PITTSBURGH - Newly hired attendants at PNC Park are instructed in the most emphatic terms never to enter private box five. Box five long has been rumored to be haunted during Pirate home games by the mysterious owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, G. Ogden Nutting. When the Pirates are not playing at home, Nutting retreats to the wet catacombs deep beneath PNC Park where he brings promising young players -- his "proteges," he calls them -- to mold and to teach the finer points of the game. Nutting, whose face was hideously disfigured in the implosion of Three Rivers Stadium in 2001, hides his visage beneath a ghostly half-mask. (This photograph, taken last year, is the only one of Nutting known to exist since the implosion.)One of the phantom-owner's proteges is pitcher Zach Duke. Soon after Duke arrived with the club last year, he found a red rose in his locker, signifying that Mr. Nutting had hand-selected him to tutor. "He took me to his dark lair," said Duke. "There, he worked with me day and night, for weeks on end, to improve my pitching." Duke pauses and says quietly: "I owe all of my success to him, my angel of the night."
When Mr. Nutting deemed Duke ready, he instructed then-Pirate manager Lloyd McClendon to start him in a game against the dreaded Yankees, but McClendon tapped Kip Wells instead. That night, a chandelier in the Pirates clubhouse fell on Wells under mysterious circumstances, severely injuring his pitching arm. Duke got the start and went on to become the best rookie pitcher in baseball last year.
Duke continued to work with the phantom-owner, but all the while a burning curiosity grew within him to unmask his strange mentor. Then one day last September, while the Mr. Nutting was conjuring up some weird cacophony on the PNC Park organ, Duke sneaked up from behind him and snatched the mask from his face.
"He turned around, and it was the most horrifying sight I had ever seen," said Duke, still trembling months after the event. "His face looked exactly like -- radio talk show host Mark Madden!"
