Pittsburgh’s Bicentennial fireworks went off at 9:30 Saturday night on schedule, and Pirates manager Clint Hurdle had warned just about everyone on the pitching staff that a sustained burst of pyrotechnics might be coming at a moment perhaps inopportune.
Cubs manager Joe Madden likely issued the same advisory to his moundsmen, but neither knew the half of what was coming.
So many rockets had come off the bats at PNC Park in a riotous baseball game to that point that the city’s spectacle almost seemed tame by comparison. The two leading teams in the National League Central, the thundering Pirates and the suddenly staggering Cubs, rattled baseballs off the walls, up the alleys, into the notch, over the fences, and into the night, obliterating four different leads in the first four innings alone, and with the actual fireworks at their climax somewhere over the Mon, the Pirates shifted into full sky blast.