Recently, Craig Edwards published an interesting piece analyzing each team's payroll situation prior to free agency. In it, he compared projected 2016 salary commitments to 2015 Opening Day payrolls and observed that the Pirates had the least available budget room of any team in the National League.
Despite some unavoidable imprecision in his numbers (the article was published prior to qualifying offer decisions and we still don't have arbitration information), Edwards' conclusions are compelling: barring an unforeseen increase in payroll, the Pirates are unlikely to be significant players in free agency.
There's a larger, normative argument to be made here about how much the budget should be.