Paul Skenes Is Stuck Being A Guy While The Pirates Require A Dude

The Pittsburgh Pirates probably are not yet feeling desperate, but desperation can’t be very far off. For the first time in recorded history, the organization made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline, beefed up their bullpen, and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There is one problem: They share a division with the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball. There is another problem: They also share a division with the Chicago Cubs, who have 66 wins, a .574 win percentage, and a huge lead atop the wild-card standings, and who also made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There are other problems: Five other NL teams I haven’t even named are presently ahead of Pittsburgh in the wild-card standings, and the Pirates are presently below .500 on the season, and going into Wednesday night’s tilt in Milwaukee they’d lost 11 of 18 since the All-Star break.

The troubles of one man, amid all these hardships, might not otherwise rate very highly, except that Paul Skenes is The Man in Pittsburgh, the face of the franchise, and his job Wednesday night, as the ace of the pitching staff, was to take matters in hand and yank the foundering Pirates back onto the right trajectory. But another problem for the Pirates is that Skenes hasn’t been his usual world-devouring self this season. By almost every measure, Skenes has been a less reliable, less dominant pitcher than he was across his first season-and-a-half of service time. The increase in Skenes’s WHIP looks modest—from .948 last season to 1.118 in 24 starts this season—but he’s allowing about double the number of dingers per nine innings. He’s giving the Pirates fewer innings per start, and although he’s had only the one blow-up performance—Opening Day, when he was undone by lack of control and horrendous team defense and failed to complete one inning of work—Skenes has allowed five or more runs in six starts this campaign, something he’d done only once prior to the start of this season.

Tuesday night presented a worryingly typical performance from Skenes in 2026. Facing Milwaukee’s pesky, relentless, deeply fucking irritating lineup, Pittsburgh’s ace looked much more like a guy than a dude. He started the game with a non-competitive four-pitch walk, then threw a wild pitch, then hung a 3–2 slider that Jackson Chourio pounded to center for a very loud fly-ball out. Skenes escaped the inning unscathed, but it took him 23 pitches. He labored again in the fourth, allowing consecutive one-out walks, then consecutive RBI knocks, and then another walk, before getting out of the inning with his pitch count up to 83. His ERA on the season climbed above 4.00 before a clean fifth brought it back down to 3.97, which for most other pitchers is fine but for Paul Skenes is like a giant deafening klaxon positioned centimeters from your eardrum.