Twenty-one and seventeen.
The Pittsburgh Pirates — the team that has been baseball’s designated punchline for the better part of a decade, the franchise that last made the playoffs in 2015 — are 21-17 in 2026, sitting third in the NL Central as of this writing with a +22 run differential that ranks fifth-best in the entire National League. They are legitimately good. Not “scrappy and fun for a rebuilding team” good. Actually, competitively good.
And yet the national baseball conversation is consumed by the Mets falling apart at the seams (13-22, 12-game losing streak, their worst stretch since 2002) and the Phillies firing Rob Thomson at 9-19. Which, fine — those are real stories. But while the big-market disasters get wall-to-wall coverage, one of the most compelling team-building narratives in the sport is unfolding in Pittsburgh and getting about a tenth of the attention it deserves.
Paul Skenes is doing something that has never been done before in Major League Baseball. His 2.36 ERA and 0.714 WHIP in 2026 are absurd on their own. His May 6 start against Arizona — 8 innings, 2 hits, 0 runs, 0 walks, 7 strikeouts on 97 pitches in a 1-0 win — was a masterpiece. But the full context is what makes it staggering:
Paul Skenes is the first pitcher since earned runs became an official statistic to post a sub-2.00 ERA with 175+ strikeouts over their first 25 MLB appearances. pic.twitter.com/mYn7LnJrnO
— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) April 3, 2025
Through his first 25 MLB appearances (across 2024–25), he became the first pitcher since earned runs became an official statistic to post a sub-2.00 ERA with 175-plus strikeouts. In 2026, he hasn’t let up. That is not a Statcast quirk or a small-sample fluke. That is a place in history. The full breakdown of his 2026 numbers — 46 strikeouts, 7 walks, 42 innings pitched across 8 starts — is at FanGraphs, and they hold up under every angle you look at them.
Meanwhile, Oneil Cruz is putting together the best sustained stretch of his career. He’s hitting .292/.364/.551 with a 148 wRC+ — for reference, his career rate coming in was 104 — with 9 home runs, 28 RBI, and a 95.7 average exit velocity that makes opposing pitchers visibly uncomfortable. The numbers on Cruz suggest this isn’t a hot streak. This is a player who figured something out.
Then there’s Konnor Griffin, who is somehow the wildest part of this whole story. The kid made his MLB debut on April 3 with an RBI double in his first at-bat. The Pirates, apparently deciding they had seen enough, signed him to a 9-year/$140 million extension — a franchise record — within his first week in the big leagues. He’s hitting .257 with 7 stolen bases and zero caught stealing. The Pirates bet on a player who had appeared in zero major league games and they did it with nine figures. That’s either the most reckless thing a small-market team has done in years, or it’s the kind of conviction you only have when your scouting department knows something the rest of baseball doesn’t.
Some national outlets have started to notice. CNN ran a feature on May 4 about the Pirates winning back Pittsburgh. MLB Network’s Mike Lowell and Mark DeRosa named them the most surprising team of 2026. That’s something. But a couple of features and a shoutout on a highlight show is not proportionate to what’s actually happening here. Bryan Reynolds is quietly hitting .290/.375/.484 and barely registering in any national conversation. The run differential story alone — fifth-best in the NL while playing in a division with the Cubs and Brewers — would get three newsletter segments if it belonged to a team in New York or LA.
The May 6 gem against Arizona got a day of attention and then evaporated. Eight innings of two-hit ball in a 1-0 game, from a 23-year-old who is rewriting record books, and the news cycle had moved on by the next morning.
Pittsburgh fans have been patient through some genuinely painful years. They watched a core that should have contended get dismantled. They watched prospect after prospect get traded before they were ready to win. They watched 2015 end and then nothing else begin. This team — this specific group, right now — is different, and the people who have been showing up to PNC Park through all of it have every right to be furious that it’s taking this long for the rest of the country to pay attention. The Pirates aren’t a feel-good sidebar. They’re a legitimate story. Start covering them like one.
