Pittsburgh finished 82-80. Write that down somewhere, because it took eight years to happen again. An 11-game jump from last year’s 71-91, and the Pirates’ first winning record since they went 82-79 in 2018. That year is also, not coincidentally, the last time anyone in this city bothered getting excited about September baseball.
Great. Cool. Now do it again, except this time make the playoffs, because 2018 didn’t and neither will this.
Pittsburgh Already Ran This Exact Play
That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. The Pirates hit 82 wins once before and the response was seven more losing seasons and a front office that treated “competitive” as a synonym for “finished.” An 82-80 record reads like the same page Pittsburgh was on in 2018: same team, same owner, eight years later, just with slightly better pitching depth.
The playoff drought attached to that stretch is now eleven years old, dating back to 2015, which means this winning season doesn’t even end the thing it was supposed to cure. A winning record got the Pirates back to even. It didn’t get them within shouting distance of October.
Matt Gajtka of The Early Shift said what most of this fanbase already feels: breaking .500 “meant something, man,” a small, earned relief after a childhood of mediocrity. Fair. It should feel good. It just shouldn’t be mistaken for the finish line.
Buchanan, Keller and Rodríguez Aren’t the Upgrade
Pittsburgh hired Sean Buchanan this winter to run pitching development. He spent the last two years coaching pitchers for the Astros’ Sugar Land affiliate. It’s a real hire. Houston’s farm system has produced a steady pipeline of big-league arms, and Pittsburgh clearly wants a piece of whatever Buchanan was doing down there. It’s also the cheapest kind of move a front office can make, a staff title change instead of a roster move. Mitch Keller and Endy Rodríguez got activated off the 60-day injured list, pushing the 40-man roster to 38 players.
Pirates Transactions: MLB
Pittsburgh Pirates claimed LF Akil Baddoo off waivers from Milwaukee Brewers.
Pittsburgh Pirates activated C Endy Rodríguez from the 60-day injured list.
Pittsburgh Pirates activated RHP Mitch Keller from the 60-day injured list.
Seattle Mariners…— Pirates Prospects (@pirateprospects) November 3, 2026
None of that is a roster upgrade. A coaching hire is development, not depth. Reinstating two guys who were already hurt when the season ended is just paperwork catching up to reality. Pittsburgh spent the winter getting its own injured players back and borrowing a coach off Houston’s farm system: the full extent of the roster movement.
Fans noticed the gap between that and an actual signing. A post asking who wants Lowe back in Pittsburgh for 2027 cleared 2,700 likes inside a day, which tells you where this fanbase’s head already is. The front office’s winter, so far, hasn’t matched it.
The $12 Million Pittsburgh Won’t Spend
Then there’s Brandon Lowe, who arrived in a three-team deal and promptly got a one-year, $23.15 million qualifying offer, the same tender seven other free agents received around the league.
Eight players received the one-year, $23.15 million qualifying offer today. The deadline to accept it is Nov. 17.
Randy Arozarena (Mariners)
Seiya Suzuki (Cubs)
Brandon Lowe (Pirates)
Trevor Rogers (Orioles)
Adrian Morejon (Padres)
David Bednar (Yankees)
Jake Bauers (Brewers)…— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 2, 2026
A qualifying offer is a procedural tender with a Nov. 17 deadline, the exact mechanism a team uses to recoup a draft pick when a free agent walks. Ownership doesn’t have to want Lowe back to make it. If he accepts, it’s the largest single-season salary in franchise history, which says less about Pittsburgh’s ambition than about how little this roster has ever paid anyone.
Pirates current payroll…$106 million.
Add Brandon Lowe at $25 million a season…that gets you to $118 million (he's already making $13 million).
And if you paid Paul Skenes $50 million a year.
That gets you to $168 million.
Still $12 million UNDER the cap floor. pic.twitter.com/RtL77AzDac
— Andrew Fillipponi (@ThePoniExpress) November 3, 2026
Add Lowe at market rate and a theoretical Paul Skenes extension at $50 million, and the Pirates are still $12 million under the league’s salary floor. Pittsburgh has the room and chooses not to use it, then asks fans to count a development hire as proof it’s trying.
Pittsburgh fans have watched this movie enough times to know how it ends. The Brewers started from a similar place and funded their way to a World Series, spending real money on the roster instead of leaning on a pitching-development hire to carry the story. Lowe has until Nov. 17 to decide whether he wants to stick around for the next version of this team. Pittsburgh already decided how much that decision is allowed to cost: $12 million of unused room, still sitting in the account, untouched.
