The Pirates finally bought some offense last winter, and for a while it looked like the gamble had paid off. Brandon Lowe and Ryan O’Hearn gave Pittsburgh real thump, the club set a franchise record with 182 home runs, and it finished in the top five in runs scored. For once, the lineup looked like it belonged in the same conversation as the rest of the roster.
Then a left-handed starter showed up.
That’s where the whole thing fell apart. Pittsburgh went 18-33 against left-handed starting pitchers in 2026, and the line against them was ugly across the board: .229 batting average, .300 on-base percentage and .359 slugging percentage.
All of that ranked last in MLB. The strikeout rate against southpaws was 25.6%, second-worst in the sport.
It wasn’t a small leak. It was the kind of matchup problem that can sink a season.
The roster construction explains a lot of it. The Pirates leaned left-handed, and the bats they counted on most were the ones that struggled hardest in same-side matchups.
Lowe was excellent overall, but against lefties he hit .220 with a .632 OPS, a sharp drop from his .279 average and .908 OPS against righties. O’Hearn had his own issues in those spots, and the midseason attempt to patch things with Marcell Ozuna didn’t change much.
The right-handed addition hit .207 against lefties before the move lost steam.
Don Kelly didn’t sugarcoat it. “It has been an Achilles' heel against lefties,” he said in September.
He tried to answer the issue in June by stacking an all-right-handed lineup against Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez. Pittsburgh still managed only three hits in seven innings.
That was the other part of the problem: even the right-handed options weren’t consistently dangerous enough to punish a lefty starter. Nick Gonzales, Jared Triolo and Henry Davis all finished with OPS marks below .700 against southpaws.
Now the Pirates are staring at a winter that demands a very specific kind of move. They have momentum, a strong starting rotation and an emerging young core, and the fanbase has already spent years waiting for this kind of progress.
But the market doesn’t make this easy. The free-agent pool for right-handed impact bats is thin, and the trade market could force Pittsburgh to give up the one thing it has in surplus: young pitching.
Ben Cherington has talked about staying opportunistic, but this is the kind of opportunity that requires real force. The Pirates do not need another left-handed hitter.
They do not need a bat that only works in one narrow split. They need someone who can start against lefties, stay in the lineup against righties and keep opposing managers from treating a southpaw start like a built-in advantage.
There are names on the market, but no perfect fix. Eugenio Suárez stands out as a proven right-handed power bat and the type of middle-of-the-order addition Pittsburgh has usually stayed away from, though his age and strikeout rate make a multi-year deal risky.
Austin Slater and Ramón Laureano are cheaper outfield options who have done well against lefties, but neither solves the bigger issue against right-handed pitching. Paul DeJong brings infield flexibility and right-handed pop, though his on-base numbers have gone up and down.
That leaves trades, where the Pirates’ rotation depth becomes the leverage. Jared Jones, Mitch Keller and Braxton Ashcraft all carry value, and other teams know Pittsburgh has more starters than jobs for them.
A controllable right-handed bat, the kind of player who can move around the diamond and doesn’t need to be platooned, would fit the need best. A Zack Gelof or Isaac Paredes type would make sense on paper. The price would hurt, but that’s the cost of fixing a real flaw instead of pretending it will disappear on its own.
There is some internal optimism, too. Oneil Cruz hit .323 against lefties in 2026 after hitting just .102 the year before, and Konnor Griffin batted .313 in limited at-bats against southpaws.
Both missed significant time with injuries, though, and that matters. Banking on two players to solve a team-wide problem is not much of a solution, especially when one of them has never played a full season.
The Pirates showed in 2026 that they can score. They also showed how quickly that offense can be neutralized when the matchup turns against them.
If they want to build on this season, they have to fix the lefty problem. Otherwise, the next time April rolls around, one left-handed starter could make the whole lineup look ordinary again.
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