Pittsburgh Pirates pitching sensation Paul Skenes was already one of the most eagerly anticipated mound prospects ever to arrive in Major League Baseball when he made his debut on May 11, 2024. Skenes, a product of El Toro High School in Lake Forest, California, had already dominated at the collegiate level, with a 13-2 record and 1.69 ERA in 19 starts for LSU in his senior, and only year there â also winning the Most Outstanding Player award in the 2023 Men’s College World Series.
He was immediately predicted to become the top overall pick in that year’s MLB draft, and the Pirates fulfilled that prediction. It took the young righthanded phenom just 12 starts to rise through the Pirates’ minor league system. After seven starts at Triple-A Indianapolis in 2024, Skenes clearly had nothing left to prove, allowing a microscopic 0.99 ERA and striking out 45 in 27 1/3 innings while walking only eight.
When he got to MLB, Skenes was no less spectacular, putting together the best overall season by any rookie pitcher since the New York Mets’ Dwight Gooden in 1984. Skenes finished with an 11-3 record in 23 starts, and though his 133 innings pitched were short of the 162 require to qualify for the league lead, his 1.96 ERA would have easily been the best in MLB.
Bullpen Let Skenes Down Over and Over Again
The only piece of Skenes’ game that was not spectacular was one he could not control â namely, the Pirates’ bullpen. Five times in 2024 Skenes left the game with a lead â allowing only one run in three of those games â only to see the Pittsburgh ‘pen turn his stellar performance into a loss.
In total, the Pirates’ relievers blew 27 saves, tied for third-most in MLB last year.
Over the offseason, the Pirates would have been expected to make some significant moves to strengthen the bullpen, in order to better support Skenes, as well as their other promising rookie starter from last year, Jared Jones. But they did not do that. In fact, in the Pirates’ biggest offseason acquisition, last week the club signed lefty starter Andrew Heaney to a one-year, $5 million deal.
But what about the ‘pen? Asked on Tuesday whether David Bednar, who saved 29 games for Pittsburgh last season, would remain the closer in 2025, manager Derek Shelton did not know, saying only “we’re not ready to say that.”
“Skenes led an excellent starting rotation, but the Pirates were plagued by bullpen woes and held back by the NL’s third-worst offense in terms of runs scored,” wrote Christopher Kline of Fansided. “Now, the Pirates threaten to screw over Skenes â and their fans â again with a ludicrous approach to the offseason trade market.”
Pirates Could Trade Skenes as Part of Overall Rebuild
The Pirates have recorded just one winning season and have not made the playoffs at all since 2015. They have finished either last or in fourth place in the National League Central division every year since 2016. Rather than waste the early years of Skenes’ career, would the Pirates’ simply trade Skenes as part of an overall rebuild?
Former big league catcher Erik Kratz, co-host of the Foul Territory podcast, urged the Pirates to to just that in a recent edition of the show.
“Blow the doors off of the trade market. Set the bar so high, you know, a franchise-future type of trade for Paul Skenes,” Kratz implored the Pirates.
Fansided writer Kline expressed similar sentiments, predicting that the Pirates will “waste Paul Skenes prime and trade him in three years, probably.”
The only question, it now appears, is whether the Pirates will trade Skenes away sooner rather than later.
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