I blame Barry Bonds.
Well, first, I blame the closing of the steel mills. But after that, Bonds.
We're a warm people, we Pittsburghers. We'll open our homes and our hearts to you. We'll scoot over a lane on the Parkway to make it easier for you on the entrance ramp. We'll greet and treat the Cheese Lady at Penn-Mac like a part of the family, expect her to remember all our favorite foods, even fill her in with our children's graduation plans. We won't be surprised in the slightest when she beams upon seeing the kids, "Yinz are gettin' so tall!"
But man, for all the unspeakable riches we've reaped from our sports teams, we can be a bummer.
The steel mills started this.
As I wrote in one of my final columns for a newspaper, upon the passing of Chuck Noll in June 2014:
It was a terrible time. The steel mills that employed nearly half the city were closing en masse. The surrounding businesses were failing with them. Pittsburghers were out of work, out of luck and, soon, out of town: From 1970-80, the city's population was slashed by 96,179, per the U.S. Census. Almost 20 percent! Some fled for the D.C. area and government jobs, others for new economies in the South and West, others just for sanity's sake.
We were Beirut without the bombs, Chernobyl without the radiation.
That era is long over, thankfully. Our population's stabilized, and the city's never been healthier, cleaner or more beautiful.
But the scars remain.
We hate when people leave. I hate it, and I don't know of any other Pittsburgher who doesn't take it personally when hearing or reading someone's leaving.
Which brings me, naturally, to Bonds. Because he left, too, after the 1992 season. Setting aside all his later transgressions, that's the one, if we're being honest, that hurt the worst around here. Never mind that the Pirates only made one absurd attempt to keep him -- remember $30 million over 30 years? -- and never mind that Major League Baseball's economic system was only then beginning to skew toward the haves. Nothing rational applied at the time.
He was leaving. That was it, and nothing more. We didn't care why our neighbors and friends and doctors and teachers were leaving, either. We just knew they were leaving. And in this case, we knew this particular ballplayer was taking with him any hope for the franchise, maybe forever.
So the steel mills and, much later, Bonds connected those two terrible feelings into one, and it's carrying on to this day. It's passed down from one generation's fears, worries and grousing to the next, even if the current generation couldn't independently correlate one of those, never mind both.
This has been my theory on this forever, though I'm fairly sure I've never put it into print until this very column.
And for that, I'll blame Le'Veon Bell. Not the athlete, of course. Not the person or even his agent. And no, not the Steelers, either. As I shared when these parties couldn't find common ground within a five-year, $70 million offer, I see this situation itself as basically blameless.
But leaving?
That's a separate crime around here.
It's why we fret that a player might become an unrestricted free agent in, oh, 2023 or 2027.
It's why we track, borderline obsessively, salary caps and Super-2s and every clause of every contract.
It's why we've done insane things like booing former players when they're introduced at PNC Park, even when they did absolutely nothing wrong on their way out. That's begun to change in recent years, mercifully, but that won't expunge a decade-plus of booing poor Aramis Ramirez each time he stepped to the plate. As if he were somehow culpable for being brazenly sold off to the Cubs for parts.
And now, I'll bet, it's at the core of the local conventional wisdom on Bell.
It's not that he's annoying or childish or greedy, and it's certainly not that he lacks anything as a football player. It's just that he's leaving. The Steelers and Pittsburgh gave him everything he ever could have wanted here, not least of which was a star-laden, experienced set of teammates on offense, plus all the adulation of one of the planet's most ardent fan bases, plus the forgive-and-forget moment following his suspension two years ago ... and he's leaving.
Nothing the Steelers did, nothing we did, was good enough.
That's the steel mills. That's Bonds. That's still with us today.
That's my perspective, anyway.
• This is personal, too, but I'm convinced this is why I committed at a crazy-early age that I'd never leave Pittsburgh. In my newspaper days, I had job offers from other cities, including from two national outlets, and never even agreed to an interview. Because there could never be anything out there professionally that would be worth leaving this place.
Believe me, I'm not criticizing anyone for feeling what's described above. I'm part of it. Always will be.
• All that spoken, Mike Tomlin needs to ride Bell hard into that looming sunset.
As one wiseguy once remarked at PNC Park about the Pirates babying a certain pitcher, "What are they saving him for, the Yankees?"
That doesn't mean Bell needs to be driving between the tackles every other down, and it definitely doesn't mean the head coach should act in a punitive way, as that would be unprofessional and infantile. But it does mean that, with Bell already clearly motivated by his ultimate payday -- above all other concerns -- play right along with him. He's openly stated he wants this to be his peak, tweeting, "Trust me, 2018 will be my best season to date." So give him that chance and give him that ball. On the ground, through the air, whatever.
Look, if he'd signed the five-year deal and the Steelers had made that massive investment, there's no way Tomlin wouldn't have approached certain situations at least a little differently. He'd have needed to protect a long-term asset.
Not now.
• Why does a sports network have an awards show?
Really, whose idea was this, and why did everyone just kind of play along as if it were relevant?
• There won't be a Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game within five years. Bryce Harper going all-out Monday night, then immediately complaining about how his biceps would be 'burning for a week' is all anyone at any level of Major League Baseball should need to hear to either greatly reduce the event's scope or eliminate it altogether.
• Most likely Pirates to be traded, in order: David Freese, Jordy Mercer and Corey Dickerson. And I'm only exempting Francisco Cervelli and Josh Harrison because of current health issues, especially Cervelli's.
• That team could sweep through all six of the upcoming games in Ohio, then predictably tear up the terrible Mets for four more Ws, and not a thing would change about the front office's preference to clear payroll and kick the can.
And to repeat this yet again, it's not that a rebuild would be wrong in this specific setting. It's just that these guys are the wrong ones to execute it, and they've got the wrong motive for doing so.
• Remember when I reported that the Penguins wouldn't be interested at all in Ilya Kovalchuk? And then how I added that they absolutely shouldn't be, since he's only ever been about the money?
Yeah, and then remember the Kings idiotically offering Kovalchuk, now 35 years old with more than 1,000 professional games of mileage on his once-formidable tires, three years at $18.75 million to join a team that was already way too old?
“When I was making my decision, it was all about hockey," Kovalchuk told reporters in Los Angeles this week, presumably with a straight face. "Because I have three or four years left in my tank where I can really play at a high level. L.A. has a great group of guys."
Mm-hm.
It's not as if Jim Rutherford was unaware of this.
• Pursue the player who's already proven he's committed. It's the safest, smartest policy.
Rutherford bent his own policy by negotiating in-season with Patric Hornqvist and got a deal done -- five years, $26.5 million -- that would have been blown away by what we all saw was a weak NHL free-agent market this summer. That happened because Rutherford and Mike Sullivan recognize and respect Hornqvist's value to this particular group, but also because Hornqvist genuinely couldn't stand the concept of potentially being a loser somewhere else.
Hornqvist's one seriously smart guy. Believe me, he knew the kind of cash that would have been thrown his way this summer.
I swear, I'm only partially comparing this to the Steelers and Bell. I'd have had no issue with the Steelers had Bell accepted their offer, although that's in part because less than half of it would have been guaranteed.
But there is something to say for legitimately prioritizing loyalty and success.
• Hornqvist might as well have been born here. Five other random current athletes I'd toss into that pile: J-Hay, Cam Heyward, Bryan Rust, Joe Musgrove, Mike Hilton.
• So, as long as I'm all city-sappy today, here's a one-tap option to watch Matt Sunday and I do a Morning Java on the North Shore yesterday in which we essentially sing about where we get to live:
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