It's OK to say Pittsburgh has a bad baseball team. A lot of us say so. The proof is again in today's National League standings. The Pirates are 39-49 after their 5-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs yesterday. Similar proof has been in the standings for going on 13 years.

But, please, don't say Pittsburgh is a bad baseball town.

The Houston Chronicle is the latest to make that bogus accusation. In one of those let's-rank-'em columns that always seem to turn up at this time of year, the Chronicle's Richard Justice rated Pittsburgh as the fourth-worst baseball city behind Tampa-St. Petersburg, Atlanta and Miami. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the low, Justice gave us a 1 for fans and a 1 for passion. He could find it in his heart to give PNC Park only a 7.

"With all due respect to the guy," Pirates general manager Dave Littlefield said this week, "he's way off base."

I couldn't agree more.

Start with that 7 for PNC Park. It's one thing to give Boston's Fenway Park a 10. "If you want to say we're No. 2 or No. 3 as a ballpark, I can handle that," Littlefield said. "It's like trying to rank great quarterbacks. Who do you want? Marino or Elway or Namath ... "

Then, after a long pause ...

"Or Ben Roethlisberger?"

Could Littlefield be a politician or what?

But how does PNC Park rank behind Cincinnati's Great American Ballpark and just ahead of that airplane hanger in Phoenix where the Arizona Diamondbacks play?

Justice's column loses any sense of legitimacy there.

"Don't say fans in Pittsburgh don't care because the team stinks," he opines. "Fans in Pittsburgh never have cared. They didn't care much in the Roberto Clemente years, and they didn't care in the Barry Bonds years."

Written like a true outsider.

Fans in Pittsburgh have always cared and still care, probably more than they should because, invariably, the Pirates break their heart. That doesn't stop them from watching the games on television or listening to them on radio or ripping Lloyd McClendon at the office the next day. And this season, it hasn't stopped them from going to the games in almost shocking numbers considering the mediocre on-field product.

Pittsburgh is still taking a beating for not selling out all of the home playoff games in the early 1990s. What is never pointed out is the Pirates played those games in cavernous Three Rivers Stadium, where only about half of the 60,000 seats were good for baseball. What also is never mentioned is the Pirates averaged crowds of 52,732 for their 10 home playoff games in those years. Those would be considered terrific crowds today with the smaller, more fan-friendly ballparks.

The attendance this season has been especially remarkable in some ways. It's easy to explain the Pirates' jump to 23,488 a game, up from 20,277 at this point a year ago. That's the lure of the 2006 All-Star Game. But it's a lot harder to explain the team's five sellouts or its 10 30,000-plus crowds, or its average attendance of 27,050 in the past 14 home games, or its walk-up sales of 8,800 for a game against the Chicago Cubs in April, 6,700 for a game against the Colorado Rockies in May and nearly 5,700 for a Tuesday night game against the Baltimore Orioles in June.

It's also difficult to explain the energy and emotion at PNC Park for a team that, frankly, doesn't deserve such loyal support from such great fans. You would think most people would be getting tired of all the losing, the Pirates' many failed five-year rebuilding plans and management's broken promise to field a contender once the new ballpark was built. But that wasn't the case Friday night when the Pirates played the New York Mets in a game that had no more significance than to determine if the Pirates would be eight or 10 games under .500 when it was finished. It's not just that 32,563 fans came out. Many stayed until the end and were on their feet, thrilled, when the Pirates rallied for four runs in the ninth inning and won in the 10th. The atmosphere was similarly electric the next night when a sellout crowd of 36,708 gave shortstop Jack Wilson a curtain-call standing ovation after his seventh-inning grand slam. You would have thought it was Willie Stargell taking a bow, not a .229-hitting shortstop.

"People are starved to get on board with us," Littlefield said.

He isn't the only one who has noticed.

"When we got to .500 [June 11], it was unbelievable to see the reaction of the fans," Pirates pitcher Mark Redman said. "It's a baseball town that's just waiting for us to give them what they want. Can you imagine what it will be like when we do?"

It would be wonderful. Pittsburgh would embrace the Pirates with both arms and rally around them. PNC Park would be a hot ticket, the place to be in the summer. And, thankfully, we no longer would be mentioned among baseball's worst cities.

I'm still hoping it's going to happen in our lifetime.