As Hank Kimball from the old Green Acres TV show might say, it wasn’t a good season, but it wasn’t a bad season, either. There were high expectations at PNC Park when Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington and owner Bob Nutting stepped outside of their comfort zone, signed a free agent to a multi-year deal, and gave a big long-term contract to a prospect before he even played a major league game. So why are the Pirates on the outside looking in at the playoffs for the 11th straight year? I’ve rounded up the suspects. You be the judge.
The General Manager
Since I mentioned Cherington, let’s start with him. In the offseason, he needed to vastly improve what was an anemic offense in 2025. A veteran starting pitcher to anchor the rotation wouldn’t have been a bad idea either. He pulled off a blockbuster three-way trade, sending expendable starting pitcher Mike Burrows to the Houston Astros in a three-team transaction and receiving Brandon Lowe, Jake Mangum, and Mason Montgomery from the Tampa Bay Rays in return. Ryan O’Hearn was signed as a free agent under a two-year contract. It was the first multi-year contract the Pirates had given a free agent since Iván Nova way back in 2016. Free agents Marcell Ozuna, Gregory Soto, and José Urquidy were signed to one-year deals. The Pirates’ 2024 first-round draft pick Konnor Griffin was signed to a lucrative nine-year deal and promoted to the majors at age 19.
Cherington largely succeeded in improving the offense. PNC Park was built to favor left-handed hitters, but 2026 was the first year in its quarter-century existence that the Pirates were built that way. Enter Lowe, Mangum, and O’Hearn. Acquiring Lowe, Mangum, and Montgomery from Tampa Bay for Burrows was highway robbery, even if Pittsburgh gets just one year from Lowe, whose contract has expired. Lowe led the team with 35 home runs and 96 RBI, and his 5.4 WAR was just barely out of the major league top 10 for position player WAR. Limited to 110 games due to injury, O’Hearn added 18 homers and 76 RBI. Because of injuries to outfielders Oneil Cruz and O’Hearn, the switch-hitting Mangum got more playing time than expected and responded by hitting .276/.331/.363.
There were also some gross miscalculations by the GM. Looking to add a right-handed power hitter to the lineup and failing to land Eugenio Suárez, Cherington pivoted to the 35-year-old Ozuna, taking a $12 million gamble that the steep decline in his 2025 performance was due to trying to play through a hip injury instead of his advanced age. Ozuna failed miserably. (Suarez wasn’t much better for the Cincinnati Reds.) Mitch Keller and Urquidy never became what the Pirates hoped for from two veteran starters. Since his All-Star season of 2023, Keller’s performance has dropped off every August; this year, his August slump began in May. Urquidy never even started a game; the Pirates gave up on him after five relief appearances.
Cherington also counted on Dennis Santana and Isaac Mattson to be late-relief options along with Soto. The journeyman Santana seemed to have turned his career around with Pittsburgh in 2024 and 2025. Continuing to believe in him may not have been the worst decision, but Mattson was a different case. He’s a career minor leaguer who had his first good season in the majors last year at age 29 and had pitched in independent ball as recently as 2023.
As the trade deadline approached, the bullpen was in shambles, Ozuna and his .203 average and .612 OPS were on the verge of being released, and it became increasingly evident that the starting rotation could use that veteran anchor. Cherington worked the phones and acquired relievers Lake Bachar, Camilo Doval, Luke Weaver, and Kirby Yates without giving up anything from the major league roster or taking on significant salaries.
In the Pittsburgh talk shows and on social media, Cherington was vilified for not addressing the bullpen issues earlier. That’s a false narrative. Teams weren’t trading relievers of Weaver’s caliber in May or June. At that time, seeing teams happy to add Pirates castoffs like Geoff Hartlieb, Justin Lawrence, and Bryse Wilson to their bullpens was indicative of what was available before the deadline.
Cherington didn’t add a right-handed bat, either, feeling the price was too steep for players who wouldn’t have made a significant difference. In that connection, two names that were tossed about were Jo Adell and Taylor Ward. Cherington did well in avoiding Ward. The Seattle Mariners traded three prospects to the Baltimore Orioles for Ward, a rental who hit .125 with no home runs for them. However, Adell, who is signed through next season, would have been a good option. He hit .244/.324/.417, seven HR, and 32 RBI in 48 games for the Cleveland Guardians after they acquired him from the Los Angeles Angels. All it cost them was a Double-A catcher who’s currently the Angels’ No. 22 prospect. Cherington probably could have outbid the Guardians for Adell’s services.
