Mariners fans won't believe which team was determined to steal Josh Naylor

Seattle Mariners fans won’t believe which team was determined to steal Josh Naylor, because it’s the one franchise everybody assumes will never crash the high-roller table. The Pittsburgh Pirates have spent the better part of three decades treating free agency like a thrift store: browse the bargain rack, maybe grab a one-year flier, and get out before the prices get scary. 

Their priciest free-agent deal ever is still a three-year, $39 million pact for Francisco Liriano, signed more than a decade ago. Since 1991, no team in baseball has spent less in free agency, and it’s not particularly close. The Pirates’ comfort zone has always been cost-controlled youth, not nine-figure checks.

Pirates were ready to break the bank for Josh Naylor before Mariners shut the door

That’s exactly what makes the latest reporting so jaw-dropping. Jeff Passan’s big offseason intel dump at ESPN doesn’t give the Mariners a ton of direct headlines — until you get to the part where he casually drops that Pittsburgh, of all teams, was ready to blow past its own history for Josh Naylor. The Pirates, per Passan, were prepared to more than double that old Liriano benchmark to pry Naylor away before Seattle locked him up for five years and $92.5 million in the first major signing of the winter. For a franchise that has never pushed a free-agent deal over the $40 million line, lining up that kind of offer for a first baseman is not just aggressive. It’s off-brand to the point of feeling almost fictional. 

And yet, the more you zoom out, the more this bizarre rumor actually tracks. The Pirates just watched Paul Skenes win a Cy Young Award while their offense spent the summer stapled to the floor. Pittsburgh finished last in MLB in runs scored in 2025, yet still managed a top-five run prevention unit thanks to a rotation and pitching staff that quietly shoved all year and led the league in shutouts. That’s the kind of split that forces an ownership group to either squint and pretend this is fine… or finally acknowledge that you can’t waste pre-arb ace seasons forever. When you’re dead last in scoring and watching a generational arm carry a 1.97 ERA around with a .500 record to show for it, even the most historically frugal front office starts to feel the urgency. 

Layer on the financial side, and the picture sharpens even more. Multiple reports in recent days have suggested the Pirates are prepared to add somewhere in the neighborhood of $30–40 million to their 2026 payroll — a massive jump relative to how they usually creep into the winter.

From a baseball fit standpoint, it’s not hard to see why Naylor would have been at the top of that list. The Pirates desperately need an everyday bat who brings both thump and edge — someone who can lengthen the lineup and set a tone that losing seasons are no longer acceptable. Naylor checks every box: left-handed power, track record against elite pitching, and an energy level that might actually register on a Richter scale. You can picture it: helmet-slapping celebrations in Pittsburgh instead of Seattle, Naylor screaming at the dugout after a big homer while Skenes smirks from the top step, finally watching his offense show up.

All of which makes the Mariners’ early strike look even more important in hindsight. For a front office that has taken plenty of heat for being too cautious in past winters, this was the opposite: an aggressive, targeted move that answered a need and blocked a surprise steal in one shot. 

So yes, it’s ridiculous — in the best possible way for Seattle — that the Pirates were apparently ready to smash their own spending history to steal Josh Naylor. It underscores how valuable he’s seen around the league and how dire things have gotten in Pittsburgh’s lineup. 

But it also underlines something else that should resonate with Mariners fans: when the right player came along, Seattle acted faster and thought bigger than a team that had every incentive to overpay. If the Mariners finally push deeper into October with Naylor hitting big postseason homers at T-Mobile Park, this little footnote from Passan’s column might read as the sliding-door moment when they kept a would-be Pirates splash right where it belonged, in the realm of “you won’t believe this” instead of “how did we let that happen?”