How a Bucs fan went viral -- and built a community in the process

William Stiteler was on an Indiana Jones-like crusade. He had his artifact, and he believed it belonged in a museum.

At the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum last month, Stiteler tried to do a reverse museum heist and sneak his Mitch Keller Star Wars bobblehead into the collection. It was there where he got a notification that he had a new follower: The Pittsburgh Pirates.

Now his hometown team is one of the over 11,000 accounts who follow the Pittsburgh social media sensation known as “SaxBoyBilly18.”

For the uninitiated, the allure of SaxBoy may be hard to sum up in just a few grafs. His love of baseball and comedy stems from the 1997 “Freak Show” Pirates and 1992 film “Wayne’s World.” Those passions combine into a series of short videos that can range from sketches, heckling, song parodies, dancing, interacting with Pirate fans or the average man on the street and more. It’s part Wayne Campbell, part Bob Costas, part Eric Andre, part Weird Al, and above all else, part Bucco baseball.

“When people started noticing me at the games, which was pretty immediately. I was walking around outside the stadium and like 15 people noticed me,” Stiteler said at Dodger Stadium, decked out in a 2013 Clint Hurdle Manager of the Year t-shirt. “I was like, ‘Holy [crap], seriously?’”

Stiteler has been to almost every home game this season, thanks to the Pirates’ Ballpark pass that offers a general admission seat for $40 a month. He took it a step further in May and began traveling on the road to see them in every city they play, Grateful Dead style.

“You can do it very inexpensively,” Stiteler said. “... I was like, ‘You know what, life is for the living. I’m gonna use credit cards and I’m gonna travel.’”

With the proceeds of a Pirates merchandise resale shop he started -- plus withdrawing 10% from his 401K -- Stiteler began hitting the road. Sometimes it means sleeping in an airport to maximize his dollar. Sometimes it means picking a Los Angeles Airbnb where he shares a room with six other people. But it’s in those environments where his cult status has grown, and where he’s met players, including his favorite player, Keller.

“He’s hilarious,” Keller said. "Let's start a fund for him or something [if he’s traveling]. We gotta start something for him."

It’s on the road he’s produced some of his best work. Some of the greatest hits include:

• Stiteler is an avid biker, and while riding his rented city bike in Toronto, he accidentally stumbled into a race. He was awarded a medal.
• The Pirates were in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention, and he went around telling people about the “rigged” decision to leave Keller off of the NL All-Star team.

“This is such a small, insular, stupid world, no one’s really taking the piss out of it,” Stiteler said about the Pirates fan sphere. “It was a very self-serious, crazy run, and I was like, ‘I can get a little [like] Wayne here.’”

The videos have also been therapeutic. Stiteler is very open that he’s a recovering alcoholic, now seven months sober. When he was younger he did comedy in New York while working as a production assistant at CNN and The Newlywed Show, but after seven years, he made a shift to working in the beer industry making sales. After he picked up drinking more, he moved to Mongolia to “mix things up,” but things continued to get worse.

“As addicts are known to do, you change locations thinking that will do anything, but I went to Mongolia and alcohol was cheaper, available 24/7 and I didn’t know anyone,” Stiteler said. “I was incredibly isolated, which is the recipe for drinking all day.”

He still followed the Pirates while overseas, waking up at 7 a.m. to do so. After he admitted he needed help and moved back home, his passion for baseball and comedy gave him a new outlet and vice to follow, one that has landed him on The Yak and the Baseball Bar-B-Cast while also helping him get closer to finally making this brand of comedy a career.

Stiteler is going to continue to travel this season, and he’s hoping to make the tour international come next year, seeing if he can backpack around Europe to meet Pirate fans.

Who knows what videos would come from that.

“I just kinda started this thing being like, ‘Hey, everybody -- notice me,’” Stiteler said. “And now they’ve noticed, whether they like it or not.”