Bucco Ball @buccoball - Bluesky Profile

Glasnow being bailed out by the umps in an attempt to embarrass Neal Huntington

28.10.2025 00:34 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Imagine if somehow, by the grace of God, the Pirates won the NL pennant, and the trophy presentation kicks off with Bob Nutting shuffling to center stage wearing the world’s baggiest khakis and says “this is a dream come true”

21.10.2025 03:19 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 3 📌 1

That’s a gut punch for Seattle

21.10.2025 03:04 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Yeah this is gonna be a Kano heart-rip fatality

21.10.2025 02:29 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

We’re about to witness one team suffer its worst loss in franchise history

20.10.2025 22:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1

Roberts should put Kershaw in

18.10.2025 03:02 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The announcement that he’s signing with the Dodgers mid-championship parade is gonna go crazy

15.10.2025 13:52 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

That’s the most insane double play I’ve ever seen

14.10.2025 01:08 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

2025 in Review: Wasting Time I was a Pirate fan all my life, and then I wasn’t. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I never really stopped supporting the Pirates. I still went to games. I still occasionally checked the…

I have followed the Bucs closely for most of my life. I have written about them almost daily for the past 5 years. But after a terrible 2025 season and a press conference on Monday that only drove home the team's complacency, I feel like I'm wasting my time buccoball.wordpress.com/2025/10/01/2...

01.10.2025 11:46 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

You’re killing it @pirates.com 💪💪💪

30.09.2025 21:42 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0

Bucco Ball’s Personal Postseason Rooting Rankings:

Guardians (wife’s team)
Mariners
Blue Jays
Padres
Brewers
Tigers
Phillies

Getting run over by a bus

Dodgers
Red Sox
Yankees
Reds

Bringing back your front office for a 7th year after 6 losing seasons

Cubs

30.09.2025 13:40 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 1

The Bucco Ball 2025 Minor League Recap During the early years of the rebuild, the minor leagues were the only place to find solace as a Pirates fan. The games being played by the actual major-league team were dull and often depressing; …

Last week I recapped the Pirates' farm system, which overall had a much better year than the parent club.

My look at the best and most disappointing performances from the minor leagues: buccoball.wordpress.com/2025/09/23/t...

30.09.2025 11:46 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

29.09.2025 20:07 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

“We need to shift our focus to delivering wins” then what the hell HAVE you been focusing on for the past several years??

29.09.2025 17:13 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Love the implication that they weren’t focusing on wins previously

29.09.2025 17:10 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

*than. I’m also off my game

29.09.2025 17:06 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Beautiful timing on this, by the way. No better time to announce you’re keeping the manager - and also the GM - then hours after the city’s main newspaper publishes a devastating article about how inept your organization is

29.09.2025 16:59 — 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

Game 162: Pirates 1 Braves 4 Major League Baseball's regular season came to an end on Sunday, which meant that — for the tenth year in a row — the Pirates' season also came to an end. The finale in Atlanta was a microcosm of the previous 161 contests the Bucs had stumbled through over the preceding six months. Once again, the Pirates got a pretty good effort from their starting pitcher, who on Sunday was Johan Oviedo; after giving up a titanic 2-run homer to Ronald Acuña Jr.

The end of the baseball season used to be a bittersweet feeling for me. Not anymore. I was glad to see the 2025 season come to an end yesterday.

Farewell to one of the worst seasons of Pirates baseball in my lifetime

29.09.2025 11:50 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Since Ben Cherington was hired by the Pirates after the 2019 season, every team in the NL Central has reached the postseason at least twice — except, of course, for the Pirates.

28.09.2025 22:02 — 👍 8 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0

Well, that was a undoubtedly a season of Pirates baseball.

I'll have my final recap for you tomorrow morning, and a longer post on my thoughts on the season later this week.

Thanks for following along. Talking ball with you all was just about the only good thing this year

28.09.2025 21:45 — 👍 7 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Game 161: Pirates 3 Braves 1 I didn't watch Saturday night's game, and neither did you. But I wasn't surprised to check the box score this morning and see that Bubba Chandler had another fantastic start against a pretty good Atlanta lineup. Pitching in his home state for the first time, Chandler's only blip on Saturday was a leadoff triple he allowed to open the 2nd — and some of the credit for that also belongs to Jack Suwinski, who played the ball off the wall about as badly as one could.

