Happy BMTIB Day, everyone!
It's the 16th of August and, exactly 11 years ago to this date, Bob Nutting boasted to me in a one-on-one interview at PNC Park that the Pirates had "the best management team in all of baseball," paving the way for a decade-plus of derisive references, memes and, most notably, the BMTIB acronym that persists as powerfully today as it did at the time.
Never in my career have I gotten a quote from anyone with that kind of resonance, and there's no close runner-up.
So, on this anniversary -- of which I'd been blissfully unaware until a reader brought it up in comments yesterday -- it feels like a fine time to revisit the full context of that day, those words, what led to them and some of what followed.