He’s the Best Pitcher in Baseball— And He Can Barely Win a Game

BY JARED DIAMOND

Pirates ace Paul Skenes is delivering another otherworldly season from the mound. But thanks to the offensive ineptitude of his Pittsburgh teammates, he somehow holds a losing record.

Nobody on the planet understands the plight of Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes better than Joe Magrane.

As a young pitcher in 1988, Magrane posted a major-league best 2.18 ERA. The St. Louis Cardinals, somehow, went just 8-16 in his outings—an almost unimaginable level of futility.

After the losses, an increasingly frustrated Magrane would return home around 1 a.m., throw a steak on the grill and consume what he described as “a couple extra Budweisers.”

It is, to this day, the worst team performance in baseball history behind such a dominant starter.

“The biggest lesson was to not bag on your teammates not scoring runs,” the 60-year-old Magrane says now. “That just looks horse s—t when it’s on the printed page.”

To his credit, Skenes has heeded that advice so far. But the way things have been going, no one would blame him for unleashing a few words that are as fiery as his fastball.

Skenes, the once-in-a-lifetime pitching phenom whose 100 mph heat and mysterious “splinker” have captivated the sport, is following up his otherworldly rookie season by pitching even better this year. After bamboozling the Philadelphia Phillies for 7 ⅔ innings without allowing an earned run Sunday, Skenes’s ERA in 2025 is 1.88. He has given up just 56 hits over 91 frames, further cementing his status as one of the favorites for the Cy Young award.

Through no fault of his own, however, there’s something conspicuously missing from Skenes’s résumé: wins.

Thanks to the Pirates’ embarrassingly dismal offense, Skenes has a record of just 4-6 despite pitching like the second coming of Walter Johnson virtually every night this season. The last-place Pirates have gone 6-8 in games when Skenes is on the mound. On two separate occasions, Skenes has allowed just a single run over eight innings—and still taken a loss both times.

The situation over the last few weeks has been even more dire. In his last six starts, Skenes has surrendered four earned runs over 42 ⅓ innings, a microscopic ERA of 0.85. Yet he has earned the victory just once. The Pirates have gone 3-3 in that span, scoring a total of 13 runs while Skenes was pitching.

After his latest masterpiece, Skenes said he enjoyed pitching in low-scoring games, where one bad pitch can make all the difference. Still, he admitted, “Pitching in 10-0 games is fun, too.”

The Pirates don’t have too many of those. They entered Wednesday ranked second-to-last in the National League in runs scored and on-baseplus- slugging percentage, which explains how they have squandered the presence of a generational talent.

“Control what you can control,” Skenes said earlier this season. “Obviously, not everything is within my power.”

This is nothing new for MLB’s most moribund franchise. The Pirates haven’t qualified for the playoffs since 2015 and haven’t reached the championship series since 1992. Their last World Series title came in 1979, when Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was the team’s official theme song and Willie Stargell was NL MVP.

“We need to deliver more and better,” Pirates general manager Ben Cherington says. “Everyone who cares about the Pirates de--serves that.” Cherington says the Pirates expected more this season. Their front office projected a roster that was good enough to finish around .500, putting them in position to compete for the postseason if a few players overperformed. Instead, the opposite has happened. While their starting pitching has been solid even beyond Skenes, the lineup has collapsed, leaving the Pirates again searching for a path forward. The clock is ticking. The Pirates have the rights to Skenes for four more seasons, at which point he will be eligible to sign an enormous free-agent contract. Already, executives across the industry are starting to wonder when the Pirates might make Skenes available in a trade if they don’t start winning soon. “If you really look at the players that are in the organization now,” Cherington says, “I don’t believe you have to squint too hard to see some real strengths.”

Until then, Skenes will continue to make history for all the wrong reasons. Since earned runs became an official statistic in 1913, no qualified starting pitcher with an ERA under 2.00 finished the season with an individual record below .500.

Then again, none of them played for the 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates.

Paul Skenes has a 4-6 record despite pitching like the second coming of Walter Johnson.