Since it's halftime, you have a minute to read my brief recap of Bubba Chandler's last start of the season

28.09.2025 15:05 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

I’d be doing backflips if they signed Lane Thomas

27.09.2025 18:57 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Game 160: Pirates 9 Braves 3 I've written a lot recently about Andrew McCutchen — about whether this is his final year as a Pirate, and what he meant to the franchise if it is. Cutch's comments to the media of late do not sound like they are coming from a player who is happy with the current state of things. He's mentioned several times that he wants to win in 2026, which likely will be his final season in the majors, and if that's the case he's probably better off going anywhere other than Pittsburgh.

Friday night was probably Mitch Keller's last game as a Pirate. It bummed me out.

27.09.2025 13:40 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1

Apparently Justin Wilson is still pitching (he just gave up a grand slam to Toronto)

26.09.2025 00:48 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Game 158: Pirates 4 Reds 3 Do you know what kind of player Paul Skenes is? After Wednesday night's game, the media gathered around Skenes' locker to ask him about his start in Cincinnati, which will presumably be his last appearance of the 2025 campaign. Skenes entered the day with an ERA a hair over 2.00; he needed 4 scoreless innings of work on Wednesday to get his ERA under that mark.

To watch Skenes pitch is to watch a player that has seemingly mastered the game of baseball, and we got to see that one last time on Wednesday

25.09.2025 12:11 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Game 157: Pirates 4 Reds 2 As a fan of a team once again playing out the string of another lost season, there really isn't much reason to look forward to late September baseball unless there's a chance to ruin someone else's fun. The Pirates have a prime opportunity to do that this week in Cincinnati. The Reds are probably the closest thing the Pirates have to a "rival," even if they still rank behind "spending money" and "Bob Nutting." Both teams have a similar history — powerhouses in the 70s and early 90s, long periods of incompetence since then — and have met in the playoffs more than any other two National League teams.

At this point in the season, there's no point in watching the Bucs unless there's a chance to ruin someone else's fun. The Pirates have a prime opportunity to do that this week in Cincinnati, and they got off to a good start on Tuesday.

24.09.2025 12:06 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Bucco Ball 2025 Minor League Recap During the early years of the rebuild, the minor leagues were the only place to find solace as a Pirates fan. The games being played by the actual major-league team were dull and often depressing; the Bucs lost a lot, and those roster were comprised of players who would never go on to accomplish anything in Pittsburgh (or anywhere else, really).

After 6 years of losing in the majors, it's hard to take solace in the farm system. But the Pirates got some big performances down on the farm this summer, including from the newly-minted top prospect in all of baseball. My MiLB year-end round-up:

23.09.2025 11:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Game 156: Athletics 0 Pirates 11 On Sunday, the Pirates played perhaps their most complete game of the year. Four different pitchers combined to shut out the A's — with Mike Burrows and Carmen Mlodzinski shouldering most of the load — while Jared Triolo continued his late season surge by picking up 4 hits, including a double and a home run. It should have been a satisfying way to close out the home schedule, where the Bucs compiled a 44-37 record.

I hope that Cutch's last game in Pittsburgh wasn't Sunday, playing in front of a mostly-empty ballpark while most of the region is watching the Steelers, at the end of another losing season.

22.09.2025 11:55 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Game 155: Athletics 0 Pirates 2 After a disastrous start against the Milwaukee Brewers a couple of weeks ago, Bubba Chandler bounced back with a great start against the Washington Nationals last weekend. But the Nats are an atrocious team, one of the few organizations in baseball in a worse position than the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Athletics presented more of a challenge. The A's aren't in a much better spot than either the Pirates or Nationals, especially when you consider that they'll be playing in a minor-league ballpark for the foreseeable future, but they do have a pretty good offense.

This A's lineup is not an easy task for a pitcher, but Bubba Chandler sliced through them anyway

21.09.2025 14:22 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Game 154: Athletics 4 Pirates 3 I was too busy living life to watch the game on Friday night, but I was able to see the fireworks from where I was sitting outside. It looked like a good display, as the post-game fireworks usually are. Maybe the Pirates should give up this whole baseball thing and just use PNC Park as an amphitheater for firework shows — although come to think of it, that's pretty much what it is now.

Well, the fireworks looked nice.

20.09.2025 14:45 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

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