The Pirates have certainly looked the part of a much-improved offensive team over the first 24 games of the season. Sure they’ll still have some lackluster performances here and there, but it seems as if they’re getting contributions from a number of guys on a day-to-day basis rather than there being weight on the shoulders of a few.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The numbers support the notion that this offense, one that ranked as one of Major League Baseball’s worst in 2025, has significantly improved. Here are some numbers in a few categories along with their ranks among teams in MLB:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Average: .250 (T-10th)
On-base percentage: .335 (6th)
Slugging percentage: .391 (10th)
OPS: .726 (8th)
Home runs: 27 (T-10th)
Runs: 122 (8th)
Stolen bases: 24 (7th)<\/p>\n
There’s always room for improvement, though. And one area in which the Pirates have struggled is hitting with runners in scoring position. They’re 22nd in MLB with a .229 collective average with runners in scoring position and have the most strikeouts (72) in those situations. They’ve also grounded into the second-most double plays (10). In the first two games of this series against the Rangers, the Pirates are 5 for 15 with runners in scoring position. In their series against the Rays last weekend, they went 7 for 38, including a 2 for 17 showing on Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They’re still scoring runs and the bats have, for the most part, given the team a chance to win games early on. But there has to be more production from guys at the plate when presented with opportunities to drive runners in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“In the games that we haven’t come out on top, it always goes back to the 2 for 17 with runners in scoring position, and last night we had really big hits with two outs and runners in scoring position,” Don Kelly said. “I think the thing that stands out to me is when we stay committed to our approach, we’re getting good pitches to hit and staying within ourselves in those moments, it’s a big key rather than going up there and trying (to do too much). Oneil (Cruz), that was a heck of a swing (Wednesday), and it just looked like he was being Oneil. He wasn’t trying to hit the ball off the top of the foul pole, it just happened by putting a good swing on it. How can we continue to be consistent in being ourselves and staying within the approach is key.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pirates have certainly looked the part of a much-improved offensive team over the first 24 games of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[150,152,151,97517,13551],"class_list":{"0":"post-263464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arlington","8":"tag-arlington","9":"tag-arlington-headlines","10":"tag-arlington-news","11":"tag-feed-article","12":"tag-pirates"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}