PITTSBURGH – Paul Skenes has a lot on his mind. The chances of the perpetually curious National League Rookie of the Year staying with the Pittsburgh Pirates indefinitely is not one of them.
Not yet anyway.
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“I haven’t given it too much thought,” Skenes said Sunday when asked about the chances of him signing an extension with the Pirates.
The 22-year-old star might be one of the few.
Pittsburgh's quiet offseason in free agency has done little to quell angst among the fanbase that the club is already living on borrowed time with the hard-throwing right-hander, who became a sensation the moment the top pick in the 2023 draft made his big league debut last May armed with an electric 100-mph fastball and the swagger to match.
Skenes' arrival gave the city and the franchise a needed jolt. Yet it hasn't exactly spurred general manager Ben Cherington to go on a spending spree over the winter to juice up an offense to complement what could be one of the better rotations in baseball led by Skenes and 23-year-old Jared Jones.
One fan has begun a billboard campaign urging Pirates chairman Bob Nutting to sell the team. A small chant of “Sell the Team!” even broke out at the club's annual fanfest, with vice president Travis Williams responding during a Q&A session that Nutting had no interest in moving on.
Neither — at this point anyway — does Skenes, who pointed to Pittsburgh's young core of talent and tweaks to the coaching staff as proof that the team has not sat idly by following a second straight 76-86 finish.
“The group that we have from last year is going to be better I think than we were last year,” Skenes said. “We’re going to have more experience. I don’t think you can overstate the impact that coaches can have on it, too, so we made some good additions there. It’s not a complicated thing. It’s hard to do, but it’s not complicated.”
The Pirates hired Matt Hague to run their hitting program and brought on longtime pitching guru Brent Strom to help a staff loaded with potential but short on experience.
The external fear is that the club could be limited on time to maximize its window while Skenes is on the roster. Though the Pirates have locked up some of their cornerstones for the long term — including outfielder Bryan Reynolds and pitcher Mitch Keller — in recent years, keeping Skenes would be another matter. He will become eligible for arbitration after the 2026 season, and the list of high-end pitchers the club has parted with before they became too expensive includes Gerrit Cole and Joe Musgrove.
Skenes, however, is not caught up in the future. There's too much at stake in the present. He'll be grateful when he arrives for spring training in Bradenton, Florida next month as a full-fledged major leaguer without worrying about any sort of innings limit like the one the team imposed last year to protect his arm. He was fully on board with the idea, even saying at the end of the season it worked perfectly.
And now it's a thing of the past.
“I’m going to be ready to throw 240 innings,” said Skenes, who went 11-3 with a 1.96 ERA in 23 starts. “It’s not going to be 160 innings again. I know that. It’s gonna be much more, ‘Take the ball and pitch.’”
Off the field, Skenes expects to take a more central role in creating a clubhouse culture designed to create a productive environment. He spent a portion of his offseason canvassing veterans on other teams looking for insight. What that looks like in the end, he's not certain. He'll know it when he sees it.
“I don’t know what the character of that will be, but I’ll have probably a little more say so," he said, while cautioning "there’s still a long way to go. I’m not going to overstep, but winning is winning. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to make it happen.”
On that front, he is fully committed. He has spent a portion of the winter training in Charlotte, North Carolina, and coming to grips with his burgeoning fame.
“The nice thing about the offseason is people kind of forget you because it’s not baseball season,” he said. "It never completely goes away. That’s just how it is. It’s the new normal.”
Even if it's not exactly “normal.” Skenes encountered a fan on a flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh recently. The fan wanted him to sign something but the only thing he had on him was a copy of the classic Russian novel “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. So Skenes grabbed a pen and scrawled his name at the bottom of the author biography page.
The act quickly went viral, something that's becoming a habit no matter where Skenes goes, particularly when his girlfriend, gymnast/influencer Livvy Dunne, is involved.
The former Air Force Academy cadet, however, became adept at compartmentalizing things long ago, a skill that should come in handy as he tries to navigate his way from the phenom stage of his career to something more lasting while trying to lead the Pirates back to the playoffs for the first time since 2015.
Yes, he's aware of the yawning gap between teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Pirates. No, he's not willing to use it as an excuse for failure.
“There’s no reason we can’t play fundamental baseball and execute at a very high level without having players like (Shohei Ohtani),” he said. "It’s not a complicated game.”
And it's not a complicated situation. Yet.
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AP MLB: https://www.apnews.com/hub/MLB