At approximately 4:05 p.m. on Saturday at PNC Park, there could be a changing of the guard as far as how the Pittsburgh Pirates are looked at from a national perspective.
No, Bob Nutting isn’t selling the team, but there’s going to be a 6’6” right-hander by the name of Paul Skenes who’s going to be toeing the major league rubber for the first time, and he has the potential to be a total game-changer.
Alright, I know, you can insert your eye roll here.
This is an organization that, outside of a three-year window in the mid 2010s, has spent the better part of 30 years being the laughingstock of baseball, pretty much ever since Sid Bream slid home safely in the 1992 NLCS.
It’s an organization that’s been in a perpetual rebuild since then, cycling through managers, general managers and endless waves or prospects that were promised to be the next big thing. They’ve also been a victim of baseball’s economic structure, but other teams in similar market sizes have been able to win despite that.
Baseball’s most beautiful backdrop, PNC Park, has played home to perhaps the league’s worst franchise. There’s almost a cruel irony in that.
No doubt if you follow baseball at all you know about Skenes, who is just a few weeks shy of his 22nd birthday. It’s not just the fact that he throws a baseball 102 MPH, showing the kind of arm that comes along only a few times in a generation. And it certainly goes beyond his dominant numbers in college, as well as his brief stint in the minor leagues.
You mix that all in, and you add the makeup and character of this young man, which are off the charts, and you could finally have a guy that could elevate your franchise back to relevancy.
Nothing speaks more to that character than a story about Skenes when he was at the Air Force Academy.
During practice one day, the flag went down, and the national anthem played on a day where 11 Marines had died in the Middle East. Everyone was supposed to stand at attention, but a couple of students at the football field, which is just uphill from the baseball field, didn’t. After the anthem, Skenes raced up the hill to chew them out.
“It shows the type of person Paul Skenes is,” Ryan Forrest, former Air Force and current Boston College pitching coach told MLB.com. “It shows his character. It shows his morals. Shows he loves his country and has a passion for his country.”
It’s one of many stories, but you get the idea.
As far as the player himself is concerned, this is probably the most hyped major league debut for a pitcher since Stephen Strasburg.
Pirates scout Dewey Robinson went to watch Skenes during the 2023 college baseball season, when Skenes was at LSU and the Pirates held the No. 1 overall pick in the draft.
His report, he tells MLB.com, was brief, about two pages long. It was the notes at the end of the report that held the most wait, however.
“We’ve got to take this guy,” it said.
He went on to tell MLB.com: “He’s one in a decade,” Robinson later told MLB.com. “You don’t get an opportunity to get a guy walking into your camp like this. Some guys you can develop over years and get to that point, but he’s walking in as that guy.”
Pair Skenes with fellow fireballing right-hander, 22-year-old Jared Jones, who has been beyond impressive so far in his young big-league career, and the Pirates could potentially have one of the best 1-2 pitching punches in baseball for years to come.
One thing is for sure, a fanbase that has seen so much bad baseball over the years certainly deserves that to come to fruition.
