The Pirates are a mess. They fired manager Derek Shelton after a 12-26 start and currently sit 11.5 games out of a playoff spot. Their situation is dire enough that fans and pundits alike have wondered whether they might trade Paul Skenes just 1.5 years into his big league career. That’s never seemed likely, and a Pirates official recently said there’s “no way” the team would consider that, but the fact that it even needs to be said speaks to the current status of the team.

Pittsburgh’s ongoing rebuild simply hasn’t worked as hoped. Trades of Starling Marte, Josh Bell, Adam Frazier, Joe Musgrove, Jameson Taillon, Richard Rodriguez and others haven’t netted nearly enough talent. Other possible trade chips have been held onto and seen their stock dwindle. One player who many have expected to be on that list of traded Pirates stars over the years is closer David Bednar, but he’s still in Pittsburgh and working to rebuild his stock after a poor 2024 season and after being optioned to Triple-A amid some early-2025 struggles.

Bednar may well have been traded by now, it seems, if were up to the front office alone. But Noah Hiles of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports in his latest mailbag column that ownership has previously “stepped in” to prevent the baseball operations staff from trading him.

It’s not clear when a potential Bednar trade might’ve been coming together. He’s been the subject of rumors dating back to the 2022 season, when the Pirates reportedly rejected what at the time were described as “tempting” offers for both Bednar and outfielder Bryan Reynolds. Bednar’s name has been synonymous with each of the two subsequent trade deadlines as well, and he’ll surely be talked about again this summer. Hiles notes that he does not expect ownership intervention this time around — presumably a reflection on Bednar’s struggles over the past calendar year, his mounting price tag ($5.9MM in 2025) and his dwindling level of club control (through the 2026 season).

Ownership stepping in to meddle in baseball operations affairs is hardly a situation that’s unique to the Pirates. Over the years there have been various reports of Angels owner Arte Moreno going over his front office’s head in free agency and more recently of quashing a potential Shohei Ohtani trade late in his tenure with the team. Astros owner Jim Crane operated without a GM in place for months after former GM James Click’s ouster in Houston and signed Jose Abreu and Rafael Montero to regrettable free agent deals while serving as the de facto head of baseball operations. You can go all the way back to 2012 and find reports of Rockies owner Dick Monfort nixing a trade that would’ve sent Jorge De La Rosa from Colorado to Baltimore in exchange for then-prospect Eduardo Rodriguez.

Bednar likely holds some extra value in the eyes of Pirates chairman Bob Nutting and the rest of the ownership group. He’s a Pittsburgh native who grew up rooting for the Pirates and quickly became the most (and only) productive player acquired from the aforementioned trade of Musgrove. Those Pittsburgh roots presumably make Bednar a bit more marketable, although his hometown ties to the area were not expressly mentioned by Hiles as a reason for ownership’s intervention in those trade talks.

Regardless of the reason, it’s likely that prior ownership protest prevented GM Ben Cherington and his staff from capitalizing on Bednar closer to peak value. Bednar broke out as a top-notch setup man in 2021 and by 2022 had assumed the closer’s role in Pittsburgh. From 2022-23, he pitched 119 innings with a 2.27 ERA, 30.6% strikeout rate, 7.6% walk rate and 0.53 homers per nine frames — all while compiling 58 saves for a team that only won 138 games. A hearty 42% of the Pirates’ victories in that two-year period were nailed down by Bednar.

Back in 2022, Bednar would’ve come with four and a half more seasons of club control. In 2023, that’d have (obviously) been three and a half. The asking price for an All-Star closer in his pre-arb years would presumably have been substantial. By 2024, Bednar’s value had plummeted. He missed several weeks in the first half due to an oblique strain and lugged an unsightly 4.95 ERA into the trade deadline. If ownership stepped in to quash a trade at that point, it’d be a bit more understandable, as selling low on a pitcher as talented as Bednar understandably may not have been viewed favorably. Again, the timetable surrounding the events isn’t clear.

Whether due to ownership or lack of sufficient offers, Bednar stayed put last summer — and the Pirates are probably better off for it. It’s true that he struggled enough early on to briefly be optioned to Triple-A Indianapolis, but that brief reset looks to have done wonders. In 13 1/3 innings since returning, Bednar has posted a sharp 3.38 ERA with exceptional rate stats. He’s punched out 20 batters (37% of his total opponents) against just one walk (1.9%). His velocity is as strong as ever, with a fastball sitting 97.1 mph, and he’s inducing grounders at what would be a career-high 48.5% clip (way up from last year’s 37.1%).

If Bednar can continue anywhere close to that pace over the next month or two, he’ll be an in-demand asset once again. With the Pirates in a total state of collapse and Bednar only controlled through 2026, he’d seem like a very strong candidate to change hands this time around. That’s perhaps even truer given that from midseason 2024 through early 2025, it looked like the Pirates had missed their opportunity to trade him for anything of note at all.