I think that Pittsburgh has always leaned more towards it’s football than anything else. Now that the Pens have won the cup again, there will be an upswing of hockey fans, but I think basically baseball crashed when that strike happened years ago. Yeah the Pirates suck anymore, but truth be told the Steelers didn’t recover a Super Bowl from 1979 until 2005. Yet the fans remained there. The Pens hadn’t had the Stanley Cup since 1992. The fans held out. When you talk about the Cubs and the Yankees, they both have heavily loyal fans…they are baseball towns. Pittsburgh is a football town. The focus is just there. I would love to see the Pirates make something of themselves and get another World Series title, but (and this is strictly my opinion) baseball just isn’t as exciting as football or hockey. They have much more physical action.
pittsburgh wasnt always a football town. pittsburgh was a baseball town until the steelers finally won. the whole country was a baseball country. the cubs and yanks also are in LARGE cities…its a numbers and percentages game.
basketball? haha…the NBA is struggling…pittsburgh would never go for hoops. The interest is just no there to sustain a team. arena football would do better than the NBA.
Yay a basketball team, so the ghetto fanbase can jump on cars like they did in LA…
Not.
No, it really isn’t.
The Pirates insisted that they would be competitve if they got a new venue. Well, they got it. STill waiting for that competitive team we were promised.
Some excerpts from a posting on sportscribe.net. I did not fact check the numbers, but found them believable. I think what this guy is writing reflects the feelings of a lot of the people in Pittsburgh
http://sportsscribes.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=280:do-the-pirates-still-belong-in-pittsburgh&catid=39:mlb-news&Itemid=101
While the Pirates may not annually generate the amount of revenue earned by teams such as Boston and New York, they also spend a far smaller percentage of their total revenue on payroll than most other teams.
In 2006, the Pirates ranked 28th in the league in the amount of total revenue spent on payroll at 43%. Comparably, the Yankees ranked third at 74% and the Red Sox were tied with Houston for eighth at 60%..Thanks in part to revenue sharing money received from teams like the Yankees and Red Sox; the Pirates were reportedly among the most successful teams in the league on the balance sheet with a profit of around $34 million during 2005-2006.
In 2001, the Pirates had a team payroll of $57 million. In 2008, the payroll was $48 million, after being just $38 million in 2005.Every time an All-Star caliber player like McLouth, Benson, Jason Kendall, Aramis Ramirez, Brian Giles, Xavier Nady and Jason Bay starts to show promise, the Pirates quickly trade the player for additional prospects.
The standard line is that they are building for the future, but the reality is that the player had become too expensive for the Pirates’ small salary budget.In 2009, the Pirates posted a winning record in April (11-10) for the first time since 2002 and hopes were high that this might be the season when they finally started playing for today, instead of tomorrow
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a new venue implies people fill the place!!! thats the catch 22… people want them to be good but wont go till they are…they cant make money and get good till people come. cleveland go jacobs field and it was sold out for the first 8 or 9 years!
the pirates may have made more profit but the overall pictures doesnt allow them to take the same risks that boston and new york can. if the pirates spent every penny on the team they’d be somewhere around the 65 mill mark…thats still not even half of some teams so how would that be a smart business move? you all do know sports is a business, right? the pirates know they cant get sustained fan support no matter what they do.