The Pittsburgh Pirates are happy to have Paul Skenes on board.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are getting their feet wet for the 2025 season, and a 5-8 start through 13 games suggests that the team is still getting used to the water.
Someone that is a little further along in the pool is Paul Skenes, who was named as the biggest difference-maker for the Pirates by The Athletic contributor Levi Weaver.
I like to think of myself as a creative person and an outside-the-box thinker. I love to eschew the predictable in favor of the underappreciated or unexpected. Routine? Never heard of it. My art? Abstract. My music? Eclectic. I put mayonnaise on my hot dogs because I like it and because it makes my friends from Chicago very angry.
But no matter how much I look for a zag (Andrew McCutchen?), it’s obviously Skenes, who has a 1.46 ERA after two starts. Nobody outside Pittsburgh can even give you a half-hearted suggestion that anyone else is even close, and nobody in Pittsburgh wants to.
Skenes holds a lot of the cards for the Pirates this season, and his success plays a huge factor into how the team does.
Skenes may not be as dominant as he would like to be, but he is still the ace of the staff and he will only get better as he continues to get more used to the flow of the season.
The Pirates are back in action this weekend against the Cincinnati Reds, but Skenes is expected to sit until his next scheduled start on Monday against the Washington Nationals.