The Pirates Cannot Afford To Waste Paul Skenes

In Paul Skenes, the Pirates have probably the most exciting and talented pitcher Major League Baseball has seen in close to a generation. Perhaps not since Dwight Gooden debuted with the Mets in 1984 as a 19-year-old and posted a 2.00 ERA in his first two seasons has a young pitcher captured the baseball world’s collective attention so completely.

Nearing the end of his second year in the majors, Skenes has numbers that mirror Gooden’s pretty closely. He has a 2.02 ERA since his debut last season, and like Gooden, Skenes was the National League Rookie of the Year in his first season and has a very serious case to win the Cy Young this year, just like Gooden did in 1985.

But there’s a glaring difference between the two pitchers. Where Gooden won 17 games in his rookie year and a league-leading 24 in his second season, Skenes has not received the same kind of run support. The Pirates pitcher managed to go 11-3 in 2024 but has an 8-9 record this season, despite having the lowest ERA in the National League.

Though pitcher win-loss records don’t carry the same significance as they did when Gooden was starting his career, the fact that Skenes very likely will finish with a losing record in 2025 is a microcosm of the problem the Pirates have. It’s one that is two-fold, as well.

First, they are wasting Skenes’ talent in the present. He and the rest of the starting staff in Pittsburgh have the seventh-best wins above replacement ranking in baseball, according to Fangraphs. They outrank teams like the Brewers, Dodgers, and Cubs. Even the bullpen is solid; that group ranks right around the top third of all 30 teams in wins above replacement.

The problem is, the Pirates have an abysmal offense. Their lineup boasts a collective 5.9 fWAR, which puts them at 29th in baseball, above only the Rockies. For perspective, there are four different players who individually have a higher fWAR than the Pirates have as a team, and a fifth – the Phillies’ Trea Turner at 5.8 – who is just behind them.

The fix for the Pirates is pretty simple: Get offensive support for the very talented pitching that’s already in the organization. A quick scan of Pittsburgh’s players in arbitration shows that the pitching staff is cheap and under team control for a long time. It’s not just Skenes; they are potentially wasting a host of talented young arms.

But that leads into the second part of Pittsburgh’s problem: The wise move would be to keep Skenes in a Pirates uniform for as long as possible, and the even wiser move would be to secure him sooner rather than later. Skenes isn’t going to be an unrestricted free agent until 2030, but the longer the Pirates wait to extend him, the more expensive that is likely to get. And the issue isn’t whether the Pirates have the available resources: Spotrac has their current team payroll at about $83 million, which is well below this year’s first tier threshold of $241 million.

And the Pirates could do this relatively inexpensively, especially if they strike early. In recent years, a number of young players with years of team control ahead of them have signed early extensions. The incentive for the player is the chance to make more money than they would in arbitration, and for the team, they benefit by securing the player past his years of team control for a price lower than it would cost for an extension as those years come to a close.

Skenes will still be under 30 years old when he reaches free agency, and given how he has pitched in his first two seasons in the majors, Skenes will have plenty of suitors offering top dollar to convince him to sign when that time comes. Again, the Pirates have a great opportunity to keep Skenes beyond his age-28 season and do it at a much more affordable price.

But, of course, the problem is that this kind of financial move would be a break from the team’s usual approach. Pirates owner Bob Nutting has had a financial stake in the ballclub since 2002 and has been the principal owner since 2007, and in that time, he has earned a reputation for placing his profits over the product on the baseball field to the ire of the fans. After trading Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen in the 2017-2018 offseason, Pirates fans started an online petition demanding he sell the team.

Pittsburgh fans are not alone in this kind of frustration. In Chicago, fans of the White Sox have spent years urging owner Jerry Reinsdorf to sell, and even now that he’s found a buyer, that transition will take time. And even the big spenders, like the Cubs, aren’t immune from fan criticism. In the event that Nutting does decide to sell the team – something he has not indicated he plans to do – Pirates fans wouldn’t necessarily get relief from stinginess right away.

This means that any hope of signing Paul Skenes to an extension and buffering his performance on the mound with offensive support is probably slim. It’s a shame because the Pirates have a chance to lock down a generational pitcher, but in a city where the priority seems to be the team’s finances, the chances of that happening aren’t good.