The Pittsburgh Pirates are one of baseball's original National League powers — founded in 1882, in the NL since 1887 — and their history reads like the sport's own highlight reel. Honus Wagner, the bowlegged shortstop who was the game's first true superstar, starred for the 1909 champions. Five World Series titles followed across the century: 1909, 1925, 1960, 1971, and 1979, each with its own mythology.
The 1960 Series gave baseball its most dramatic ending ever: Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run in Game 7 against the Yankees, still the only Game 7 walk-off homer in World Series history. The 1971 team, led by Roberto Clemente at his absolute peak, beat Baltimore; the 1979 "We Are Family" Bucs, Willie Stargell's joyous bunch, came back from 3-1 down to beat the Orioles again. And Clemente — 3,000 hits, the cannon arm in right field, the humanitarian who died in a plane crash on New Year's Eve 1972 delivering earthquake relief — is not just the franchise's greatest player but one of the most beloved figures the game has ever known. His number 21 is retired, and his statue stands outside PNC Park.
PNC Park, opened in 2001 on the Allegheny riverfront, is the jewel-box counterpoint to the franchise's hard decades: a record 20 consecutive losing seasons from 1993 to 2012, the Barry Bonds years ending with Sid Bream's slide in the 1992 NLCS, a small-market club that kept developing stars for richer teams. The 2013-15 wild-card runs — Andrew McCutchen's MVP season, the blackout crowd for the Cueto game — reminded Pittsburgh what October baseball feels like.
What defines the Pirates is the weight of the black and gold: Wagner's 33, Stargell's 8, Mazeroski's 9, Clemente's 21. This is a franchise that has been great, been heartbroken, and been both at once — and through it all, one of the most beautiful ballparks in America, filled with fans who know exactly what they're part of.
The 2026 season was the best the Pirates have had in a decade — and the most bittersweet. Pittsburgh finished 82-80, third in the National League Central behind Milwaukee’s historic 103-win machine and the 89-win Cubs, and was eliminated from playoff contention in the season’s final week. It is the franchise’s eleventh straight season without October baseball. But it is also the Pirates’ first winning season since 2018, and only their second non-losing mark since 2015 — the last time they made the playoffs. In the 21st century, the Pirates had finished above .500 exactly three times before this year, all in the 2013-15 wild-card run. The fourth one matters, even if it doesn’t end the drought.
The season’s great paradox wore No. 30. Paul Skenes — the No. 1 pick in 2023, the 2024 Rookie of the Year (11-3, 1.96 ERA), the 2025 Cy Young winner (10-10, 1.96, winning the award without a winning record, a Nolan Ryan-esque feat) — fell to earth in 2026: 10-11 with a 3.82 ERA, including a nine-start stretch from May 17 to July 1 in which he went 0-6 with a 5.36 ERA and the Pirates lost every time he took the mound. His fastball dipped from 98.1 to 96.8 mph, and Skenes himself pointed to March’s World Baseball Classic — pitching for Team USA instead of ramping up slowly — as a likely culprit. “It’s tough,” he said after the elimination became official. “This is my third year and every year at the end, it’s, ‘what’s it going to look like for next year?’ I don’t love that. I’m kind of tired of it.” He also insisted 2026 wasn’t a failure — that he grew through it. Both things can be true.
The staff around him is the real reason for optimism. The Pirates struck out a franchise-record 1,496 batters in 2026, the fifth-most in baseball. Jared Jones missed the first two months recovering from internal brace surgery and finished the season strongly; Braxton Ashcraft took a leap in his first full season as a starter and made his first All-Star team; Mason Montgomery emerged as a legitimate closer, and the bullpen’s second-half turnaround — the second-lowest batting average against (.207) and second-fewest homers allowed among relief corps after the deadline — is why the club is keeping its pitching coach for 2027. The offense finally helped, too, scoring 4.73 runs a game. The what-ifs are real: 19 blown saves, Mitch Keller’s 5.29 ERA before a season-ending arm injury in August, a bullpen that was a mess before the deadline. Win half of those, and Pittsburgh is playing in October.
What’s happening now is the most interesting Pirates offseason in years. The club is reportedly in the market for a left-handed starter — Foster Griffin and Trevor Rogers, both headed for free agency, are the names in circulation — to balance a young rotation that already looks playoff-worthy. Oneil Cruz, Bryan Reynolds, and Henry Davis form a core with real thump, and the farm system that produced Skenes, Jones, and Ashcraft keeps humming. The goal for 2027 is unambiguous: end the eleven-year drought, get back to October for the first time since 2015, and give Skenes a postseason stage before the “what’s it going to look like for next year” question gets asked again. PNC Park, the jewel box on the Allegheny, deserves October baseball. For the first time in a decade, it feels close enough to touch.
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