Why Pittsburgh remains my home plate
Thomas Wolfe was wrong. You can go home again. And when you do, you can feel as though you had never left. I’m not sure it’s true everywhere, but it is in Pittsburgh. I know, because it happened to me at the Pirates game last Sunday at PNC Park, when I stood on the mound to throw out a first pitch.
I am part of the first big wave of the Pittsburgh Diaspora: a fifth-generation Yinzer who left the city after college in the early 1970s because challenging job opportunities were few.
Close family ties remain, including my mother, Jean L. Fineman. But I pursued a career and built my own family in Washington, D.C.
Time and distance have given me perspective on Pittsburgh. I am fully aware that there are deep problems in the Tri-State area and that nostalgia and memory cloud clear-eyed realism.
And yet my appreciation has deepened for what the city offered in my youth and for what it has now become. I’ve traveled America and the world for decades, and I’ve concluded that there was no better place for a kid to grow up, and that the same may well be true today.
The scope and strength of Pittsburgh’s civic institutions, public and private, remain remarkable for a city of its size. Culturally and geographically, Pittsburgh is neither here nor there: not quite East, Midwest or South. It was and still is a region unto itself, with its own language to match.
We are united by a leveling spirit — Pittsburghers acknowledge, but don’t worship, big shots — and by an usagainst-the-world chip on our shoulders. If I have heard it once, I have heard it a thousand times: “If [name your sports star] were playing in New York, they’d be a bigger star than …”
The hills, valleys and bridges keep the neighborhoods intact (not always for the better), and the ethnic groups within them, and the clubs within the groups. My club at Allderdice High School, the Marquis (don’t laugh), was founded in the mid-1960s. Most of us don’t live in Pittsburgh, but we still are in touch almost daily via an email thread maintained by our former president. (I do the same with PNC’s Sy Holzer, a friend since elementary school.)
The gold-and-black thread that binds the Diaspora, of course, is sports. I find it amusing when TV announcers declare that the Steelers “travel well” to road games. Sure, present-day Pittsburghers invade other stadiums, but many if not most of those Steelers fans are expats who live in the away-game city.
When I was growing up, the Steelers were awful and baseball was still king. I basically grew up in Forbes Field. I knew every nook and cranny, every back stairway and many of the ushers, particularly “The Hook,” who worked down the third base line and let us sit in the boxes when he knew the paying patrons weren’t coming.
I knew all of the players, their stats, their hitting stances, swings and throwing motions.
Now the park is PNC, a wonderful, up-to-date remake of Forbes. I love it.
When I was asked months ago to throw out a first pitch (in a game against the Washington Nationals, of course), I was pretty nervous. I am well-enough known that I didn’t want to become a viral example of athletic ineptitude on YouTube.
I practiced a lot, but remained jittery when the public address announcer introduced me. Striding out onto the field, trying to look confident even though I wasn’t, I heard him say, “Let’s welcome Pittsburgh native …”
There was a smattering of applause, mostly, I am sure, from my family.
This Pittsburgh native stood on the mound and gazed around at the capacity crowd. Most of the fans weren’t paying attention, but even so I felt somehow (or imagined) that the 35,000 or so people there were on my side, or at least not eager to see me embarrass myself.
That calmed me down. I took a deep breath and threw the pitch. I got it to the plate. It wasn’t Gerrit Cole, but it was fine. And why not? I was throwing at home.