4/26 From the 1950’s Through the 1990’s: Let's Make A Deal; Opening Day Embarrassment; Game Stories; HBD Sean, Francisco & Curtis

• 1958 - With Pittsburgh and Cincinnati knotted 4-4 at Crosley Field heading into the eighth, Bill Mazeroski took over. First, he drilled an eighth-inning solo shot to put the Pirates on top, then his three-run bomb in the top of the ninth sealed the deal, 8-4. It was the first of eight multi-homer games in his career, with his next coming less than a month later on May 10th. 1958 was also the year Maz earned his first of seven All-Star spots. Billy’s heroics gave Don Gross the win after he spun four innings of one-hit relief, with Roberto Clemente, Bob Skinner and Ted Kluszewski adding three hits apiece to aid the cause. 

Billy Maz - 1958 Topps

• 1961 - IF Curtis Wilkerson was born in Petersburg, Virginia. Wilkerson spent 11 years in the show as mainly a bench guy, getting into 85 games for the Pirates in 1991 and hitting .188. After he retired, he managed for three years in the Rangers system and then three more years (1999-2001) for the Buccaneers squads in Williamsport and Lynchburg. He closed out his skipper career in 2012 with an indie club. 
• 1972 - RHP Francisco Cordova was born in Cerro Azul, Mexico. He spent his five year MLB career (1996-2000) as a Pirate, first as a reliever who notched 12 saves in his rookie year before becoming a starter. His slash was 42-47-12/3.96. He was part of one of the great Pirate moments on July 12th, 1997 at a sold out Three Rivers Stadium when he pitched nine innings of a combined 10-inning no-hitter, with Ricardo Rincón closing it out. The Pirates won the game on a three-run, pinch hit home run in the bottom of the 10th by Mark Smith. 
• 1978 - Ed Ott hit an 11th-inning home run at Shea Stadium to give the Bucs and Bert Blyleven, who pitched a complete game six-hitter, a 1-0 win. It took 35 years for another Pirate, Neil Walker, to homer for the only run in a Bucco extra inning victory. 
• 1980 - The Pirates scored five times in the first inning and cruised to a 9-2 win over the Cubs at Wrigley Field. Pittsburgh pounded out 17 hits, led by three apiece from Mike Easler and Dave Parker. John Candelaria went the distance, allowing two runs on eight hits as the Pirates split a brief two game series with Chicago. 
• 1985 - Utilityman Sean Rodriguez was born in Miami. In his career, S-Rod has played every position but pitcher and catcher. The Bucs traded for him during the 2014 off season and he played around the field for Pittsburgh. He was signed up again for 2016 after hitting .246 and playing six different spots in 2015. The super-sub had a super year, batting .270 w/18 HR and turned that into a nice FA deal with Atlanta. He missed much of the 2017 campaign due to a shoulder injury suffered in an off-season car accident and returned to the Bucs via the trade route in August. He’s now with Miami. 

S-Rod - 2018 photo/Pittsburgh Pirates

• 1995 - 34,841 fans at TRS disrupted a delayed Opening Day by throwqqing whatever was handy (mainly giveaway day Bucco pennants) on the field to show their displeasure with the freshly resolved player’s strike and some shoddy play by the Bucs. The game was delayed for 17 minutes until the announcer told the unruly crowd that the contest was about to be forfeited. It might as well have been; Montreal won the game 6-2, chasing Jon Leiber in the fifth. The team was lucky they weren’t wrapped in Jolly Rogers and tossed overboard after one of the worse innings in their history. Going into that fateful frame, it was a 1-1 game between Pittsburgh and Montreal before the floodgates opened. There were two outs, Expos on the corners (the runner on first reached when his right side, shoulda-been inning-ending nubber was fielded but nobody covered the sack) and one run in when Roberto Kelly bled another soft roller, this one up the left side. 3B Jeff King flipped the ball into the outfield; RF Orlando Merced missed the mark on the throw home, and all three Montreal runners scored. Montreal added another run on a hit batter, single and wild pitch. Jason Christiansen added a throwing error to the pot before the Bucs got back into the dugout (and the ground crew picked up a field littered with pennants tossed by frustrated fans). So instead of being out of the inning, it ended up game, set and, match for Montreal, 6-2 winners. C Mark Parent told the Post Gazette’s Paul Meyer “That whole fifth inning was a fiasco. It was like Murphy’s Law.” 
• 1995 - As the Pirates were bungling away at the North Shore, Mayor Tom Murphy and Vince Sarni, chairman of the Pittsburgh Associates, left the Duquesne Club and announced that they had reached a framework to sell the Pirates and keep the team in Pittsburgh with Chambers Development Company chairman John Rangos, saying that an agreement could be reached within a week. They were wrong; the deal was never finalized and the PA held on to the team until selling it to the McClatchy group in 1996.