Stealing First Base is a Pittsburgh Pirates blog operated by me, Nate Rose.
I’ve written in various blogs before. I started out at the now defunct Sixty Feet, Six Inches, a blog about sports in general. The blog disbanded when all of the writers decided to focus on other projects. (If you’re interested or remember me from SFSI, Peter is now maintaining a hockey blog called Hoosier Hockey and Thomas is maintaining a Mets blog called Thus Spoke Keith Hernandez. Both of them are quality writers and you should check out their sites.)
After Sixty Feet, Six Inches I wrote on Bleacher Report about the Pirates for a while until I attracted the attention of Brad Stewart from the FanHuddle network, and from then until the start of this blog I maintained Pirates Public. I left FanHuddle due to unresolved technical issues and a few other reasons that I feel it would be unprofessional to discuss in the public forum, and Cory Humes from Titletahn graciously offered to host me at my new home, Stealing First Base.
The name, for the uninitiated, comes from a June 26th, 2001 game against the Brewers. Former Pirates catcher Jason Kendall was called out at first base on a close play, and former manager Lloyd McClendon proceeded to have one of the most memorable angry manager tirades of all time, getting himself ejected. After the ejection, he picked up first base from the playing field, threw it into the dugout, and walked off. The Pirates later rallied to win in extra innings, and mounted the base on the dugout wall in memoriam of the incident. And why shouldn’t they? McClendon had succeeded in doing what nobody before him had: he had stolen first base.
