The Pirates have been starved for offense for most of this century, so when a night like this happens, you let it breathe. O'Hearn, in his first year in Pittsburgh after an All-Star 2025 split between Baltimore and San Diego, turned PNC Park into his personal launching pad against Atlanta, and the Pirates' celebration cone barely got a rest.
O'Hearn rounds the bases on an early homer as the Pirates' dugout breaks out the cone for the first time.
That was just the appetizer. O'Hearn opened the scoring with a grand slam off Atlanta starter Hurston Waldrep, added a three-run shot off Waldrep later in the game, then went back to the well against reliever Connor Thomas for a third homer and a third trip through the Pirates' dugout ritual. By the time it was over, Pittsburgh had rolled to a 12-4 win and O'Hearn had etched his name into the franchise record book, breaking the club's single-game RBI mark of 9, set by Johnny Rizzo all the way back in 1939.
The scale of it is hard to overstate. O'Hearn became the 16th player in the Pirates' 145-year history to hit 3 home runs in a single game, and the 11th player since RBI became an official stat in 1920 to combine 3 homers with 10 RBI in one night. The last guy to pull that off? Shohei Ohtani, against the Marlins in 2024. That's the company O'Hearn is keeping this week.
The scoreboard tells the story by itself: Braves 2, Pirates 10, with the exit-velocity graphic on O'Hearn's blast lighting up at 373 feet and 101.3 mph.
For a Pirates team that's had precious few reasons to celebrate in recent years, the cone has become the running bit of this season's offense, and Tuesday night it earned overtime. Every homer meant another trip to the railing, another round of teammates mobbing O'Hearn like he'd just won a title, and by the third one it stopped being a bit and started being a genuine outburst nobody in that dugout will forget.
A packed house of black-and-gold-clad fans cheers as the readout confirms just how far O'Hearn hit his homer.
There's also a Pirates-specific subplot worth noting: this came the same night Paul Skenes reportedly snapped out of a rough stretch on the mound, meaning Pittsburgh got both its ace looking like himself and its new first baseman putting together a night that will be talked about in the same breath as franchise legends. For a fan base that's had to manufacture reasons for hope, O'Hearn's record-breaking game is as real as it gets.