Through June of this season, he was just about the best young pitcher we'd seen since Dwight Gooden 40 years ago. But over his past 15 starts, he has a 5.06 ERA, with declining velocity to go along with mediocre (at best) production. My typical inclination is to give Skenes the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, I wouldn't want to rank him as a top-three SP like I was coming into the season, but given the much longer track record of him as one of the best pitchers in baseball, he deserves some benefit of the doubt, right? I certainly won't rank him as if he's a 5.00-plus ERA pitcher. But man, it just doesn't feel like this is a normal slump.
Skenes admitted to tweaking his mechanics throughout the season to try to rediscover his old form, and nothing seems to have helped much. He had a stretch in August where it looked like he might be figuring things out, but then he allowed five runs in his most recent start last week against the Royals of all teams. He has one start with more than five strikeouts in his past seven starts and just six with more than six strikeouts since his season took that turn in late June.
He hasn't looked like an impact pitcher for an awfully long time. And, honestly, the fact that both Skenes and the Pirates have maintained he is healthy throughout this whole stretch doesn't even make me feel better. If Skenes was battling through some kind of lingering-but-manageable injury, I could at least move forward with the hope that a fully healthy offseason would get him back on track.
A complete collapse without a good explanation – I don't buy the World Baseball Classic as a cause for why Skenes suddenly stopped pitching well three months after making two starts there, sorry – is a lot harder to make sense of. Players typically don't just stop being good at 25 years old without an injury, but that's less true of pitchers, certainly. What makes pitchers so frustrating is that they often do just stop being good seemingly overnight; the other side of that coin, of course, is that sometimes pitchers just start being really good seemingly overnight.
I can't dismiss Skenes' sudden dropoff quite as easily as I can someone like Vladimir Guerrero's, even though both are plenty concerning. I haven't finished my pitcher rankings yet – keep an eye out for my first batch of rankings for 2027 next week! – but there's no way I can rank Skenes as a top-12 option at this point. Top 24 seems possible, but at this point, I'm leaning toward dropping him a bit below that.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
