PITTSBURGH — Few players are dominating baseball quite like Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes.
Just a year and a half after making his Major League debut, he’s won both National League Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young Award.
It’s clear that it’s all in the rearview for the Pirates ace. He told Channel 11 that in 2025, and he’s looking ahead to 2026.
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He’ll join a Pirates team that had one of its more aggressive offseasons in recent memory.
With the additions of Ryan O’Hearn, Marcell Ozuna and Brandon Lowe, there was an effort to add more power to the team’s batting order.
“I can see why we went after them,” Skenes said. “We went after the right people this offseason. Obviously, the players are great, but we went after the right people. We’re a week in, so stuff’s going to change. The newness is going to fade, and we’re going to get into kind of the grind of it a little bit here soon, but once that happens, I think it’ll be really telling who we have.”
Toward the end of last season, Skenes was vocal about the team needing to take strides with player acquisition, telling 93.7 The Fan in July they needed to “consciously and intentionally” make moves to improve the team.
Skenes had at least a small role in how that came together, including calling newcomers after they signed.
“It wasn’t as extensive as people probably think,” he told Channel 11. “I had conversations with (General Manager Ben Cherington) and (Manager Don Kelly) at the end of the season last year and during the off-season. I talked with Donnie pretty regularly, and I talked with Ben a few times in the offseason. They weren’t really asking me for who I thought we needed. They did to an extent, but in terms of specific names, they weren’t really asking, and I wasn’t really going to give it to them just because it’s not my job.”
Still, a genuine effort from the Pirates ace as the publicly perceived window to win with Skenes in the black and gold gets smaller.
It’s outside chatter Skenes already had to navigate during his first full season in Major League Baseball last year.
“You do your best to block as much outside noise as possible,” Skenes said. “It’s impossible to block it all, but the moves that we’ve made this off-season and the core that we’ve had from last season and two years ago that’s coming into this year, we have a lot of really good guys that have been here that are getting better. Obviously, we brought in some really good players. So, the ball’s in our court with that. We can win if we want to. We just got to go out there and take it.”
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