Paul Skenes Wins NL Cy Young As Speculation About Him Being A Yankee Appears

Paul Skenes was a unanimous winner of the NL Cy Young award Wednesday night and since he achieved the feat for the Pittsburgh Pirates, there seems to be an informal countdown to when he leaves a team without a playoff appearance since 2015 and without a playoff series victory since 1979.

Naturally as might be expect, the Yankees are among those viewed as a destination for the Skenes sometime in the upcoming future.

It is a story that gained some legs on Wednesday on the second day of the GM meetings in Las Vegas when NJ.com published a story about a teammate from Pittsburgh saying how Skenes seemingly dreams of playing for the Yankees at some point.

So far Skenes’ lone experience with the Yankees was a two-inning cameo on the final Saturday of the 2024 season at Yankee Stadium when he struck out Juan Soto and Aaron Judge as gymnast girlfriend Livvy Dunne cheered him on.

That was at the end of his rookie season when he beat Jackson Merrill for Rookie of the Year while joining a 76-win team so there was no speculation then but it figures to be the kind of thing to appear now and occasionally in the future until the Pirates lock him up to a long-term deal or actually trade him.

It is not quite like Gerrit Cole going to the World Series in 2001 as a child with a sign proclaiming his massive Yankee fandom but it is out there so much to the point that GM Ben Cherrington even addressed the topic.

“What we’re going to focus on is just how do we win games with him in a Pirates uniform,” Cherrington told reporters. “I have a ton of respect for the Yankees but we’ll just focus on what we need to do.”

And what Cherrington and the Pirates need to do is spend enough to build a team around Skenes. Skenes won his Cy Young Award with 10 wins. It is tied for the fewest total for a starter to win the award in a full season.

Skenes joined Jacob deGrom as the only pitchers with 10 wins to win the award in a full season.

DeGrom was 10-9 with a 1.70 ERA and 269 strikeouts while pitching for a 77-win version of the Mets in 2018, whose payroll back then was roughly $150 million.

Skenes was 10-10 with a 1.97 ERA and 216 strikeouts while pitching about 30 fewer innings than deGrom. In all 10 of his losses, the Pirates scored three runs or fewer, including four times when they were shutout. In 19 of his 32 starts, the Pirates scored three runs or fewer.

The lack of run support resulted in the Pirates going 17-15 in games he started as part of a 71-91 finish for Pittsburgh, which lost at least 90 games for the 14th time since 1992.

If those things sound familiar it is because they are similar if not worse. The Mets were 14-18 in deGrom’s starts in 2018 and it was because of the run support issue.

Those Mets scored three runs or fewer in 20 of deGrom’s 32 starts in 2018, including in seven of his nine losses.

The difference between Skenes and deGrom was payroll disparities. The Pirates played with a roughly $87 million payroll, a figure that is the same as their final number of 2024 along with two million less than the final figure of 2019, which would have been Cole’s free agent year with them if he was not dealt to the Houston Astros following the 2017 season.

The Skenes out of Pittsburgh talk and links to the Yankees will persist until proven otherwise. The Pirates are consistently in the bottom of payrolls, finishing in the bottom-five 16 times since 2007 when Bob Nutting bought the team.

“In a nice way, it’s really simple because what matters most to (Skenes) is what matters to us,” Cherington told reporters. “Win more games. That’s the focus because that’s what is going to be most important to him. What probably gives us the best chance to keep him in Pittsburgh for longer is winning games, and that’s what we need to do anyway.

“So in a way it helps simplify it and focus it. My conversations with him, the only thing we talk about is winning and how to do that.”

For now, the Pirates may raise payroll by an incremental amount, but it is unknown if it will be good enough to get them into contention in a league where 83 wins led to a playoff berth for the Cincinnati Reds.

Until anyone starts to see Pittsburgh produce a payroll in the middle of the pack, the buzz of when Skenes leaves will overshadow things, though it is hard to believe his departure is coming within the next year.