Legendary crazy

You know what I miss most about baseball, as the calendar leans in toward June and summer?

 

I miss whining about my relentlessly crummy Pittsburgh Pirates, and then hearing my faithful reader(s) scream "Enough about the (bleep-bleep) Pirates! Nobody cares!"

 

Well ... I do. And this is my Blob. So nyah.

 

Besides, how could I pass up wonderful stuff like Matt Zylbert of the reconstituted Deadspin reminiscing about the signature awfulness/weirdness of the Aught Pirates?

 

Hey, I knew my Pirates were epically pathetic in the '90s and Aughts (Twenty straight losing seasons, y'all! Nobody's EVER done that!). But I didn't know they were also epically strange.  I mean, seriously, bows and arrows? Lloyd McClendon? Randall Simon and Nyjer Morgan?

 

These were some legends, man. These were giants among ginormous losers.

 

Remember when McClendon, the nutso manager who averaged 96.8 losses per season between 2001 and 2005? Remember when he got thrown out of a game and stole first base?

 

No, really. He stole first base.

 

Or how about Simon? Remember that guy? First player in MLB history, probably, to beat up a guy dressed as a sausage with this bat. Interrupted the hell out of the sausage race in Milwaukee that day, it goes without saying.

 

And then there was Morgan, who adopted an alias named Tony Plush. Seven flavors of crazy. Hit a walkoff home run and didn't realize it was a walkoff home run. Used to take dumps in Gatorade bottles.

 

I'd almost forgotten about all that. And I never knew about the bow-and-arrow thing, bored players in the dregs of another crap season showing up with their hunting bows and shooting arrows around PNC Park before games. One guy even got pissed at the clubhouse TV one day and took it out with an arrow.

 

You go an entire decade without finishing within ten games of .500 in any season, stuff will happen.

 

And the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune will fly.