Early Thoughts on the Pittsburgh Pirates 2026 Draft
The Pittsburgh Pirates have the largest bonus pool in the 2026 draft, no scouting director, and a bad draft history.
The 2026 MLB Draft is one month away, taking place on July 11th and 12th.
The Pittsburgh Pirates have the fifth overall pick, and they also have the largest bonus pool in the draft at $19,130,700.
After failing to sign last year’s 50th overall pick, Angel Cervantes, the Pirates received the 51st pick in this year’s draft as compensation. That pick comes with $1,938,100 added to their bonus pool. They also received the 34th overall pick for their Competitive Balance round A selection, which adds $2,897,400. The fifth overall pick is worth $8,336,500, which would be the second highest bonus in team history if the Pirates went full-slot.
Those three picks alone give the Pirates more spending power than 18 teams in the draft.
You can check out the draft slot values for every pick on the Pirates Prospects Draft Pick Signing Tracker, which will also keep track of the draft and signing period.
I have some thoughts on the upcoming draft, but first, I want to share an update to the signing tracker.
Yesterday, I completed an update to the Draft Pick Signing Tracker. If you go to that page, you will now find career stats for every player the Pirates drafted since 2012, which was the year the current bonus pool system was implemented.
The career stats are filtered down by Batters and Pitchers, and include both Signed and Unsigned players. You can sort by draft year, or see the entire 14-year history in a single chart.
That history isn’t great.
The Pirates have drafted 212 position players since 2012. Only 36 have made the Majors (17%), from the single plate appearance of John Bormann, to the 4346 plate appearances of 2013 sixth round pick Adam Frazier.
The 17% mark seems about league average. However, the success rate of the hitters who made the Majors tells a story of why the Pirates have struggled for so long. Only one hitter in that entire group has an MLB OPS over .800. That hitter is Austin Meadows, who the Pirates traded away in 2018 before his MLB career took off.
Only six other hitters have a career OPS above .700. One of those is current rookie Konnor Griffin. Two others are unsigned picks Paul DeJong (2014, 38th round) and Jake McCarthy (2015, 23rd round). The other three are Jordan Luplow, Connor Joe, and Frazier.
No disrespect to those final three players, but all three had careers as bench players, and at best, role player starters. That’s not a great example of success over a 14-year draft period.
DeJong is the only drafted player with over 100 home runs. Meadows and Frazier join him as the only batters with over 50 home runs.
The pitching side looks a bit better, but not by much.
The best pitcher so far is a guy the Pirates didn’t sign in 2012: Walker Buehler. That year’s 14th round pick leads all Pirates draft picks in strikeouts, and has one of the best ERAs of all drafted pitchers.
Paul Skenes is already high on the list, and will no doubt end up the best. He’s currently fifth overall in strikeouts, despite having by far the lowest inning total in the top five. He also has the highest ERA of any pitcher with over 100 innings. The only pitcher with a better ERA at any inning total is 2012 unsigned first rounder Mark Appel, who only threw 10.1 MLB innings.
There are some encouraging signs from the current pitching staff.
Braxton Ashcraft ranks second in ERA among pitchers with 100+ innings. Carmen Mlodzinski ranks third. Jared Jones ranks seventh. Mitch Keller ranks 12th. Bubba Chandler has under 100 career innings, but he’s in line with Keller around the 4.50 mark, which is slightly below league-average.
There are only five pitchers drafted during this 14-year span with an ERA below 4.00 and 100+ innings in the Majors. Skenes, Ashcraft, and Mlodzinski are three. Unsigned picks Buehler and 2013 40th rounder Bryan Baker are the others.
In terms of strikeouts, only three pitchers have struck out more than 500 batters during this time. Buehler ranks first, with Keller second, and Chad Kuhl third. Unsigned 2016 41st overall pick Nick Lodolo is fourth, Skenes is fifth, and unsigned 2015 32nd rounder Cole Irvin is sixth — rounding out the only others above 400 strikeouts. JT Brubaker, Shane Baz, and Baker are the only others with above 250 strikeouts.
If you feel like wasting some time this weekend taking a trip down draft memory lane, check out the new stats section on the Draft Pick Signing Tracker.
The same feature was added to the International Signing Tracker, which shows the career results of signings since 2021. The majority of these players are minor leaguers, with only Esmerlyn Valdez making his MLB debut. Antwone Kelly is expected to join him this weekend, after leading all Pirates international pitchers during this timeframe in strikeouts. Both were signed in 2021, reflecting the longer path to the Majors for international signings.
