Baseball Fan Interviews: Walt McGough

For my story, “Cheering Out of a Suitcase,” featured in the May edition of Norman Einstein’s, I emailed a few people who have moved around the country to discuss their relationships with their hometown teams. Since I wasn’t able to use their complete interviews in the story, I thought I’d share their full insights here. First up, Walt McGough.



Walt McGough is a Boston- and Chicago-based playwright. He co-founded the Sideshow Theatre Company in Chicago, and also works closely with Chicago Dramatists and The Boston Playwrights Theatre.

Where are you from? Where are you living now?
I grew up in Pittsburgh, and the last few years I’ve moved around a fair amount. I went to college at the University of Virginia, and after that I moved out to Chicago for three years to work in theatre and start a company with some friends. I’m currently in Boston, getting my MFA.

What team did you follow?
The Pittsburgh Pirates: the best minor-league team in major-league baseball.

What made you a fan?
Two words: Doug Drabek. I went to a bunch of games with my dad growing up, and we somehow got tickets to Game 5 of the NLCS against the Reds in 1990. I had an airbrushed t-shirt with Doug Drabek’s face on it (it was a giveaway) and I remember both loving it and, even at the age of six, thinking he looked completely ridiculous. They won that game in a nail-biter, and even though they lost the next game and were knocked out, I remember being in the stands and everybody just holding their breath until the last double play, when the whole crowd went absolutely crazy.

Of course, shortly after that everybody got traded and the dark ages began, and I started the long adolescent process of discovering that I was terrible at baseball myself (I was the scorekeeper in eight grade; that was the low point), so for a while I fell out of fandom a bit. But I always loved baseball, and right around college I found myself following the Pirates really closely again, online.How do you follow your team now?
I don’t have a lot of basis for this, since I don’t read a whole lot of other coverage, but I firmly believe that the Pirates have one of the greatest sports beat writers in the world:Dejan Kovacevic. I just can’t picture it getting any better. He writes for the Post-Gazette, and has this wealth of constantly thorough, fair-minded, and interesting coverage on all aspects of the team. It’s the perfect blend of practicality but also hope for the future: he’s not claiming that we’ll win a pennant any time soon, but he also exerts a huge amount of effort to get to know each of the players individually. Which is great, because they’re all these young, excited, really kind of lovable guys, and you get invested in them through the coverage and really want to see them do well.

So I read Kovacevic pretty much every morning, from Spring Break on through the rest of the season. The blog is going behind the newspaper’s pay wall soon, I think, but I’ll probably shell out the money just because it’s become such a routine for me.

In addition to that, Major League Baseball released an iPhone app last year that lets you listen to the live broadcast of any game you want on your phone, with whichever broadcast team, and I listen to the Pittsburgh broadcasts of the games whenever I get a second. It’s great to have, since the Pirates don’t get broadcast on TV much here, and it’s also just a great thing to have going in the background of whatever I’m doing around the house.

Has moving away altered your perception of your team and/or city in any way?
It has made me realize, on a lot of levels, just how much I love Pittsburgh and how proud I am to be from there, even though it’s a long shot that I’ll ever move back, since I work in theatre and it currently is a tougher city to make a living doing theatre in. And being gone, the sports are the easiest way to stay connected. It’s such a gigantic sports town, and it’s also a city that everybody tends to grow up in, leave when they’re twenty, and come back to ten years later, when they have families. As a result, all the major teams have these rabid, young fanbases in every city across the country; I have yet to encounter any metropolitan area without at least three Steelers bars.

But in a weird way, the Pirates being so awful for so long makes it easier for me to be a fan of them when I’m abroad. The Steelers and Penguins are awesome, and because of that people tend to assume that you’re a bandwagon fan if you’re wearing a Heath Miller jersey in the middle of Boston. It’s like, “Oh, yeah. Of course you like the Steelers. How predictable.” But with the Pirates, there’s a bit more of a die-hard element to it. You know the team, the players, you wear the hat, and it’s not like you’re reaping a whole lot of benefits for it in return, so you’re kind of staking a much stronger claim on the hometown: “Yes, I’m from Pittsburgh. And you can tell I really love it, because I root for their terrible baseball team.”

And then, of course, if the unthinkable happens and we wind up making a run of it one season, it’ll be that much sweeter because I’ll have been with it the whole time. I guess it’s kind of a weird, sports-related hipsterism on my part.

Have you adopted the team of your new city? Why/why not?
Nope. When I was in Chicago I lived in Cubs territory, but they were in our division and also had this nasty habit of absolutely destroying the Pirates every time they played. (I was listening on my iPhone last season when they scored 10 runs off of Charlie Morton in one inning; it was rough.)

And now that I’m in Boston, I guess it’s just too easy to be a Sox fan. They’re good, they’ve got the market, they’ve got the money; they’re everything that I hate and envy, all in one package. It’s such a complete no-brainer to root for them that it sort of comes back around and is impossible for me to do so. I guess I’m just a masochist at heart; I’ve been bred that way over the last 17 seasons.

Other thoughts:
- Drabek aside, my favorite live-game moment might have actually been last summer: I went home to visit and my Dad and I spent an awesome evening watching the Pirates unexpectedly clobber some other team at PNC. The high point was watching Garrett Jones, who’s currently my favorite player and was just starting to emerge out of nowhere. Dejan Kovacevic had begun to jokingly refer to him as “The Legend” in the daily column, which I told my Dad about on the way to the game, and then Jones had some ridiculous night, 3-for-4 or something and he almost hit the cycle, and I looked like a genius because I’d been talking him up. And it was just really great getting to sit there and watch this team I’d followed so closely from a distance, playing live in a gorgeous ballpark, with my Dad, and have them actually win one.

- The new ballpark is amazing. Simply, flat out amazing, and is definitely one of the reasons I started to follow more closely when I left. Having a nice park to go to makes it more of an event to look forward to, and helps insure that, if I go home during the summer, catching a game is definitely on the agenda. (It also employed my sister for a summer: she was on the hospitality staff. Didn’t get free tickets, though, which was a bummer.) Now if we can just build up the team that it deserves.