I'm buying a fully grown pear tree!

[htuttle]

Anyone have experience with pear trees? The tree is in the backyard of a house I'm buying. It's about 30+ feet tall, and currently covered with hundreds of golf-ball sized pears. They look very healthy, if a little small, but I don't know how large pears should be this time of year (I'm in Madison, WI).

The person I'm buying it from doesn't know what variety it is, but says the fruit is usually ready to pick around late August, and is quite tasty. I'm thinking that means they are probably Bartletts, based on the maturity chart I found.

The tree hasn't been very well pruned over the years, so I was thinking about thinning it out a bit to promote larger pears. However, I also found a couple of articles that suggested that once a pear tree gets overgrown, they don't respond very well to pruning.

Has anyone dealt with a pear tree starting to go wild? Prune it, or leave it alone?