The Pittsburgh Pirates are done chasing October, and the reasons why are spread across the roster.
Their playoff hopes officially ended on Sept. 18, when the San Diego Padres beat the Miami Marlins at Petco Park. That result pushed Pittsburgh out of reach. At 77-77, the Pirates can’t make up ground on San Diego, which sits at 85-69 and owns the intradivision tiebreaker.
For a team that spent much of the season hanging around the .500 line, the finish is a familiar kind of frustration. Pittsburgh had chances to build something better and never quite found the run that would have changed the shape of the race.
The first big problem came in the bullpen. Early in the season, relief pitching repeatedly failed to protect leads or keep games close enough for the offense to rally.
Those blown opportunities piled up fast. The Pirates gave away wins they should have banked, and that left them staring at a late stretch with little left to play for.
There was also major turnover in that group. Dennis Santana and Justin Lawrence both regressed badly enough that Pittsburgh designated them for assignment, while Isaac Mattson split time between Triple-A Indianapolis and the majors.
The Pirates kept cycling through arms and never really settled into the kind of relief consistency they needed until after the trade deadline. Even with those additions, the damage was already done, with close to 11 games lost by the bullpen alone.
Offensively, Pittsburgh looked dangerous for a long stretch. Through the All-Star break, the Pirates had one of, if not the, best offenses in baseball.
But that version of the lineup didn’t last. Injuries hit hard, and they hit key names: center fielder Oneil Cruz, shortstop Konnor Griffin, first baseman/right fielder Ryan O'Hearn, first baseman Spencer Horwitz and catcher Endy Rodríguez.
The losses were more than just inconvenient. Griffin and Cruz were especially costly absences, with Cruz on pace for 34 home runs and 53 stolen bases before going down.
Each missed two months, and Pittsburgh never really replaced that kind of production. Horwitz and O'Hearn were major reasons the first-half offense hummed, while Rodríguez seemed to be putting things together before another injury knocked him out until midseason 2027.
The replacements did what they could, but they couldn’t match the output that disappeared from the lineup. That showed up most when the Pirates were already under pressure.
Then there was Paul Skenes, who was brilliant in 2025 and won the NL Cy Young Award, but hasn’t been at that level this year. He’s 10-11 in 31 starts with a 3.91 ERA over 168.0 innings, along with 192 strikeouts, 47 walks, a .230 batting average allowed and a 1.13 WHIP.
His season opened in ugly fashion when he couldn’t get out of the first inning against the New York Mets at Citi Field on Opening Day, allowing five earned runs. Cruz’s poor play in center field played a role in that start.
Skenes responded with a 1.09 ERA across his next eight outings, but things shifted again after he gave up five runs against the Philadelphia Phillies at PNC Park on May 17. That game sparked the first real slump of his major league career.
Since then, he’s gone 4-9 over his last 22 starts with a 4.73 ERA across the past four months. That’s a sharp fall from the sub-2.00 ERA he posted in his first two seasons with Pittsburgh.
The source of the drop has included fatigue from pitching for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic in March, mechanical issues, and a dip in fastball velocity, among other factors. The encouraging part for the Pirates is that he isn’t injured.
Even with all that, Pittsburgh stayed in the mix for a long time. The problem was that the team never stacked together the kind of streak that separates a contender from a club that’s merely hanging around.
The Pirates have been at .500 more than 20 times this season, and their longest winning streak was five games. That run came during the opening stretch of the year, from March 31-April 1 and April 3-5, the second and third series of the season.
For most of the year, they hovered right around even. That made the bad stretches especially costly, because there wasn’t enough cushion to absorb them.
The second half brought a rough slide, including seven straight series losses and a 7-16 stretch from July 20 to Aug. 13.
They later won seven of their next 10 series, but still fell as low as 63-69 after being swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodgers Stadium from Aug. 21-23.
Pittsburgh can still finish with a winning record, which would be its first since 2018. But the bigger story is the one they couldn’t finish: a season that never quite took off when it needed to.
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