Horwitz poised for big year in Bucs' lineup with more pop

This story was excerpted from Alex Stumpf’s Pirates Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

It was around PiratesFest last year during his ramp up to the season that Spencer Horwitz’s right wrist started to flare up. While he didn’t know it at the time, that would be the start of a sequence that would lead to surgery, missing the first month and a half of the season and then a slump with his new club.

This year at PiratesFest, the infielder was all smiles.

“It feels great to be healthy,” Horwitz said Friday. “This is the healthiest I've felt in a long time, knock on wood, and I think the offseason has gone great with strength levels and what I wanted to work on with baseball hitting and defensively. I'm just excited to show it on the field."

Horwitz put together a fine season in 2025, hitting .272 with 11 home runs and 51 RBIs in 411 plate appearances. Even with his late start, his 1.6 WAR was second among Pirates position players, according to Baseball-Reference.

He’s aiming for more this year. Defensively, he’s preparing to play both first and second base. Offensively, he’s done bat speed training and tried to build general strength. Both could yield more pop.

Even if he just replicates his 2025 results, he should fit in nicely into a lineup that looks more promising than a year ago. That early-season slump he had last year should also be a thing of the past.

Some of those struggles were health related, getting back his timing after missing the start of the season. Some of it was mechanical, excelling in the second half of the season once he opened up his stance and focused on making sure his direction took him toward the center of the field.

And some of it, he will admit, was mental. It’s why that late-season push, where he had a .916 OPS after the All-Star break, was a “weight off my shoulders.”

“I put a lot of pressure on myself early, being the only acquisition last year,” Horwitz said. “I wanted to help this team so bad, and I think I did a poor job of that in the beginning, just trying to do too much. But also with the injury, new team – it was a lot for me honestly.”

The Pirates went into the 2024 offseason with high hopes, and while the Horwitz trade looks like a solid move now, it also ended up being the only major acquisition they made that winter. Other additions were mostly veterans on one-year deals, which turned out to be not enough. The Pirates’ offense struggled mightily, and while Horwitz led the team with a .787 OPS, it wasn’t enough to keep the Pirates out of the cellar in basically every offensive stat that mattered.

This offseason was a different story. The offense needed a boost, and the Pirates traded for Brandon Lowe and Jake Mangum from the Rays and signed Ryan O'Hearn. They’re still on the market looking for ways to improve further, but adding two All-Stars in Lowe and O’Hearn should give the lineup more length and upside.

“I think they both add much-needed depth and pop to this lineup,” Horwitz said.

We don’t know where manager Don Kelly is going to pencil Horwitz into the lineup – neither does Horwitz, for what it’s worth – but the whole goal this offseason was to improve the lineup. Some of that was going to be external, but also maximizing the players they already had in house. A deeper lineup should help make that possible.

"I think adding those two guys, Brandon and Ryan, they're two middle-of-the-order guys and that adds a lot of depth to our lineup,” Horwitz said. “I think last year I hit seventh twice. I might be starting the year hitting seventh. I might be starting the year hitting first or second. I don't think that's a hit on my ability, I think that's a blessing that we have so much talent now.

“I think Ryan, Brandon, Bryan [Reynolds], Oneil [Cruz] – all of them – we're just super excited to be able to lean on each other. If somebody's having an off day, we know the guy behind us or in front of us will pick us up."