Pittsburgh Pirates

Pittsburgh Pirates, American professional baseball team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Sometimes referred to as the “Bucs,” the Pirates are among the oldest teams in baseball and have won the World Series five times (1909, 1925, 1960, 1971, and 1979).

The team that would become the Pirates was founded as the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1882 and played in the American Association before moving to the National League (NL) in 1887. League officials accused the Alleghenys of using “piratical” tactics to steal talented players from opposing teams, and the ball club embraced the label and in 1891 officially adopted the name Pirates.

Shortstop and Pittsburgh-area native Honus Wagner was among the team’s early standouts, playing with the Pirates from 1900 to 1917. The winner of eight batting titles and a member of the first group of players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Wagner led the Pirates to three straight pennants at the turn of the 20th century and to an appearance in the first World Series (1903), which Pittsburgh lost to the Boston Red Sox in eight games.

The Pirates won their first World Series title in 1909, but the team struggled in the 1910s before returning to the World Series to defeat the Washington Senators in 1925. They reached the World Series again in 1927 but lost to a standout New York Yankees squad that featured Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

Less-successful years followed, but the Pirates, led by future Hall of Fame member Roberto Clemente, won the 1960 World Series dramatically with Bill Mazeroski’s game-winning home run in the ninth inning of the seventh game. In the 1970s the Pirates left Forbes Field, their home for more than 60 years, to play in Three Rivers Stadium, where the power hitting of Willie Stargell and Dave Parker helped them clinch the NL Eastern Division six times and win World Series championships in 1971 and 1979. In the mid-1980s the Pirates acquired sluggers Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla, and the team finished atop the NL Eastern Division in three consecutive seasons (1990–92) but failed to advance to the World Series each year.

Bonds signed with the San Francisco Giants as a free agent after the 1992 season, and the Pirates (who began playing in PNC Park in 2001) soon became one of the worst teams in baseball. In 2009 the Pirates had their 17th straight losing season, a record for a professional franchise in the four major North American sports leagues. That streak extended to 20 consecutive seasons until it was broken in 2013, when the Bucs, led by NL Most Valuable Player Andrew McCutchen, won 94 games and earned a berth in the postseason, where the team won the one-game Wild Card playoff but was eliminated in the NL Division Series. Pittsburgh returned to the postseason the following year but was eliminated in the Wild Card Game. In 2015 the team won 98 games—Pittsburgh’s best season since the Bonds era and the second most wins in the major leagues that year—but the team was relegated to the Wild Card contest because of the Pirates residing in the same division as the 100-win St. Louis Cardinals, and the Bucs again lost the one-game playoff. The team’s three-season postseason streak ended in 2016 as Pittsburgh posted a losing record. The Pirates continued to struggle in the ensuing years, and in 2021 the team lost 101 games.