Pirates chaos turns ESPN insider's bold Opening Day take into instant joke

Buster Olney's take didn’t even make it out of the first inning.

That’s not a knock on the veteran ESPN insider so much as it is a perfect snapshot of just how violently, absurdly fast baseball can flip a narrative on its head — especially when it comes to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

For about 90 seconds on Opening Day, Olney looked prophetic.

Brandon Lowe stepped in for his first at-bat as a Pirate and immediately delivered — a two-run homer, loud contact, instant payoff on one of the most significant offseason acquisitions this front office actually managed to pull off. It was the exact kind of moment Pirates fans had been begging for: a proven bat showing up right away.

So Olney fired off the tweet: “If the Pirates make the playoffs, the narrative starts with that Lowe homer.”

And honestly? In that moment, it didn’t feel crazy. It felt like the beginning of something.

Then the bottom of the first happened. And everything — the optimism, the offseason narratives, the carefully constructed hope — detonated in real time.

Oneil Cruz misread a ball that turned into instant damage. Then another defensive lapse compounded it. All of a sudden, what was supposed to be a cleaner, more reliable version of Cruz in center field looked… exactly like the version that raised red flags last year.

Behind it, Paul Skenes — the ace, the anchor, the guy this entire season quietly hinges on — came completely unraveled. Walks, traffic, no command. And before anyone could even process it, he was out of the game after recording just two outs.

Thirty-seven pitches. Five runs allowed. Gone. And just like that, Olney’s tweet didn’t just age poorly — it became a meme.

Buster Olney's Opening Day tweet about Brandon Lowe's Pirates homer aged like milk

If you think about it, this is the Pirates experience in a nutshell. The high is intoxicating, the low is immediate, and the whiplash is unavoidable.

Lowe’s homer should matter. Over 162 games, it probably still will. That swing is exactly why he’s here — to lengthen a lineup that desperately needed credibility.

But Opening Day doesn’t live in the long term. It lives in the moment. And the moment was chaos.

That’s why Olney is getting roasted. Not because the take was objectively ridiculous — but because it was premature in the most Pirates way imaginable.

If anything, the tweet wasn’t wrong. It was just about 161 games too early.