MLB's Growing Paul Skenes Problem

Paul Skenes is about to win the National League Cy Young Award, and everyone has every reason to think it will be the first of many.

It was barely two years ago that the 23-year-old was the No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft, yet he's already won the NL Rookie of the Year and started twice as many All-Star Games as Clayton Kershaw has in his career.

Meanwhile, here are some fun Paul Skenes facts:

What MLB has here is the kind of starting pitcher that Rob Manfred had only been able to dream of before Skenes came along: A proper history-making ace at a time when aces of all stripes are going extinct.

It's therefore too bad that all of this is being wasted in a small market and on one of MLB's most miserable franchises. It's the worst-case scenario for Skenes' career unfolding in real time, and it should have the league spooked.

The Pirates Don't Deserve Paul Skenes

Just as you can't fault Skenes for being a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates, you can't really fault them for how they've handled him.

Picking him No. 1 overall in 2023 was a no-brainer, and calling him up for his MLB debut less than a year later was aggressive, but not reckless. He'd only made 12 pro starts, but those saw him rack up 55 strikeouts and allow only 22 hits out of 133 batters faced. He was ready.

By modern standards, Skenes has been allowed a relatively long leash. He's averaged 93 pitches and 5.9 innings per start, pitching into at least the fifth in 49 of his 53 starts.

The approach has been successful in keeping Skenes healthy, although some of the credit also goes to him. While averaging 98.2 mph on his fastball, he's hit 100 mph only 13 times after doing so 100 times as a rookie in 2024. He's letting it eat without redlining, a skill that other young starters would do well to copy.

Yet, the Pirates are barely breaking even (16-15) in Skenes' starts and are ticketed for last place in the NL Central for a second straight year.

Only the Pirates are capable of such tragicomic boobery. The 1979 World Series is the last time they won a playoff series, and they lead all of MLB with 3,867 total losses since then. The breakdown by decade isn't much prettier:

Losses in 1980s: 825, 6th-most in MLB
Losses in 1990s: 779, 13th-most in MLB
Losses in 2000s: 936, 2nd-most in MLB
Losses in 2010s: 826, 15th-most in MLB
Losses in 2020s: 500, 3rd-most in MLB

The Bucs aren't about to buy their way out of trouble while owner Bob Nutting is still around and keeping his $1.1 billion fortune to himself. The franchise needs to be a player development machine like the Tampa Bay Rays, Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Guardians, and it's simply not.

There is Skenes, of course, and the Bucs have two prospects in MLB Pipeline's top seven. But no franchise bats 1.000 with prospect development, and this one has seen Ben Cherington waste a No. 1 pick on Henry Davis and fail to develop Oneil Cruz, Ke'Bryan Hayes, Nick Gonzales and Termarr Johnson into bankable stars.

What If Paul Skenes Is the Next Mike Trout?

For Paul Skenes and Paul Skenes connoisseurs the world over, one silver lining is that he's not anonymous.

People who know baseball know who Skenes is, and there's more to that than his high-profile personal life. He is every bit as electric as his results indicate.

It also helps that the league really does put effort into pushing Skenes. The official MLB account on X is replete with Skenes tidbits and updates, and even someone getting the better of him is treated as news.

There's no good way to narrow down how popular a player should be, but there's an easy argument to make for Skenes as top-five material. In fact, he's nearly a top-five player by wins above replacement over the last two years:

You'd expect a player with this much value, alongside such historical acclaim and general buzz, to at least have a top-selling jersey. Yet when MLB released its 20 bestsellers in July, Skenes didn't make the cut.

Tarik Skubal and Clayton Kershaw were the only full-time starting pitchers on the list. It's understandable and a shame. Every generation of fans should have at least one unimpeachable ace to gravitate toward, but it's an open secret that aces are going extinct by way of frequent injuries and changing (i.e., lowering) standards.

Skenes is clearly one of these guys on paper, but that only matters to MLB so much as long as he struggles to capture the hearts and minds of fans outside of Pittsburgh. Sadly, it feels like Mike Trout and the Los Angeles Angels all over again.

Throughout the 2010s, Trout was well on his way to being GOATed. Yet despite all his success and not-infrequent attempts by MLB to hype him, it always felt like he was just a bit outside the mainstream as he labored in Anaheim for an Angels franchise now mired in an 11-year playoff drought.

Now in his post-prime years, what star power Trout had is a ghostly apparition. It's a sad story that MLB surely does not want repeated with Skenes.

The Best Ways Forward for Everyone

This story may yet have a happy ending, though what shape it takes will depend on how things shake out for Skenes, the Pirates and for MLB as an institution.

For now, only two of these entities have the power to change anything. Skenes is essentially trapped by MLB's collective bargaining agreement, which ties him to the Pirates through the 2029 season. Until then, he only has one way out.

The Best Thing for Skenes: He Gets Traded

The Bucs made it clear ahead of this year's deadline that they don't want to move Skenes, but that reportedly didn't stop teams from calling. The question now is how much more time can pass before the Bucs have no choice but to start listening when other teams reach out.

He's going to be arbitration-eligible in 2027, at which time he's going to start getting expensive for the eternally penny-pinching Nutting. And with young, cost-controlled talent representing the only hope the Bucs have of contending, the prospect of a Herschel Walker trade may only become more and more alluring.

For his part, anywhere would be better than Pittsburgh if Skenes values winning games and raising his profile. The New York Yankees are unsurprisingly interested, and one can just as easily imagine him ending up with the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs.

The Best Thing for the Pirates: They Extend Skenes

When Tim Britton of The Athletic sought to ballpark an extension for Skenes in March, he landed on a 10-year, $200 million contract as a fair deal. As he is now a year closer to free agency and even more accomplished, he has every reason not to budge until offered Yoshinobu Yamamoto money: 12 years, $325 million.

That deal is about three times as large as the priciest contract the Bucs have ever done—8 years, $106.8 million for Bryan Reynolds—which leaves only one rational path to it. The Pirates would have to channel both the Giancarlo Stanton contract and any one of the Dodgers' big deals by backloading and deferring as much salary as possible.

In all likelihood, pigs have a better chance of flying than the Pirates do of locking down Skenes. But stranger things have happened, and the Bucs won't merely have bought a superstar if they can do it. They'll also have bought some much-needed goodwill among their fan base.

The Best Thing for MLB: The Draft Goes Bye-Bye

For this, we'll need to not put on our tin foil hats and dream of a scenario in which Manfred forces the Pirates to trade Skenes. It doesn't work like that...or so we think.

Rather, what MLB should be reckoning with is how Skenes did not ask to be a Pirate. He's a Pirate only because baseball is like every other pro sport in that it recruits employees via the weirdest of job fairs: the draft.

No draft is an event where talented people show up and market their skills and experience and hope to get a good offer. Their talent and experience are on display for only one employer at a time. And if they want you, you basically can't say, "Thanks, but no thanks."

A better system would be for MLB to retain the bonus pools that determine how much draft prospects sign for, but to eliminate the draft part. It's the same concept as how teams add international amateurs: a free market, wherein any team would be able to make the best offer.

Perhaps it wouldn't be a perfect system. But in theory, it would put an end to generational talents languishing in obscurity just because of bad luck.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.