Paul Skenes threw 35 pitches in the second inning on Wednesday and allowed five runs; the Pittsburgh Pirates, a franchise historically allergic to institutional competence, watched it happen from the dugout and said things like “He’s always looking at what he’s doing.”
That’s not a coaching staff. That’s a support group.
The final line was 4 innings, 7 earned runs, two home runs, two walks, a hit batter, and a fastball sitting at 96.3 mph, tied for the lowest velocity of his career. His Stuff+ has dropped from 110 to 99. His spin rate on the four-seamer has fallen below 2000 RPM from 2261. Hitters are barreling him at 8.6% this season; last year it was 4.2%. These are not the numbers of a guy working through a blister. These are the numbers of a guy who has been decoded.
The sequencing problem that scouts whisper about when discussing any young elite pitcher has arrived for Skenes, and it has arrived on schedule. He came up as already-arrived — that was the whole pitch, the untouchable stuff, the 1.97 ERA, the Cy Young at 23. He never had to reinvent himself in the minors because the minors couldn’t touch him; he never had to reinvent himself in the majors because, for one glorious season, neither could they. Now hitters have a full year of data. They know the patterns. And Skenes, for the first time in his professional life, has to figure out what comes after “throw harder.”
https://x.com/DraftKings/status/2037227595197010337
That tweet was from March. The warning was visible from space. The Pittsburgh Pirates, characteristically, appear not to have owned a telescope.
Ben Cherington, the Pirates GM, offered this after Wednesday’s game: “I think zooming out, my personal opinion is, this is fairly standard for starting pitchers over time, including elite ones. There are smaller stretches of time where there is some small regression that can be for any number of reasons and then three months later they feel different.”
Nine starts. 5.36 ERA over that stretch. Winless since May 12. One away from tying Blake Snell’s record for the longest winless streak by a reigning Cy Young winner. And the organizational response is to zoom out. This is the kind of organizational logic that makes you want to lie down.
Cherington is not wrong that elite pitchers go through rough patches; he is spectacularly wrong in what that observation implies the Pirates should do about it. The rough patch is the test. What does a 23-year-old do when the league catches up? He adjusts. But adjustment requires coaching: real pitching development infrastructure, someone who has been through this specific thing with a pitcher at this specific level. The Pirates’ pitching staff has Don Kelly telling reporters that Skenes is “always looking at what he’s doing, trying to adjust it and tweak it,” as if that’s a plan rather than a description of a man quietly panicking on a mound.
The fairest counterargument here is that the Pirates’ defense has been genuinely awful during Skenes starts (minus-six fielding runs, worst in baseball), and that some of the damage in games like Wednesday’s (Nick Gonzales’ throwing error contributing to a 5-run second) isn’t Skenes at all. That’s real. Skenes himself kept it measured: “I didn’t execute very well. That’s really what it comes down to.” The raised arm angle, the declining extension, the velocity bleed — those are his to fix. But the context in which he’s trying to fix them is the Pirates’, and the Pirates, not long ago still flirting with relevance, are now sitting at 43-44, three games out of a Wild Card spot, with their entire organizational future hanging on a 23-year-old working through his first real professional crisis alone.
Skenes on the velocity drop: “I don’t know. It happens.”
He’s 23. He’s allowed to not know. The organization is supposed to know. The organization is supposed to have a plan for exactly this moment: the moment when the league figures out your best pitcher, the moment every team building around a young ace eventually faces. The Pittsburgh Pirates have built their entire identity around Paul Skenes and have apparently never once asked what they’d do when this happened. The answer, it turns out, is zoom out and wait three months.
The Phillies won 10-6. Trea Turner hit a three-run homer. Bryce Harper added a two-run double. It was 90 degrees at Citizens Bank Park. The Pirates flew home with a 43-44 record and a pitching coach who has never done this before with a pitcher like this. Paul Skenes goes back to work in five days. Nobody knows what he’s supposed to do differently, least of all the people whose job it is to tell him.
