The Pirates have signed right-hander Beau Burrows to a minor league deal, according to the transactions tracker on Burrows’s MLB.com profile page. Burrows had already spent the 2025 season in the organization on a minor league deal.
Burrows, 29, last pitched in the majors back in 2021. A first-round pick by the Tigers in the 2015 draft, Burrows was a one-time top 100 prospect in the sport who made his big league debut during the shortened 2020 season. The right-hander has just 11 MLB appearances on his resume between the 2020 and ’21 seasons. He posted an 8.64 ERA in six appearances for the Tigers at the big league level before being plucked off waivers from the Twins in 2021 and turning in a 12.54 ERA across 9 1/3 frames for Minnesota. Burrows has identical 12.5% strikeout and walk rates for his career and has allowed eight home runs in 17 2/3 career innings of work.
It’s an ugly big league resume, brief as it may be. Burrows hasn’t appeared in the majors since, but spent the next few years shuffling between various minor league systems. He pitched for the Dodgers’, Braves’, and Phillies’ Triple-A affiliates between 2022 and ’24 before he found himself released by the Phillies in June of 2024. He caught on in the independent American Association for the remainder of the 2024 campaign but struggled even at that level, leaving him with an uncertain path as 2025 began. Burrows managed to find an opportunity in the Mexcian League and signed on with the Tecos de los Dos Laredos for the 2025 campaign.
Burrows didn’t perform especially well in the Mexican League, but scouts at the time suggested that his velocity and quality curveball caught the attention of MLB clubs. That was enough to get Burrows a path back into affiliated ball, and he signed a minor league deal with the Pirates back in May. He pitched to a 2.94 ERA in 49 innings of work across four levels of the minors for Pittsburgh. While he struggled in his 16 appearances at Triple-A late in the season, he was utterly dominant at Double-A with a 0.44 ERA and a 28.4% strikeout rate. Now, Burrows is set to rejoin the Pirates and continue the development work he spent 2025 in the organization working on.
Burrows’s first task in 2026 will surely be to finally conquer the Triple-A level, where he’s posted a career 6.10 ERA. If the 29-year-old can show some mastery over the highest level of the minors this year, it wouldn’t be a shock if the Pirates found a way to get him back into the big leagues for the first time in half a decade given how good he looked throughout the lower levels of the minors this year, as well as the tantalizing ability scouts felt Burrows flashed during his time in the Mexican League earlier this year. Joe La Sorsa, Noah Murdock, and Michael Darrell-Hicks are among the other non-roster relief arms the Pirates have in the organization at Triple-A headed into next year.