A Week In Pirates Baseball 2025: 7/6-7/13

Just when a six-game winning streak offered a flicker of foolish optimism, the Pittsburgh Pirates delivered a dose of reality. The 1-8 road trip that limped into the All-Star break was a microcosm of the entire Ben Cherington era. It was a nine-game encapsulation of the franchise’s identity: solid starting pitching, a broken offense, and moments of individual brilliance that only serve to highlight the systemic failures.

The Anatomy of a Collapse

After dropping the final game of their series in Seattle, the Pirates were swept by the Royals and lost the first two to the Twins before a meaningless win on Sunday provided the only relief. The most maddening part of this collapse is that the formula for failure is so painfully familiar.

The pitching, for the most part, did its job. Remove two blow-up starts from Mike Burrows and Andrew Heaney, and the staff consistently kept the team in games. But solid pitching is rendered irrelevant when the offense is non-functional. The problem remains what it has always been under this front office, a complete inability to construct a competent major league lineup.

An Offense in Name Only

The box scores from this road trip were bad. The offensive performance was a damning indictment of the team’s overall offensive approach:

• 16 runs in 9 games (less than 2 per game)
• .201/.249/.299 slash line for a .548 OPS
• 5 home runs
• 8-for-50 with runners in scoring position

Of the 47 hits the team managed to collect, 34 were singles. This is the mathematical result of an organizational philosophy that prizes passivity and fails to develop or find any power bats. You cannot win baseball games when your offensive strategy is built on such a weak foundation.

A Tale of Two Pirates

The ultimate frustration of this week is the stark dissonance between the on-field failure and the flashes of brilliance that hint at what could be.

On Sunday, the Pirates drafted high-school pitchers Seth Hernandez and Angel Cervantes, doubling down on the one thing the organization does well: identify and develop high-upside arms. The selection of college bats Murf Gray and Easton Carmichael immediately after, however, casts a familiar shadow. The issue is not with the players themselves, but with the troubling question of whether the organization’s broken offensive development system can possibly do them justice. For fans, any hope for these prospects is inescapably tempered by a history of disappointment.

Nowhere is this dissonance clearer than in the All-Star selections. Paul Skenes will start the game for the National League for the second consecutive year. Oneil Cruz will participate in the Home Run Derby. These are moments of pride, but they are also a ticking clock. The greatness of Skenes, in particular, is a finite resource that this front office is proving incapable of capitalizing on.

The Merciful Break

The All-Star break is not a chance for this team to reset. It is a merciful reprieve for a fanbase tired of watching the same failed experiment play out on a loop. The win on Sunday changes nothing. The fundamental flaws that defined this disastrous week are baked into the franchise’s DNA. We are left to wonder not what this team could be, but why we should continue to believe it will ever be different under the same leadership.