Johan Oviedo trade only makes Pirates’ biggest weakness more obvious

The Pittsburgh Pirates finally pulled the trigger on a real, honest-to-God upside swing — sending Johan Oviedo and Tyler Samaniego to the Boston Red Sox for top-100 prospect Jhostynxon Garcia (and Jesús Travieso). For a franchise that never cashes in pitching depth for a young, controllable impact bat, this was the kind of move fans have been begging for.

Power upside? Team control? Youth? Sign us up. But somehow, even when the Pirates make the right type of trade… they also manage to shine a spotlight the size of the Roberto Clemente Bridge on one of their biggest structural flaws. Because here’s the part nobody can pretend isn’t a problem anymore: without Samaniego, the Pirates now have exactly two left-handed pitchers on their 40-man roster.

Hunter Barco. Evan Sisk. That’s it. That’s the list.

Barco had never thrown a major league pitch before September and has only recently climbed above Double-A. Sisk is a solid depth reliever — not a late-inning weapon, not a high-leverage matchup guy, not a swingman, not a long-term lock. Just… a guy.

You don’t need a magnifying glass to see the issue here. Every contender — every functional pitching staff, frankly — has at least a couple of competent lefties to throw at lefty-heavy lineups in the sixth, seventh, eighth innings and beyond. The Pirates? They have vibes and hope.

Samaniego wasn’t Josh Hader or anything, but losing him matters because the Pirates have zero internal redundancy in this specific area. Now you’ve got a pitching staff that is even more unbalanced than it was 48 hours ago — and it wasn’t exactly symmetrical then.

Sure, Ben Cherington absolutely needed to add offense. Garcia checks that box in a big way. But in filling one hole, the Pirates somehow dug another one deeper. The bullpen was already an uncertainty. Now it’s a positional black hole.

You can’t run a modern bullpen without lefties. You just can't. Ask any manager in baseball how often they need someone to neutralize a Bryce Harper type, a Freddie Freeman type, a Matt Olson type or, frankly, any team that stacks lefties 2-3-4 in the order. The Pirates’ current answer is: “Uhhh… Barco at some point, eventually?”

Pirates' lack of left-handed pitching is fixable, but Ben Cherington has to be proactive

This is where fans get nervous, because “just add lefties” sounds easy… until you remember the Pirates’ track record of actually adding major-league relievers. They’ll scout 74 non-tendered arms, sign a journeyman to a split contract, and convince themselves everything is solved. Look at what it took for the Mariners to acquire an high-upside lefty this weekend: a top-50 prospect.

The Pirates searching through the bargain bin instead is not going to fly this time. They need multiple lefties — one high-leverage, one middle, maybe even a depth swing piece. They need to spend. They need to trade. They need to act like a team that just traded pitching for a bat and now must backfill the pitching.

Otherwise, the rotation won’t matter. The lineup improvements won’t matter. Paul Skenes can throw 100 with a 91 mph slider and none of it will matter when the seventh inning rolls around and the Pirates are asking Evan Sisk to face every lefty in the NL Central.

So, the Oviedo trade itself? Good. Necessary. Encouraging. But the moment Samaniego’s name hit the transaction sheet, the Pirates’ roster construction problem blared through a megaphone: This team has no left-handed pitching.

If the Pirates want fans to believe 2026 is the year they climb, not drift, this is the next flaw they must fix — immediately, aggressively, and with actual intention. Because the only thing scarier than a Pirates bullpen with too many question marks is a Pirates bullpen that can’t throw left-handed at all.