But this article is about the draft, and I wanted to bring up the Pirates’ history to highlight a concern with next month’s draft.
The Pirates don’t have a great draft history.
In fact, it was one of the major failings of General Manager Ben Cherington’s rebuild to make zero changes to the drafting process during the entire rebuild period. The scouting department that resided over the drafts since 2012, including scouting director Joe DelliCarri, were kept in place for the 2020-2023 drafts.
That included first overall pick Henry Davis, top ten overall first rounders Nick Gonzales and Termarr Johnson, and a lucky lottery ball that led to Skenes. Even in the Skenes draft, the Pirates didn’t decide until 20 minutes before the pick.
Cherington finally made a change before the 2024 draft, adding Justin Horowitz from the Boston Red Sox as the new scouting director to replace DelliCarri.
Horowitz oversaw two drafts. The first one led to taking Griffin in 2024. The second one led to Seth Hernandez in 2025. Griffin is regarded as one of the most promising young players in the game, after previously being the top prospect in the game. Hernandez is now emerging as one of the best pitching prospects in the game, only in his first full season.
The problem here? Horowitz was signed away this past offseason by the Washington Nationals, becoming their Assistant General Manager.
The bigger problem is that the Pirates chose to go with no replacement.
Assistant General Manager Kevan Graves oversaw Horowitz the last two seasons, and will now oversee the 2026 draft without a scouting director in place. The Pirates plan to search for a permanent solution after the 2026 draft, but they’ll enter this draft with the most money to spend out of any team, and no traditional scouting director.
I have a lot of respect for Graves, who is one of the brightest minds I’ve encountered in the game. The problem here lies with the resources of time and energy.
Graves was overseeing Horowitz the last two seasons, but Horowitz was still putting a lot of energy into overseeing the scouting process. The Pirates are expecting Graves to pick up that entire slack, increasing his time and energy into that one area. Even if Graves dedicated 100% of his time and energy to the draft this year, the Pirates would still have less time and energy spent on the draft without a full-time scouting director added to the mix.
Graves does have people pitching in, from Assistant General Manager Steve Sanders, to DelliCarri, who is still in the organization. However, this isn’t a change from the resources available to Horowitz.
The draft is probably the most important aspect of the game for a small market team like the Pirates. Especially during a rebuild.
During Cherington’s rebuild, he retained a scouting director who had a long track record of poor results. After four drafts inside the top ten picks, Cherington finally made his first move on the draft front, adding Horowitz. That move so far looks like it was a good one, based on the early results from Griffin and Hernandez.
Yet, Cherington didn’t follow up on that move. He didn’t try to retain Horowitz as an Assistant General Manager. He didn’t replace Horowitz with a new scouting director. Graves is being put in a tough position, because he’s overseeing a draft with more money to spend than any previous draft, and fewer resources to dedicate toward how to spend that money.
The decision to go into the upcoming draft with no scouting director is inexplicable. Horowitz joined the Nationals on October 24th, and the Pirates likely had earlier notice that he could be leaving. They had an entire offseason to find a replacement for Graves to oversee, and instead, they just dumped the extra workload onto Graves.
That’s the biggest trend under Cherington as General Manager. Inaction, followed by the expectation for individual players or front office employees to go above and beyond to make up for the inaction.
This trend happened with the draft twice, where Cherington waited four drafts to hire his own scouting director, and is now skipping having a scouting direction in an important year.
It happened with the international period, where Cherington didn’t make a change until five years into his tenure, again despite a horrible international signing track record that existed when he took over.
And the free agency spending this past offseason was Cherington’s first real attempt at putting a winner on the field in seven years as General Manager, despite having Skenes for the previous two offseasons.
It’s too late now to add a scouting director for the upcoming draft. That should have been a priority last October, four months before the high school and college seasons began.
Next month, the Pirates will send Graves to the podium short-handed, operating with the biggest bonus pool in the draft. The Pirates finally had some draft momentum with Griffin and Hernandez, and they could have continued that momentum with the largest bonus pool this year. Instead, they fumbled the momentum away with continued inaction, in the area where depleted resources hurt a small market team the most.
If there’s any bright spot, it would be difficult to do worse than the history before Horowitz.
Until the next time I go live…
-Tim Williams