Channeling Pythagoras
With all that Cherington did and didn’t do, however, the team as constructed would have been a wild card team without the injuries (more on those in a bit). One of my favorite metrics is the Pythagorean winning percentage. Developed by Bill James and tweaked by Sports Reference, it measures what a team’s record should be based upon its run differential and indicates whether a team was lucky or unlucky. The formula is as follows:
Pythagorean winning percentage = (Runs scored)1.83 divided by [(Runs scored)1.83 + (Runs allowed)1.83]
Here’s how the National League wild card standings would have played out if the Pythagorean winning percentages held:
The Manager
Manager Don Kelly may have a bit more culpability than Cherington. He’s often criticized for not sticking to a set lineup and his use of the bullpen. Let’s dispose of the former. There’s no correlation between a set lineup and winning, and in any event, in today’s baseball, a set lineup is an anomaly, to use a Supreme Court word. Here, for example, is the number of lineups used by each team, listed in the order of finish, in the NL Central Division in 2026:
Every team changes its lineups frequently, and while my parents taught me that just because everybody does something doesn’t make it right, I see no evidence that it’s wrong, either, noting that the first- and last-place teams are tied for the most lineups used in the division.
Way back in high school, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I used to attend a good number of Pittsburgh Penguins games. I became friendly with a Penguins insider. I would ask him why the coach is playing this guy and not that guy, and the responses were eye-opening. I learned there were times when someone had an injury that the team was hiding or a family issue that was distracting him. What I learned is that we don’t know what we don’t know. Thus, I’m not big on criticizing a manager’s choice of bullpen pitchers. Furthermore, before the relief corps was improved at the trade deadline, Kelly didn’t have a lot of good options. That said, there were often some baffling decisions, such as continuing to employ Soto, loser of six games and blower of five saves, in high-leverage spots, even after he had better options. Soto cost them one crucial game at Wrigley Field on September 12, when Kelly sat and watched him walk two batters and hit two others in the eighth inning. Weaver was underused, held for situations where the Pirates entered the eighth with a lead.
On the positive side, the team generally played hard for Kelly. After losing to the Miami Marlins, 8-2, on August 12, the Pirates’ 17th loss in 24 games after the All-Star break, Kelly delivered his “stop-feeling-sorry-for-yourselves” speech to the club. They responded by going 24-16 the rest of the way. The speech was effective but may have come too late.
This was Kelly’s first season as a full-time manager, and at times, it seemed he was a manager-in-training and overmanaged the club. On April 14, for example, he sent rookie Nick Yorke to pinch-hit for Lowe with the bases loaded in the seventh inning because a left-hander was on the mound. Yorke would spend of the season in the minors while Lowe would emerge as the team’s most valuable player. Yorke hit into a double play, and the Pirates lost to the Washington Nationals, 5-4. Furthermore, ABS challenges were wasted unnecessarily, and Kelly never reined in the offenders. The Pirates’ challenges were successful 47 percent of the time, the lowest rate in Major League Baseball. While I suspect that Kelly’s decisions didn’t cost the Pirates nearly as many games as the fan base believes, I also feel that a veteran manager may have added enough wins to their total to push them into the playoffs.
The Injuries
The baseball gods were unkind to the Pirates in 2026. RotoWire issues a “severity score,” which measures the impact that injuries had on a team. The San Francisco Giants had the highest severity score at 126, making them the most affected team in MLB. The Pirates’ score was 62, tied for 16th place with the Arizona Diamondbacks. It’s hard to believe that the Pirates’ score wasn’t higher, given the lengthy injuries to key players.
Cruz, Nick Gonzales, Griffin, Spencer Horwitz, Lowe, O’Hearn, and Bryan Reynolds are very good players. None are great players who can carry a team by themselves, although Cruz has the potential. To be productive hitters, they rely on the protection provided by the others in the lineup. Together, they’re a well-oiled offensive machine. However, because of injuries, the seven hitters appeared in the same starting lineup only 21 times in 2026. The Pirates scored 116 runs in those games and won 13 of them. The injury bug was one of the biggest culprits in torpedoing the 2026 season.
The Bullpen
At the All-Star break, the Pirates had 16 blown saves, the fourth-highest in the majors. The bullpen got better after the trade deadline. The team finished with 25 blown saves, dropping to a tie for the 12th-worst with the Colorado Rockies. Santana flamed out as the closer. He ceded the job to Soto, who was inconsistent despite 16 saves. Mattson failed as the eighth-inning man. Pitchers were shuttled back and forth from Triple-A Indianapolis in desperate attempts to find an internal solution.
When Jared Jones came off the 60-day injured list to reclaim a spot in the rotation, Carmen Mlodzinski was bumped to the bullpen, where he had success as a high-leverage option in 2023 and 2024. However, that did almost nothing to improve the bullpen. Kelly saved Mlodzinski to piggyback Jones as the latter slowly built himself back up to start. Mlodzinski was essentially pitching in rotation and wasn’t available for four of every five games. The trade deadline additions and emergence of Montgomery as a reliable closer (18 saves) settled the bullpen down, but the early blown saves prevented the Pirates from jumping out to an early lead in the wild card standings.
