singles, and who's status was elevated because he played on some 

crappy Pirates teams. Brian Giles hit a lot of home runs...but what did it matter when the team was 

losing 90+ games a season****

            Also....

            ...I always liked Kevin Young more.

            Anyway....

I grew up in Three Rivers Stadium.

I marveled at the stunning beauty of PNC Park and what my tax dollars helped give to me and other fans. But it never felt like it was my place, the two seasons that I still lived in Pittsburgh. I could never envision myself watching games there until I became the old man that I’m turning into now. That burning desire to get out, shake things up...it overwhelmed me at times.

Sigh…I know 2003 was 20 years ago. And though it feels like yesterday, there are tangible truth that firmly say that year belongs in the past. Cell phones flipped. Ipods were new. There was nothing “smart” about anything. If you accessed this blog via social media…well, that wasn’t really around or too popular in 2003 either. There was no MLBTV for me to pretend that I was at home in Pittsburgh, watching the Buccos on a casual Tuesday night, like I do now. As I adjusted to my new life in New York, the 2003 Pirates season came and went for me without a blip. They were 75-87 (a record I’d kill for now). So did the 2004 season. 2005. Etc. You get my drift. I lost touch with a team that had been so important to me and my life in Pittsburgh.

And I know I missed a lot of bad baseball.

Really, really bad baseball.

But I also missed the debut of this guy.

The chance to root for him on a regular basis.

And I missed those resurgent Pirates teams that made the playoffs from 2013-2015.

Not necessarily missed…just not close to them.

Not like I was with these guys.

Maybe it's age. Maybe it’s displacement. I watch baseball and collect cards, but I don't feel nearly as empassioned about the players as I did as a kid, when they were walking, talking gods. I know I'm not the same kinf fan now. But it does sadden me that those Pirates teams Andrew McCutchen was a part of; they’ll never mean to me what they mean to other Pirates fan who watched them on a daily basis. And, I guess, that’s the deal you make when you chose to leave a place. You give up something to gain something else. No Cutch…but I can see Starry Night whenever I want.

And getting to see two guys ain't so bad.

*snuck a lil' 2023 preview in there*

But I am a home towner at heart.

I’ve had MLBTV since 2019, and I’ve spent the past four seasons catching up with my old hometown team on a nightly basis during baseball season. Rolling my eyes at bad baseball. Cheering when I see a glimmer of hope. PNC Park is a regular stop when I come home to Pittsburgh, because technology has allowed to me to feel invested in the Pirates again. I’ve started to collect the cards of the current players.

Making new favorites.

Setting my hopes on the future.

…but…

There was still something bothering me.

An itch I wanted to scratch.

In January, it was announced that the Pittsburgh Pirates had signed Andrew McCutchen to a one-year/5-million-dollar contract. Cutch was coming home to Pittsburgh after five seasons in the wilderness! Okay, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Not the wilderness per se, but the wilderness to Pirates fans who loved and missed Cutch.

For me…it felt like a second chance to see a player whom I missed out.

As a collector, it meant a chance to recoup on some of Andrew McCutchen’s glory years in black and gold.

And that’s exactly what I did recently.

Hey, Neil Walker is back in Pittsburgh too…as an announcer…so why not stock up on all of his cards that I missed out on too!

Look, I’m not fooling myself. I know that Andrew McCutchen is thirty-six. I know the glory years, the MVP years, have been gone for some time. I don’t think any serious Pirate fan should expect Cutch to party like it 2013 again. But I don’t think this is a nostalgia act. The Pirates were always going to bring in some vet who batted .230 and still had a little bit of pop in his bat to try and help the team.

They already brought in these guys.

*I'm an admitted Ji-Man Choi fan....so I'm also excited for him to be in Pittsburgh*

If you’re going to spend the five million, why not spend it on Andrew McCutchen?

To be honest, I’ll take his bat over the inept and anemic hitting I saw on last year’s team.

And I can’t wait to go to PNC Park and buy myself a t-shirt with number 22 emblazoned on the back!

I missed out on Andrew McCutchen first time around.

I’m going to be present an accountable this season.

And one last thing: this image floated around Twitter yesterday:

I sighed so contentedly when I saw it, my wife actually stopped what she was doing to ask me what was up. I said, It's nothing, honey. It's Cutch. And Key. It's Cutch and Key.

And it felt so GOOD to say that.

 Thank you for reading! Happy Collecting!

NEXT FRIDAY: Topps 2023 Series 1…obviously.