Pittsburgh Pirates Week in Review: A 2-5 Skid Tests the Buyers' Nerve

The Pirates spent the month building a credible wild-card case, and then spent this week poking holes in it. Pittsburgh went 2-5 against the Cubs, Diamondbacks, and Reds, slid back to .500 at 55-55, and lost Thursday night in Cincinnati on a walk-off infield grounder — the kind of defeat that summarizes a week all by itself. The twist in this edition of Pittsburgh Pirates news is that none of it seems to have changed the front office's posture: with the deadline set for Monday at 6 p.m. ET, insiders still expect the Bucs to buy, and the roster's needs have rarely been spelled out more clearly than they were over these seven games.

The Week That Was: A 2-5 Slide for the Pirates

The Cubs took the first two at PNC Park — a tight 3-2 loss on Friday, July 24, then an 11-0 flattening on Saturday in which Paul Skenes struck out a season-high 11 but still took the loss as Chicago piled on, with a six-run sixth and Pete Crow-Armstrong's 23rd homer doing most of the damage while Shota Imanaga continued his career-long ownership of Pittsburgh's lineup. Sunday brought the rebound: an 8-7 win powered by Ryan O'Hearn's third-inning grand slam off Jameson Taillon, which staked Pittsburgh to a 7-1 lead. The Cubs chipped away for the rest of the afternoon — Nico Hoerner's eighth-inning RBI single made it a one-run game — but the Bucs held on and avoided the sweep.

Monday's opener against Arizona was the week's best story, a 3-2 win in ten innings. Bryan Reynolds tied it with an RBI double in the eighth, the bullpen strung together four and two-thirds scoreless, and Brandon Lowe — who had three hits and two RBIs — ended it with a walk-off single in the tenth. Then the floor gave out: an 8-7 loss Tuesday, a 3-0 shutout Wednesday in which Arizona's starter carried a two-run Gabriel Moreno homer through eight innings, and Thursday's 3-2 walk-off loss in Cincinnati. That one hurt in a specific way — Lowe had tied it with his 23rd homer in the sixth, but Elly De La Cruz (3-for-4, three doubles, two steals) scored the winner in the ninth when Nathaniel Lowe beat out a potential double-play ball. Gregory Soto took the loss, and rookies Hunter Barco and Noah Murdock had shaky relief outings in their first taste of a pennant-race road game.

Standout Performances: Lowe, O'Hearn, and Skenes in Defeat

Brandon Lowe was the week's clear position-player headliner: the extra-innings walk-off Monday, the game-tying 23rd homer Thursday, and steady traffic in between. O'Hearn's grand slam was the biggest single swing of the week, and Reynolds' late game-tying double on Monday was the quiet at-bat that made the walk-off possible. On the mound, Skenes' Saturday line is the strangest of the season — a season-high 11 strikeouts in an 11-0 loss — but it came on the heels of a seven-inning, one-run win over Cleveland the previous weekend, and his overall body of work (he entered Saturday 9-8 with a 3.43 ERA and 138 strikeouts over 115.1 innings) remains the backbone of everything Pittsburgh wants to do in August. If the offense ever scores for him consistently, that win-loss record will stop slandering the ERA next to it.

The bullpen is the other side of that ledger. Pirates relievers have blown 19 of 40 save opportunities this season with a 4.38 ERA that ranks 22nd in baseball, and this week added fresh exhibits: Tuesday's 8-7 loss to Arizona and Thursday's ninth inning in Cincinnati both turned on relief work. Monday's four-plus scoreless innings proved the group can do it; the problem is guessing which version shows up.

Standings: Wild Card Within Reach, Division Long Gone

At 55-55, the Pirates sit third in the NL Central, roughly 13 games behind runaway Milwaukee (67-41 through Wednesday) and six-plus back of the second-place Cubs at 61-47. The division race is over in all but arithmetic. The wild card is not: Pittsburgh entered Thursday about two games out of the final NL spot, in a scrum that includes Miami, Washington, and the same Arizona club that just took two of three at PNC Park, with playoff odds hovering around 35 percent by FanGraphs' math earlier in the week. Even this weekend's opponent matters on that scoreboard — Cincinnati sits at 51-57 after Thursday's walk-off, four back of the Bucs and highly motivated to drag them down the standings. That's exactly the profile of a team whose deadline behavior matters: close enough to justify buying, flawed enough that standing pat is a decision too.

Roster Moves, Injuries, and the Deadline Case

The transaction wire was busy even before the main event, with manager Don Kelly's roster churning almost daily — rookies Hunter Barco, Noah Murdock, and Jhostynxon Garcia all came up from Indianapolis this week as the front office reshuffled the margins. The recent ledger:

• Ron Marinaccio — right-handed reliever acquired from San Diego on July 23, a first step toward the bullpen fix.
• Johnathan Rodríguez — outfielder added from Baltimore on July 27 for cash.
• José Urquidy — reportedly dealt to the White Sox on July 26 in a depth swap.
• Endy Rodríguez — activated from the injured list July 27, restoring catching depth; Dennis Santana was released July 29.
• Oneil Cruz — still working back from left-hand fractures suffered June 11; he has been on a return track since the All-Star break and is expected back soon, which would be the best "acquisition" of all.
• Spencer Horwitz — progressing from a hamstring strain, on a slower timeline.

Bigger swings may come. Reporting this week says the Pirates are expected to be aggressive before Monday's deadline, with needs at reliever, right-handed bat, and left-handed rotation depth, and names like Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, Luke Weaver, Jo Adell, and Lane Thomas floated as plausible fits. The bullpen case is the loudest: 19 blown saves will bury a wild-card bid all by themselves, and four of this week's five losses came by three runs or fewer. Top prospect Seth Hernandez is described as untouchable, though other names in the system could move in a significant deal. Whether restraint or aggression wins out by Monday evening will define this deadline — and probably this season.

What's Next for the Pittsburgh Pirates

Three more in Cincinnati close out the four-game set, and every one of them is functionally a wild-card elimination skirmish against a Reds team trying to climb back in:

• Friday, July 31: at Cincinnati.
• Saturday, August 1: at Cincinnati.
• Sunday, August 2: at Cincinnati, finale.
• Monday, August 3: trade deadline, 6 p.m. ET.

The week in review for the Pittsburgh Pirates is easy to summarize and hard to swallow: five losses by a combined ten runs, a bullpen that keeps writing the front office's shopping list for it, and a wild-card spot still sitting right there, two games away. The Cruz timeline, the Cincinnati series, and Monday's deadline give this team three separate chances to change its trajectory within the next four days. Teams at exactly .500 on July 31 rarely get to feel this consequential — the Pirates should enjoy it, and then go win a series.