2026 Team Previews: Pittsburgh Pirates
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates
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Podcast
Intro
I grew up a poor, sad Pirates fan in Plum Borough, Pennsylvania. The most fun I ever had was throwing a racquetball off the side of my house, pretending to be Jack Wilson. It was pathetic. I’ve talked enough about it over the years that I don’t even think I’ll go on about it. I don’t care about the Pirates anymore. But I do reserve the right to become a true diehard fan once again if they ever do end up in a playoff race.
Mid-November Edit: The Pirates GM said they’re going to spend “a little bit” of money in free agency. So, heyoooooo I’m back on the wagon baby! That probably means they sign like Danny Jansen and Harrison Bader. Best-case scenario, they pretend to bid on Bo Bichette and end up with Mike Yastrzemski and Willi Castro. But look, there hasn’t been an offseason where they’ve even said they’ll spend “a little bit” of money. You have to enjoy the sliver of hope everywhere you can find it.
Let’s bust into these player previews.
Hitters
Oneil Cruz
Age: 27
Pos: OF
It feels like we should be close to giving up on Oneil Cruz as a fantasy stud. Some have thought we have been right on the edge of it for a few seasons now, and it hasn’t come close to happening.
That isn’t to say he’s not a positive on a fantasy team. His 20 homers and 38 steals are useful. The problem is that nothing else is there. His batting average bottomed out at .200 as his K% came upward two points. We were hoping for some positive movement in K% rather than a slide further into the thirties.
The lineup around him is crap. They scored the fewest runs in the league in 2025. Cruz scored 62 runs (second on the team) and drove in 61 (also second on the team).
I’m writing this before the World Series even ends, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that the team won’t upgrade the lineup this offseason. But seeing the history of them never doing that would make me think that they, once again, won’t do that. They have some great young bats in the minors, but none of them figure to make an impact in 2026. We’re projecting the Pirates as one of the league’s worst offenses once again, so it’s hard to see anybody getting to even 150 R+RBI.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the batting average is likely to come way up in 2026. We don’t even need advanced numbers to show that. His career batting average prior to last year was .250. Any time you have a season 50 points below your career average, you know it’s really likely that you perform a whole lot better the next season.
That said, the xBA was bad at .223.
I don’t think we’ll ever get a truly useful batting average from Cruz, but you’d think he’ll pull off at least .230 next year.
Cruz inspired this post, where I went looking for batting average bounce-back candidates.
The batting average suffered a bit because of the increased playing time against lefties. They can’t platoon the guy anymore; he’s their best hitter (as sad as that is). And needless to say, he did not improve against southpaws last year.
Maybe we can’t expect .250, but I’d say the proper projection is around .235.
The other issue is that his lack of fly balls (25%) and air pulls (9.9%) limits the homers. It’s hard to see a guy with a max EV of 123 and an EV90 of 113.8 (ridiculous numbers) only hit 41 homers in two full seasons. Maybe he’ll figure it out; there’s still time. But the days of expecting 30+ homers are behind us. Let’s not do that.
We’re left with a guy who steals a bunch of bags (career high 36% attempt rate last year), hits some homers, and has physical tools that give him more upside than the average guy, even though we haven’t seen him tap into it 3+ years now.
Projection
520 PA, 75 R, 22 HR, 64 RBI, 26 SB, .238/.320/.444, 30% K%, 10% BB%
Ranking
I’m not giving up on the ceiling entirely. I will go ahead and say the guy still has a 30-40 ceiling with a .260 batting average. That seems like a 99th percentile outcome at this point, but the bat speed and foot speed are clearly there for something like that to happen. He would need plate discipline, hit tool improvement, and some good luck for that to happen, but Cruz is unlike most other players. He has those sorts of physical abilities, and we have to keep that in mind when ranking him.
I’ve always thought James Wood was a good comp. And not just because they’re both tall and non white! But Cruz has the disadvantage of having failed in 1,500+ plate appearances, while Wood’s less-than-great numbers have come in just 1,000.
So I have Wood ahead of Cruz, and actually well ahead because I’m sliding Cruz in behind Abrams, Buxton, and Goodman as well.
Bryan Reynolds
Age: 31
Pos: OF
Nobody expected Bryan Reynolds to win their fantasy league for them last year. He was looked at as a solid enough OF2 or OF3 with a low ceiling but a high floor. He did not deliver the ceiling that we knew he didn’t have, but he did prove to us that we were wrong about his floor. He had a really bad season.
154 G, .245/.318/.402, 16 HR, 3 SB
That was after back-to-back 24-homer seasons with a positive batting average. His strikeout rate rose by four points and the counting stats bottomed out for multiple reasons (one being that he sucked and the other being that the team sucked).
Reynolds is past his prime years, but he’s not so old that we think he can’t bounce back to those career norms. He was also featured in the batting average bounce backs piece, so there’s good reason to believe the Pirates will perform better next year. Okay, they were dead last in the league in run-scoring, so there’s only one way to go.
B-Rey continued to hit the ball hard enough to matter (106.3 EV90, 10.1% Brl%, 113.5 MAX EV), and it’s not as though the contact rates fell to a dangerously low place (70.6% Contact%, 80.5% Zone-Contact%).
He’s never been the toolsiest guy in the world. He’s just gotten it done by being a solid player across the board. Enough power, enough speed, and a good hit tool and decent plate discipline stuff.
We should take a look at splits for all switch hitters, so let’s do that.
He showed a lot more power from the right side of the plate. That’s too bad because that’s worse for the home ballpark he plays in. Right field is decently friendly in PNC Park while the left field notch is very, very far away. That said, his home xwOBA (.394) vastly outdid his road mark (.306). I don’t think there’s too much to that, but it’s something to note.
Randomness did Reynolds no favors last year. His xBA was more than 20 points above his actual, and the green line hovered above the red line for most of the season.
He’s never been a guy hitting mammoth homers, so maybe we just saw a little bit of a loss in raw power turn a few homers into fly outs. I’m not saying with certainty that he’s a 24-homer guy again in 2026, but I think that’s very much within the range of outcomes.
We have seen veteran players have career years in their thirties. It’s not the norm, but it happens.
The fScores (shout out to Tim Kanak) still grade Reynolds as a fine player.
We want more than “fine” for fantasy leagues. But I don’t see any reason for complete panic on Reynolds. He got a bit worse and experienced plenty of bad luck. I think he has a better 2026 season than what we saw in 2025.
Does that put him in standard league territory? I think he’ll prove to be fringey there. But for 12+ team, five-outfielder leagues, I’m thinking that Reynolds will be a pretty nice value. He has no ceiling, so if it’s not going well early on in the year, he’s a guy you can drop without being too afraid of how that might punish you.
To boil it all down to one sentence: Reynolds is a bounce-back candidate in 2026, but we’re talking about him bouncing back to an OF3 option rather than being any sort of threat to be an OF1 in the fantasy game.
Projection
600 PA, 74 R, 20 HR, 78 RBI, 8 SB, .256/.331/.432, 24.5 K%, 9% BB%
Ranking
He fits nicely into this Jordan Beck / Daylen Lile range.
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