The (Former) Ace
Is it fair to place blame on one player out of 26? Probably not. But I’m going to do it anyway.
When Paul Skenes was knocked out of the box after just two-thirds of an inning on Opening Day at Citi Field, it was thought to be a mere aberration on the way to another stellar season rather than an omen. But he never seemed quite himself. With an improved offense and a new pitching coach who he campaigned for (more on him shortly), the Pirates were 15-17 when he started. Fastball velocity was down. He finished with a 10-11 record and a 3.82 ERA that was nearly double what he’d put up in his first two seasons. But he also struck out 200 batters and put up some peripherals that most pitchers would kill for: a 3.33 FIP, 1.119 WHIP, 10.3 strikeouts per nine innings, and a 4.08 strikeout-to-walk ratio. His 3.3 WAR was second on the staff to Braxton Ashcraft’s 3.5. Skenes wasn’t terrible. But he wasn’t Paul Skenes, either.
Debriefing himself in late September, he pinpointed his participation in the World Baseball Classic. He told Colin Beazley of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “There are a lot of other factors, so I don’t want to put everything on that. But I feel like that was kind of the root of it a little bit. Usually, that time of year, you’re kind of ramping up and it’s a little bit slow. You can kind of get onto the slope and find your body. One live [batting practice], you’re topping at 97 [mph], and then the next you’re 98, 99. And that wasn’t the case this year. … Looking back, I don’t think that really helped.”
It seems doubtful that Skenes would ever participate in the WBC again, and in fact, MLB teams should prohibit their players from participating. From the teams’ standpoint, it can do more harm than good, and the WBC is kind of a non-event anyway. Remember who won it this year? Me neither. Getting back to the point, the Skenes of the previous two years would surely have pushed the Pirates over the top, but we rarely saw that.
The Pitching Coach
As we look at the coaches, I’ll begin by saying that I’m not big on blaming them when a player underperforms. If Player X has a bad season, the person most responsible is Player X. Let’s look at two key coaches regardless.
The Pirates’ pitching staff pushed to dismiss pitching coach Oscar Marin after last season and hire Bill Murphy to replace him. The press would point out that it was largely Skenes who wanted the change. The staff regressed under Murphy. Or did they? The raw stats say yes, although some metrics suggest that they had some bad luck and poor support along the way. Even so, baseball is a performance business, and for whatever reason, the staff didn’t perform as well under Murphy.
Speaking to Beazley in August, the Pirates’ pitchers absolved Murphy of any blame for their failures. But would you really expect them to publicly blame their coach?
Where Were the Pitchers?
On a side note, what happened to the vaunted starting pitching depth the Pirates were supposed to have? At the end of 2025, Thomas Harrington was their No. 3 prospect, and Hunter Barco was No. 7. In brief trials with the Pirates this season, the lefty Barco surrendered 15 earned runs in 17.2 innings and was touched up for four gopher balls. Harrington didn’t pitch in the majors in 2026. As I write this, Barco has dropped down to No. 16 on the prospect list, and Harrington is nowhere to be found in the top 30. When Keller and later Ashcraft went on the IL, instead of dipping down into the minors for another starter, the Pirates went with bullpen games. Trade acquisition Bachar pitched well as an opener, but he was basically pitching in rotation as Mlodzinski was earlier and wasn’t available at other times when he could have helped.
The Hitting Coach
What a difference a year made for Matt Hague. The Pirates scored 767 runs (sixth-best in MLB), hit .253 (fifth-best), and posted an OPS of .734 (sixth-best). He was mostly spared the fan vitriol directed at him last season. Of course, the offense was vastly improved thanks to Cherington’s additions, proving once again that what makes a good coach is good players.
Those are good numbers, of course, but not as good as they were at the All-Star break, after which the team fell into a frustrating 7-17 slump, during which they failed numerous times with runners in scoring position. As a result, Hague incurred the fans’ wrath once again. What was evident during that stretch was the lack of a two-strike approach. Is that not part of Hague’s teachings? Players were striking out, swinging hard and early at off-speed pitches on the outside part of the plate. Stranding runners played a huge role in the July-August collapse. A disciplined two-strike approach could have cashed in some of those runners left on base and perhaps propelled the Pirates into a wild card spot.
Conclusion
There you have it, friends. There was plenty of blame to go around as the Pirates are once again left out of the postseason. The Pirates have a good core going forward, especially if Lowe returns. Although they were a disappointing 82-80, it was an 11-game improvement from 2025, and that’s not nothing. It will be an interesting offseason.
