On Thursday night, the Pittsburgh Pirates finally gave Paul Skenes some run support. They scored five runs while he was in the game and seven overall, helping him earn his seventh win of the season in a 7-0 victory over the Cincinnati Reds.
The Pirates also flexed their power muscles with a pair of home runs. Bryan Reynolds’ solo shot on a 3-0 pitch in the bottom of the first started the scoring, while Henry Davis finished it with his two-run blast in the bottom of the seventh.
It was only Pittsburgh’s 21st game with multiple home runs this year. The Pirates rank last in MLB with 83 homers — 15 fewer than the 29th-ranked San Diego Padres.
At its current pace, Pittsburgh is on track to finish the season with 116 home runs. That would be 44 fewer than last year (a 27.5% drop), when the Pirates ranked 25th in MLB with 160 long balls.
Despite Pittsburgh’s drop-off, home runs are slightly up across the league from last year. MLB teams are averaging 1.14 homers per game this season compared to 1.12 last season, so what’s going on with the Pirates?
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Last season, Pittsburgh had three players reach 20 homers: Bryan Reynolds (24), Oneil Cruz (21) and Andrew McCutchen (20). However, only Cruz is on pace to reach 20 homers again. He currently has 18 and will likely set a new career high, barring injury.
Reynolds has just 11 homers, however, and is on pace to fall short of 20 for the first time since 2020. He’s having the worst full offensive season of his career (excluding 2020), showing possible signs of decline in his age-30 season.
Meanwhile, McCutchen is nearly 39, so some decline was to be expected from him as well. He also has 11 homers, but his .135 Isolated Power is the lowest of his career.
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Beyond them, no one else is on pace to reach double digits, as nobody else on the team has more than five homers. Joey Bart only has one home run this year after swatting 13 last year, and Rowdy Tellez is no longer with the team after contributing 13 round-trippers last season. Tellez has 12 homers this year, which would rank second on the Pirates behind only Cruz.
There’s still time for the Pittsburgh to get hot, especially in August while the weather is still warm. The Pirates already have 11 homers in seven games this month after smashing eight against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field last weekend, but PNC Park is not Coors Field. In fact, PNC Park has been the toughest place to homer in over the last three seasons, according to Baseball Savant’s park factors.
At the end of the day, Pittsburgh simply doesn’t have enough thump in its lineup. Regression from several top power hitters, combined with the loss of Tellez, has diminished the club’s ability to go yard. Spencer Horwitz and Tommy Pham have shown flashes, but nobody else has really stepped up.
The dearth of power is a big reason why the Pirates have one of the worst offenses in baseball. They rank last in runs per game (3.57), slugging percentage (.347), OPS (.651) and total bases (1,338). With how difficult hitting has become in the modern game, it’s difficult to score runs consistently without knocking the ball over the fence.
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With McCutchen heading towards free agency and Reynolds now in his 30s, it’s clear that Pittsburgh must prioritize adding power this offseason if it wants to jumpstart its offense and start winning more games.
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