Look, I know we all love a good story and this year’s Pittsburgh Pirates are certainly that since after years and years of penny pinching and trading away talent for nothing, but c’mon this is not a team the entire nation should be rallying over and here is why:

Pittsburgh Major Sports Championships in Last 20 years:

• Penguins – 3
• Steelers – 2

Total Championships for Pittsburgh’s 3 major sports teams (baseball, hockey, football) = 16

That’s right, I’m not rooting for the Pirates soley because Pittsburgh fans are spoiled with the success of their other teams and need to have this one loser of a team stay a loser just so they can experience some of what the rest of America feels on a regular basis (especially this Washington DC sports fan).  Bitter much?  YOU BET I AM!

This is not rooting for some loveable loser of a team for a city that hasn’t won anything. No, this is rooting for a loser of a team that used to be a winner of a team like 40 years ago and that resides in a city of other consistent sports champions. The Penguins and the Steelers both won championships in the same year in 2008 for crying out loud. This is not a city we can or should all rally behind, America should be as bitter towards them as we are New York and Boston.

Why isn’t everyone rooting this hard for the Milwaukee Brewers? This is a baseball team that has never won a World Series. That is an underdog team you we should be getting behind right there. The last real championship this city has celebrated was in 1971 when the Bucks won the NBA championship, that is, unless you count the Packers as a Milwaukee team, which means they last celebrated a championship last year.

That Packers’ Super Bowl win definitely hurts their case, but only just a little bit.  The fact alone that the Brewers have never won anything, ever, is reason enough that the Brewers should be the underdog team that everyone should be rooting for this season and NOT the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Both cities are blue collar, both cities have awesome ballparks their teams play in, both cities have excellent beer options to choose from but one city is a bit more deserving of America’s fandom than the other. I say, root for Milwaukee this MLB season if you have to choose one underdog loser of a team to root for, not the Pirates! America loves an underdog and the Brewers are the real underdog here.

For the first time in what feels like forever (20 years, to be exact), people are talking about the Pittsburgh Pirates. At 44-41 (as of last night), the Bucs are a game out of first place and won’t be selling off players at the trade deadline. They’ve sold out PNC three nights in a row and boast one of the game’s best young players in Andrew McCutchen. On top of that, they’ve re-stocked a farm system that was once the model for poor player development. As the Pirates celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1971 title team, could this be the year the Pirates get back to the playoffs?

In a word, “no.”

There’s a lot to like about the Pirates’ (relatively) strong first half, but if you look a little deeper, one begins to doubt if they can keep it up.  Sure, the pitching has been great and their division is terribly weak, but there’s a pretty significant case against them:

Throughout the course of a long season, it’s easy to take a feel-good story like Pittsburgh’s and make it a cheap “warm and fuzzy,” but it’s just not right. Bottom line: the Pirates are a great story. Fan bases like Pittsburgh’s deserve a winner — and they’ll get one. Just probably not this year.