Oct 2, 2020 By Jim Downey, For The Greene County Messenger 4 min read

The Pittsburgh Pirates’ 2020 season mercifully came to a close Sunday with an 8-6 loss to the playoff-bound Cleveland Indians.

The Pirates again allowed a lead — this time it was 6-2 in the sixth inning — to slip away and waste a decent pitching performance with a dreadful showing by the bullpen.

The Buccos finished the worst record in baseball, 19-41, for a .317 winning percentage under rookie manager Derek Sheldon. The Pirates had a slightly better record last year at 69-93 (.416).

The programmers for video games got it right, too, because the Video Game Bucs finished out the full season with a 57-105 record for a .352 winning percentage. They trailed Milwaukee by 38 games in the NL Central basement.

The notion for Video Game Bucs came from the need to get together some local copy for the sports page with the elimination of the entire spring sport seasons and the doubt surrounding the viability of playing any professional sport in the specter of the pandemic created by COVID-19.

And, hopefully, provide a bit of normalcy, albeit with a computer game, of something familiar to local sports fans and, hopefully, provide a bit of entertainment along the way.

So, I asked my nephew Brian Lohr about the what-fors and how-tos of completing such a task, since I’m only a casual video game performer.

(I did “move forward” with the purchase of a new gaming system — a PlayStation — after I was browbeat by the nephews and my niece’s husband about my archaic system. I must say the new PGA golf game is wonderful. If I could only play (and putt with that grid on the green) with actual clubs as well as I do with my thumb!)

Brian was transitioning into figuring out how to handle his Pre-K Counts teaching duties online at the time, but he figured it out for me, allowing the game to play itself.

Ergo, the introduction to the Video Game Bucs’ stories: “Following is an update of the Pittsburgh Pirates 2020 baseball season as played on PlayStation Franchise Mode under the guidance of Brian Lohr for the Herald-Standard …”

Brian didn’t want to have any interference, for positive or negative, by actually playing, so the machine was set to run on its own while he did his work or put in a few miles running.

He’d take screen shots of the linescore, box scores, etc., and email the results to me, in a similar manner to the method many of our local softball and baseball coaches do. Plus, writing the game roundups and typing up the linescores kept me used to doing so. (It prepped me for the shortened FCBL season.)

The Video Game Bucs also closed with a season-ending loss, 6-1, to the Cincinnati Reds. The final play of the video season was a diving catch by the Reds’ right fielder on a sinking line drive hit by Gregory Polanco.

Brian sent along a video of the play with the attached observation, “This is the last play of the Pirates season. What a way to end it. It was a typical long, drawn-out season, even through simulation, lol.”

Here’s how the playoffs played out:

National League: Cincinnati defeated Colorado in the wild-card game; Los Angeles swept the Reds, 3-0, and Washington edged the Brewers, 3-2, in the NLDS, and the Dodgers beat Milwaukee in the NLCS, 4-1.

American League: The Los Angeles Angels beat Boston in the wild-card game; Cleveland edged the Angels, 3-2, and Houston swept the Yankees, 3-0, in the ALDS, and Cleveland won the ALCS over Houston, 4-2.

World Series: Los Angeles Dodgers 4, Cleveland Indians 2 (Poor Cleveland, can’t even win in the virtual world.)

Washington’s Max Scherzer was the NL MVP and Cy Young Award winner with a 19-3 record, an ERA of 3.06 and 266 strikeouts. The Reds’ Eugenio Suarez (50 HR, 124 RBI) was the MVP runner-up, and teammate Luis Castillo was second in the Cy Young voting with a 19-6 record, 2.74 ERA and 248 strikeouts. The Dodgers’ Mookie Betts won the NL batting title with a .348 average. He also hit 39 home runs and had 110 RBI.

Well, 2020 has been quite a year so far, hasn’t it? For better or worse, here’s hoping for an actual Pirates season in 2021. For older folks like me, video games are ok every so often, but they’re not quite as good as the real thing (even when the real thing isn’t quite as good.)