The Knicks and Thunder are fighting for the NBA title. The Hurricanes are one win from a Stanley Cup. AJ Brown is somewhere new and everyone has opinions about it. The national sports discourse is full. Nobody has room for a 32-28 Pittsburgh Pirates team grinding through June in the NL Central.
That’s fine. Genuinely fine.
Because while the country is looking elsewhere, the Pirates are quietly building baseball’s best story that nobody’s telling. Eleven wins in their last 15 games. A sweep of the Minnesota Twins to close out May. A run differential of +31 — which, per Baseball Reference’s 2026 Pirates page, translates to a Pythagorean record of 33-27, meaning this team is slightly underperforming its actual talent. The last time Pittsburgh finished above .500 was 2018. They’re on pace for 86 wins. Vegas had them at 78.5.
Nobody projected this. And it’s not luck.
Paul Skenes is doing something genuinely historic. A 1.98 ERA, 56 strikeouts, 7 walks in 50 innings. He won the 2025 NL Cy Young unanimously and 2026 might be better. Skenes is already building his second Cy Young case before most rotations have settled into a groove. He’s 22 years old. He’s in Pittsburgh.
But the story isn’t just Skenes. Braxton Ashcraft is the unsung piece — 4-2, 2.75 ERA, 70 strikeouts, a 1.05 WHIP across 68.2 innings, and a May where he posted a 1.91 ERA across four starts, three lasting seven-plus innings. The Pirates have a genuine one-two that most contenders would pay a lot of money to have. Mitch Keller is a legitimate third starter at 3.86. Jared Jones is back from Tommy John and building back up. The foundation is real.
Then there’s Oneil Cruz, who on May 29 hit a baseball into the Allegheny River on the fly. Four hundred and fifty feet. 110.8 mph exit velocity. The seventh time any Pirates player has ever done that at PNC Park. It was his 12th home run of the season. Cruz is hitting .256 with a 96.3 average exit velocity and a 61.4% hard-hit rate. He may be the most physically imposing hitter in baseball right now — and he’s 25.
Same night, Bryan Reynolds hit a walk-off two-run homer to beat the Twins 6-5, snapping an 0-22 stretch when trailing after the 8th. Reynolds is at .266/.392/.418 with a seven-game hitting streak entering June. Around him, Marcell Ozuna ($12M, one year), Brandon Lowe at second, and Ryan O’Hearn ($29M, two years) give Pittsburgh a lineup with actual professional hitters throughout. Konnor Griffin is a 19-year-old rookie who got a $140M extension and is already in the lineup — he’s the future on display right now, not the reason the offense works, but the proof that ownership is thinking past this season for once.
Here’s where the skepticism lives, and it’s earned: Bob Nutting’s track record on payroll is historically bad. The NL Central is not the AL East. Milwaukee is 35-21 and Pittsburgh is five back in the division, two back in the Wild Card. This is not the 2022 Orioles steamrolling a weak division — the Brewers are legitimate, and the Cubs are tied with Pittsburgh at 32-28.
But the 2022 Orioles analogy still fits the moment. That team built on a prospect wave and got ignored for months while the national media found other things to cover. The Pirates have been here in spirit before — the 2013 team that ended a 20-season losing streak was also playing in the dark until suddenly they weren’t. The bones of this team are built to stay good. And the current pace says 86 wins, which is a Wild Card spot.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, winners of 11 of their last 15, have now dropped down to the 3rd best odds for the 2026 MLB Draft lottery. With 4 teams close behind, they could still possibly fall as far as 7th with only a 4.14% chance of winning the top pick. #Pirates #2026MLBDraft ⚾️ pic.twitter.com/3z9ldvhbHx
— PGHSportsFan (@Based412) September 4, 2025
The Pirates are winning so hard they’re dropping in the MLB Draft lottery. That’s the absurd, joyful reality of May 2026 in Pittsburgh.
There are real questions about whether this holds. Rotations get tested, prospects regress, and Nutting has a ceiling everyone in Pittsburgh knows by heart. But FanGraphs had them at 83 wins before the season started — and Pittsburgh is already making that look conservative. The country isn’t watching. The country doesn’t have to. Pittsburgh might be too busy winning to care.
