Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Driving away from New York City, there is a tension knotted between your shoulders that unwinds, and you don’t even realize it was there until it’s leaving. There is a slight chill in the air, the first hint that this is actually the end of the summer in what has been a very warm September. There are a few leaves changing colors (red and yellow) near the tops of the Allegheny Mountains, which are covered thickly with trees, but farther down everything is still green.

As we drive past Hershey, PA, my father tries to stump me by asking if I remember what notable sports event happened in Hershey. “Wilt’s 100?” I offer. He’s mildly surprised that I knew this. I’m not bad with sports trivia and I have a good memory, but I am not in a league with my older brother and my father, whose minds in this regard are encyclopedic. My father continues talking about the early days of the NBA, telling me that in the old days he would go and watch NBA doubleheaders -- not the baseball sort where each team plays twice, but with four teams in one venue. I can’t imagine what this would have been like since I grew up in the Jordan era, and I can’t think of anything new these days that would be comparable to the beginning of the NBA.

Really, it has not begun to feel like autumn at all this trip until we reach Pittsburgh. Here it starts to because our hotel is on the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) campus, and as we navigate the hills and bridges and turns of Pittsburgh in mid-afternoon, there are students everywhere. College campuses in September have a unique energy, and I miss it. It’s not so much that I’d like to go back as that I would like to go back as a 17 year old again.

“The Pirates are more of a meteor kind of team,” my father tells me: “occasionally they flash, but a lot of times it’s periods of doldrums.” Still, Bill Mazeroski hit the most famous homerun in World Series History in 1960 at Forbes Field, in Pittsburgh, just a few blocks from our hotel. Maz is also known as perhaps the greatest second baseman at turning the double play who ever played, but in a single swing, in the bottom of the ninth, he lifted the Pirates over the New York Yankees by a score of 9 to 7 with a homerun off Ralph Terry and achieved supreme notoriety for eternity. God bless him, and if I was Saint Peter I would give him a hearty handshake as I welcomed in this vanquisher. My father remembers, “That is the strangest World Series composite box because if you look, the Yankees outscore the Pirates by a considerable amount for the series and lose 4 to 3.”

The site where Forbes Field sat has been swallowed by the Pitt campus, but there is a section of the old brick wall left standing, and we visit this site. It’s red bricks and ivy, with 436 and 462 markers still declaring the distance of what it would take to hit a homerun. A police officer on the corner helps us find the spot where the ball hit by Mazeroski actually cleared the wall, a little ways over from the surviving section and where there is a little plaque in the sidewalk marking the spot. The old home plate is also still in the ground, visible now through glass on the floor in the entrance area of a lecture hall. The Pittsburgh Pirates have not accomplished their fair share of grandeur, but there were some moments, and it’s nice that someone took the time to enshrine a tiny bit of Forbes Field.

“Every so often the Pirates make a run, but they don’t last long and then they fade again,” my father tells me. “They had a good team in ’79, after Clemente, with Willie Stargell and Dock Ellis, Bert Blyleven, John Candaleria, and Bruce Kison. They were wearing the black and yellow unis.” My father is smiling as he remembers these uniforms. “Pittsburgh is another working class city, with the steel mills and all of that. If you asked anyone 3 places you wanna visit, it wouldn’t be on anybody’s list.”

A little later, we catch a bus from the Pitt campus to downtown, and it drops us off just a few blocks from PNC Park. The streets of Pittsburgh are not at all orderly I notice as we ride south and then west and then north on Fifth Ave., and we are lucky that the driver helps us figure out when to exit and points out where to pick up the return bus. I remember Ron Santo telling Pat Hughes one broadcast that Pittsburgh has more bridges than any city in the world.

We walk over to the street behind the right field entrance, and then over onto the Roberto Clemente bridge, a gorgeous yellow bridge spanning the Allegheny river from the heart of downtown across to the north, where PNC Park is set near the edge of the river. There are not many people hurrying to get in. The sun is setting farther down the Allegheny, where it meets the Monongahela to begin the Ohio river. The Monongahela is the only river in America that runs almost entirely north, and the scene with the rivers and the bridges and downtown skyscrapers is just as picturesque as it gets these days. Pittsburgh might not have been on anyone’s list to visit, and maybe it still isn’t on most, but if that’s the case then it’s something of a hidden gem because few American cities can boast a scene this fine. I have seen little in terms of residential areas -- and the few we passed on the bus did not look welcoming -- but the downtown itself is clean and attractive, and it has the energy of a city that knows it is no longer prominent but is nonetheless unwilling to deteriorate as its stature declines.

On the Clemente bridge, my father buys $27 box seats from a lounging scalper for $20. It is the most nonchalant scalping transaction I have ever witnessed. Demand for Pirates tickets is low, and besides being a weeknight, the Pirates are awful this year once again. They’ve suffered injuries without enough resources to weather them, but even if they had been healthy they would have been hard pressed to shoot for .500. They just don’t have the talent, although there are ex-Pirates starring throughout the league that Pittsburgh traded in order to defray salary costs.

PNC Park, however, is as good as it gets, and what I mean is that I cannot think of a single thing they might have done to improve it. Even the ramp to the upper deck in left field is lined with sharp purple lights. There is no sense at all of this being merely a functional concrete structure, and even the seats are a unique shade of navy blue. Camden Yards still gets points for being a ballpark like this first, but immediately I decide that PNC Park is probably the nicest ballpark in which I’ve ever attended a game. My father thinks that the new ones in San Francisco and San Diego are there with it in quality, but concedes that it would be hard to separate them up there at the top. Our seats are good, about 25 rows up from the Pirates dugout on the third base side. The view of the Pittsburgh skyline above right-center field is dazzling as the sun sets and the buildings light up.

The game obviously means nothing to Pittsburgh, but it is important to the Astros, who are leading by a slim margin in the Wild Card standings. Andy Pettitte is starting for Houston, and he has been the best pitcher in the National League for the second half of the season. On the other side, a rookie named Gorzelanny is making his first major league start. The game begins in front of a very sparse crowd -- well under 10,000 for sure -- at a temperature of 71 degrees. The rookie allows 5 runs despite fine defensive plays by Sanchez at second and the Pittsburgh All-Star, Jason Bay, in center field. Meanwhile, Pettitte makes do with less than his best (his curveball wasn’t working) and leaves in the 6th inning with a safe lead. The Astros win 7 to 4, as the Pirates leave 12 men on base. They announce a paid attendance of 12,927, but by the 9th inning the crowd has fizzled to perhaps 1,000. I guess the nice way to spin it is that we were able to enjoy the ambience of PNC Park in tranquility. My father chats with the bus driver on our ride back to the Pitt campus area, and when my dad mentions how nice PNC Park is the man retorts, “Yep, and we’re all still paying for it.”

We sleep well, and contrasting our room in Manhattan my father tells me at breakfast, “Man those pillows were nice last night.” It’s foggy in patches as we wind our way to the highway, and cool. It’s the last day of summer, and I wear shorts and sandals to feel a little bit cold on purpose, knowing that I’ll soon be back in Texas. I remark that this is the first day in nine that we will not see a game. “Yeah,” my father answers, “but it will be good to see mom.” He misses her.

We stop to get gas, and it occurs to me that we did not see a single gas station anywhere we visited on the island of Manhattan, which, after a calm night at PNC Park, already feels like a distant time ago.