Saxboybilly18 boasts and roasts Pittsburgh in viral videos on sports, city life — and sobriety
Saxboybilly18 is actually Bill Stiteler. As it happens, Stiteler has a family connection to — his dad, Ted Hoover, was a theater critic for and its predecessor . "[I] grew up with that paper always at the house," Stiteler recalls.
A South Side native who remembers hearing the shift bell ring at the Jones & Laughlin steel mill, Stiteler eventually moved to New York City for a decade. Circumstances then took him to, of all places, Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, before he moved back home to Pittsburgh in 2024 for a simple reason: "to stop drinking."
Fittingly, met Stiteler in Brother André's Café , a welcoming Lower Hill spot in the spacious Epiphany Roman Catholic Church basement.
"I'm used to being in another sort of meeting in church," Stiteler quips over coffee.
Heavy drinking in New York became dangerous drinking in Mongolia, where "vodka was, like, 80 cents for a jug." Following a stint in rehab here in Pennsylvania, Stiteler, now 10 months sober, has packed out his schedule with not only recovery meetings, but also with Pittsburgh sports, cultural events — and plenty of time editing videos for TikTok and Instagram.
"I started making videos again because I'd done comedy in New York for seven years, but I stopped in 2016 when the drinking started to pick up," Stiteler says. He had a popular Vine account at the time, as well. "It goes hand and hand, my recovery and these videos."
Under the Saxboybilly18 moniker, Stiteler has been churning out keenly observed videos that both celebrate and roast Pittsburgh culture. The process began when Stiteler started going to Pirates games "to have routine and structure."
"The account was originally just all Pirates, because they've got the Ballpark Pass," he recalls. "I just started going to every single game."
Eventually, that included games in other cities. "I was like, You know what? Fuck it. I'll go to Milwaukee." Stiteler used money from selling thrift items to fund the cheapest travel options he could find.
"I would fly the cheapest flight possible, I'd get the cheapest Airbnb possible, and I'd just ride a bike around. You can travel pretty inexpensive," he says. He also traveled to Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and, of course, metro Atlanta, with its train-to-a-bus ballpark in Cobb County and "The Atlanta Braves Song."
I was interested in the urbanism angle this and other Saxboybilly18 videos seem to have. Beyond his critiques of Atlanta or the Strip, Stiteler has posted numerous videos exploring Pittsburgh from the saddle of his e-bike — always wearing a helmet, and usually in Pirates gear. He's also spotlit Pittsburgh's numerous city steps . It turns out Stiteler doesn't drive. "I don't really like cars. I like cities and communities, and that's why I lived in New York," he says.
"The hack with Pittsburgh is the e-bike," he says. "I don't even take the bus anymore; I just e-bike everywhere."
That has fueled an appreciation for the ways Pittsburgh does and doesn't meet the needs of the 20% of Pittsburghers without cars . "Everything you need shouldn't require getting into a car and driving somewhere. Driving in a one-ton machine to go down the street to pick up a Mountain Dew, that's just ridiculous," Stiteler says.
"Things should be commutable or within walking distance," he adds. "And I get that we're more sprawled out in Pittsburgh, but that's still achievable here."
These critiques are all grounded in "how freaking unique and awesome our city is. I mean, San Francisco has really amazing views, but wouldn't Pittsburgh be right up there?"
As the 2024 Pirates season sputtered to a close, Stiteler biked to Pittsburgh's Central Park , the American Eagle headquarters , and one of Allegheny Goatscape's sites . "Slowly, over time, you'll see [my videos] stopped going from being Pirates-centric to bigger, broader topics, and that's where the account's at," Stiteler says. Other recent videos include a tongue-in-cheek promo for Carnegie Mellon University and an unvarnished review of the legacy of Henry Clay Frick.
He has further Saxboybilly18 videos in the works. Some, such as the recent Frick foray, have incorporated AI music made with Suno . Stiteler still writes all of the lyrics himself and spends lots of time fine-tuning things. "It's still kind of a mess," he says, "but you gotta learn how to do it." He says he's "not a musician" (the Saxboybilly18 moniker is an inside joke Stiteler chuckles is "not worth explaining"), but, rather, a comedian, and is happy to talk about his process with viewers.
Longer-term, he's hopeful that the traction online will keep him busy and perhaps lead to opportunities to perform. He has over 10,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 4,000 on TikTok, such that Saxboybilly18 now has fans outside the 'Burgh, and Stiteler won't rule out a future live performance.
"My dream would be to, when I follow the Pirates on the road, get a small little 100-seater" to perform in, Stiteler says. "There are these weird pockets of cities like Cincinnati [and] Atlanta [where] the videos have done really well ... It's pretty cool."
Following his struggles with addiction, Stiteler seems to be in a good place as we wrap our interview and he heads toward his e-bike in the October sunshine. "I just started doing it six months ago. So it's crazy. I thought I was gonna lose the skill," he says, remembering his Vine days. "It's cool that I was able to pick it up again."
