PITTSBURGH — Paul Skenes threw the best swing-and-miss game of his life on Sunday, and he lost it. The reigning National League Cy Young winner pulled 23 swings through empty air at PNC Park, more than in any start he has ever made, and the Pirates still trudged off on the wrong end of a 4-2 afternoon against the Miami Marlins.
The damage was in the contact he did allow. Two Marlins reached the seats in the second inning, Heriberto Hernandez first and then Joe Mack, both solo shots off a pitcher who spends most nights making hitters look foolish. In a game this tight, that was the whole of it. Skenes missed 23 bats and made two mistakes, and the two mistakes are the only part the scoreboard kept.
Twenty-three swinging strikes is not a number that turns up often, and it tells you nothing went wrong with the arm. This is just becoming the shape of his season, a strange one. Skenes has not won since May 12, a drought now stretched across six consecutive starts, and almost none of it can be pinned on how he is throwing. His earned run average sits at 2.85. His WHIP of 0.93 is among the lowest in the sport. There is not much more a starter can do than miss two dozen bats and scatter four hits over six innings. He did exactly that, and he is still waiting.
He struck out 10, walked one, and handed his bullpen a line that wins on most afternoons. Skenes waved off the math when it was over, calling it baseball, something he has run into before, and pointing out that it remains a team game. There was no heat in the answer. Whatever this is costing him, he keeps it folded out of sight.
Don Kelly, the Pirates manager, reached for the explanation managers always reach for in the middle of a slide, which is that there is no single explanation. His club has not put a complete game together, he said, and he could not point to one thing. That is the quiet cruelty of it. Pittsburgh has wasted a genuinely excellent run of starting pitching, and Sunday was the purest version yet, its best arm at its sharpest and a lineup that handed him almost nothing to defend. The career-high whiff total was a small marvel on its own, as MLB.com noted, and it bought him nothing at all.
Across the duel sat Max Meyer, who keeps winning games without anyone rushing to call him an ace. The 27-year-old right-hander gave Miami six innings of one-run ball and struck out nine, and he walked off at 7-0 on the year, a record that looks invented next to the way his rotation mates have fared. CBS Sports reported that Meyer had carried an unbeaten mark through the first two and a half months of the season, and his manager confessed the Marlins are down to nitpicking, grumbling that he occasionally leaves a run on the way to the sixth because there is nothing actually wrong to point at.
The win let Miami take the rubber match after a six-game winning streak had ended a day earlier, and it kept a team many had filed under rebuilding parked in the part of the standings where late September starts to matter. The Marlins are doing it with arms like Meyer’s and, on this particular afternoon, with a lineup that needed precisely two swings to settle the thing.
Run support is the obvious culprit, and also the unsatisfying one. The Pirates have given Skenes almost nothing during the drought, and a lineup that cannot reward six innings of two-run pitching will not reward much. Why a roster assembled around its arms has been unable to manufacture runs behind its best one is the question Pittsburgh has not answered, and Kelly’s refusal to name a single cause may be less evasion than plain honesty.
Skenes has spent the year standing in for arguments far bigger than the Pirates’ record. The players union has dug in against the owners over a proposed salary cap, with Skenes installed as its most prominent face in that fight. His name surfaces every time the talk turns to the trade market and what a controllable young ace is truly worth. He is, at 23 misses a night, precisely the pitcher both sides keep arguing over. He is also, right now, a pitcher who cannot find a win.
The division has offered Pittsburgh little comfort elsewhere. In Cincinnati the same weekend, a rookie was busy collecting his first major league victory, the kind of modest step forward the Pirates keep failing to take behind a starter who should be making those nights ordinary. Skenes is not the problem here, which is exactly what makes the problem so hard to name.
There is no obvious repair sitting in front of this team, and that is what turns a rough patch into something heavier. Pittsburgh can send Skenes out every fifth day and watch him do everything the job asks, and it has learned, slowly, that none of it comes with a guarantee. He missed 23 bats on Sunday. He has now gone six starts without a win, and nobody in the building can quite tell him why.
