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May 31, 2008

Blogging for Bucs

Team a loser, blog is a winner

By Patrick W. Connelly

HERMITAGE — With just more than a month in baseball’s record books, the Pittsburgh Pirates already appear well on their way to a 16th-straight losing season.

Despite the struggles, a Hermitage man isn’t willing to write the team off just yet. Instead, he writes them up.

Patrick Lackey, 23, uses his Internet blog to chronicle the franchise that has had far more downs than ups the past decade.

“It’s really taken off beyond anything I ever expected,” he said.

Lackey started the blog in 2005 as a way to share his opinions, musings and ideas to improve the team with his friends and family.

The blog — “Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke?” — attracts more than 900 visits each day from Pirate fans from around the region, nation and globe, he said.

A blog, short for “Web log,” is a regularly updated Web site usually devoted to news or commentary on a particular subject.

More than 112 million blogs worldwide on just about every topic you can think of were tracked in a 2007 census by Technorati, a blog search engine.

Sports blogs, especially those like Lackey’s journaling the seasons and day-to-day operations of teams across North America, have grown in popularity in recent years.

WHYGAVS, as Lackey’s faithful have nicknamed the blog, has received more than 500,000 visitors.

“I really didn’t know what I was doing when I started,” Lackey said.

Finishing his first year in a graduate biochemistry program at the University of North Carolina, he began writing the blog three years ago while attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

“The name has gotten a lot of attention,” said Lackey, who penned it after his favorite Pirate, a top player from the team’s early-1990s triumphs.

Lackey grew up playing baseball and attended 20 or 30 Pirate games a year while at Duquesne, he said.

Each day, he sets aside one or two hours in between classes, lab work and studying to update the site and interact with readers.

Finding time to keep the blog up to speed can sometimes be difficult but is a welcomed form of relaxation, he said.

“It’s a nice escape for me everyday,” he said.

In addition, Lackey blogs for America Online’s Fanhouse, where he gets paid to write about the Pirates and their divisional foes.

His work has also been featured on Yahoo and the Hardball Times, an online baseball magazine.

Advertisements on WHYGAVS bring Lackey some revenue, but not enough for him to consider blogging a full-time job, he said.

“I’m not out to make a fortune on the Internet or anything,” he added.

Sharing opinions of how Pittsburgh’s professional baseball franchise should be ran has become fodder for talk among fans in the drought of winning.

“There’s so many things with the team they have now that would have to go right for them to compete (with the National League’s best)” Lackey said.

Questions about a young, inexperienced pitching staff, inconsistent hitting and the lack of money being spent by the club’s owners all add up to “too many ifs,” he noted.

Changes in the franchise’s administration and a new focus on scouting Latin American players, although, are strides in the right direction., Lackey said.

“Unfortunately the last place you’re going to see those results (right now) is on the field,” he said.

The Pirates haven’t had a winning season since 1992 or won a league pennant in almost 30 years.

Friends often joke with him on his reasons and motivation in writing about such a woeful team, he said.

But as a lifelong fan, he said those allegiances to the Pirates won’t change.

Lackey’s blog is among five to 10 “good” ones started by fans about the team. His has even been written about in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“As long as I can I definitely want to keep it going,” he said.



(Visit’s Lackey’s blog online at www.whereisvanslyke.blogspot.com.)

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