On The Pirates and The Steelers

PIRATES 

Paul Skenes deals in the Bucs 2-1 

win over the Cardinals

Linda and I toddled on down to PNC Park on Thursday afternoon to take in the Pirates final home game of this 2026 season, a season that was both promising and disappointing.

(Interestingly, we were in attendance courtesy of two free tickets that I received from Pirates prexy Travis Williams that resulted from my written exchanges with him following a Pirates screw up earlier in the season. I wrote about that incident in THIS POST back in July.  Free tickets are nice, but I'm pretty sure that the same foul up that I experienced in July will happen yet again to 2027.)

The weather was nice, Paul Skenes pitched very well although he did not get the decision, and the team won it's 81st game of the season, assuring they will NOT have a losing season.  They now sit at 81-79, and a win either today or tomorrow will give them a winning season, a fact that will no doubt be trumpeted loudly by the PR hacks in the from office.

PIRATES  2026 - THE GOOD

• The emergence of pitchers Braxton Ashcraft and Bubba Chandler as solid major league starting pitchers.
• The astonishing number of home runs that the team has hit, led by Brandon Lowe with 34 of the teams total of 184
• Konnor Griffen making the team at age 19 and being signed to a long term nine year contract
• Mason Montgomery becoming a solid MLB closer
• Solid performance from free agent signee Ryan O'Hearn
• Very good offensive numbers from Oneil Cruz

PIRATES 2026 - THE BAD

• A substandard and disappointing year by his standards from Paul Skenes, although you would take a guy who gives you 32 starts, 10-11 W-L, 3.82 ERA, 200 K's and a 1.12 WHIP almost every time, this was definitely not the Paul Skenes of '24 and '25.
• Injuries that caused key players like Cruz, Griffin, O'Hearn, and Spencer Horwitz to miss huge chunks of the season
• A preponderance of "bullpen games", a development of baseball in the 21st century that I positively hate.
• Don "Donnie" Kelly's sometimes mystifying managerial decisions
• The bullpen which was, despite Montgomery (see above), awful.  How many games were lost because of horrible performances by the relievers?

PIRATES 2026 - THE UGLY

• New pitching coach Bill Murphy's agonizing sloooowwww walks to the mound to counsel his pitchers.  Always made me wish that one of those pitchers would have just hauled off and punched him in the face.  Radio guy Joe Starkey gave him the tremendous nickname of "Mosey Murphy", the comic brilliance of which was no doubt lost on all but longtime fans of Duquesne basketball.
• Did I mention the bullpen?  That was truly awful and ugly all season long.

At the beginning of the season, Pirates leadership in the persons of Bob Nutting, Travis Williams, and Ben Cherington made it clear that the goal for 2026 was nothing less than making the post season.  Well, they fell short, and in fact, hard as it might be to say about a team like the Pirates, they significantly underachieved for this season.  The question now becomes who, if anyone, will be held accountable for what can truly be called a disappointing season?

STEELERS

So far, the Steelers have given us a lackluster 20-13 win over Atlanta wherein the offense scored one touchdown, and an ass-kicking 20-3 loss to New England wherein the offense scored zero touchdowns.  The lasting image of that New England game, and let's hope that it will not be the lasting image of the season, will be his god-awful hit that Aaron Rodgers took:

How does anyone, let alone a 42 yer old man, 

get up and keep playing after this?

The knee jerk tendency after this 1-1 start is to say that the years have finally caught up with Aaron Rodgers and that there is nothing left in the tank for him.  That may well be true, but he has had nothing, and I mean nothing to work with thus far.  It starts with an offensive line that has done nothing but do an impression of Swiss cheese, and a #1 receiver in DK Metcalfe who's done nothing but drop passes, and a running game that has been non-existent, which also traces back to the woes of the offensive line.

Hey, the Patriots played in the Super Bowl last year, so it's no shame to lose to them a Gillette Stadium, but, man, that was a sheer debacle last Sunday, as you can see from Rodgers' body language when he was mercifully pulled near the end of the game, and Mason Rudolph was give mop-up duty.

Tomorrow, the Steelers take on what appears to be an improved Bengals team at Acrisure Stadium. Cincy is favored, but this is a traditional divisional rivalry, and the Bengals can always be counted on to be the CINCY BUNGLES when these teams meet, so who knows? Perhaps we will be singing a different and a happy tune tomorrow night but it's probably not the smart way to bet right now.