With Thursday night’s rain-delayed loss to the Milwaukee Brewers (MIL 8, PIT 5), the Pittsburgh Pirates are 17-34 this season, and on pace to win 54 games. They have to go 59-52 the rest of the way just to match last year’s 76-86 record, which isn’t even good! Needless to say, the first two months of 2025 have been a colossal disappointment for the Pirates.
Pittsburgh is 3-7 when Paul Skenes starts this year, even though he has a 2.44 ERA and is averaging 6.2 innings per start. This is worse than the New York Mets wasting Jacob deGrom’s Cy Young seasons in 2018 and 2019. The Mets were at least .500-ish in deGrom’s starts those two years. The Pirates can’t even do that with Skenes. A stunning failure by management, this is.
Given their poor play, the “the Pirates should trade Skenes” conversation has begun, though to be clear, that is only among talking heads on sports radio and columnists and the like. On Thursday, Pirates GM Ben Cherington shot the idea down completely. He said the Pirates are not considering trading the reigning NL Rookie of the Year.
“No, it’s not part of the conversation at all,” Cherington said bluntly when asked about the possibility of a Skenes trade Thursday (via the Associated Press).
Skenes, 22, is under team control through the 2029 season. Trading him now would be the Pirates telling their fans they do not think they can contend before 2029 (!) despite there being three wild-card spots, which would be PR suicide. The fan base doesn’t trust the organization as it is. Whatever shred of faith remains would be gone after a Skenes trade.
Also, the Pirates selected Skenes with the No. 1 overall pick in 2023. Trading him in 2025 would represent the ultimate organizational failure. They hit on that No. 1 pick in a massive way. Skenes is an enormous draft win, yet in less than two calendar years, you’re saying no, this isn’t enough, we can’t win with him? How could anyone take the front office seriously?
Squint your eyes and you can come up with valid reasons to trade Skenes. He’s a pitcher and pitchers get hurt, and his trade value will never be higher than it is now. Any team that acquires him would get him for five postseason runs. This might be Pittsburgh’s best (only?) chance to trade Skenes for a godfather package, the kind that addresses multiple organizational needs at once.
The other side of this coin is that there are only a few bona fide No. 1 starters in the game, and Skenes is one. They are the hardest thing to acquire. The Pirates have one, a homegrown one they drafted and developed. This is the hard part: finding the ace. The Pirates did that part already. Now, it’s about surrounding him with more talent, which the front office failed to do in the offseason.
Also, can any team put a package together to entice the Pirates? The San Diego Padres gave up a franchise-altering package for Juan Soto. Skenes has two more years of control than Soto did at the time. Pittsburgh could ask for more and I’m not sure any team has that much talent to trade. The asking price would be so high that no team might be able to meet it, realistically.
Forget trading Skenes. The Pirates should offer him $350 million right now. That would be the most money ever guaranteed to a pitcher, beating out Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s $325 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. How else are the Pirates supposed to keep Skenes long-term? Offer a record contract now. It might be the only chance at getting him to stay.
It does feel like it is only a matter of time until the Pirates trade Skenes the same way they traded Gerrit Cole, though that is likely a few years away. Trading him now should not be on the table. He’s too good and too cheap, and under control for too long. If you can’t figure out how to build a winner around Skenes, that’s a you problem. The priority needs to be improving the team around him.
