The Pittsburgh Pirates once again find themselves in the NL cellar (well, non-Rockies division), just 15-29 on the season despite a 4-0 win over the New York Mets on Wednesday night. Year after year, Bob Nutting refuses to meaningfully invest in his team; and year after year it shows, in a mediocre product with no sign of getting better any time soon.
Paul Skenes used to be the one thing that fans could hang their hat on, the one piece of evidence that better days might be on the horizon. But not even Skenes can save this dumpster fire of a roster — Pittsburgh has lost six of the nine games he's started so far this year, despite a sterling 2.63 ERA — and now it seems like the team might get rid of its best player far sooner than even the most cynical fans thought.
At least, that's the argument put forth by ESPN's Jeff Passan on the Pac McAfee Show on Thursday afternoon. To be clear, Passan isn't saying the Pirates should trade Skenes, or even that they will. But he did very much open the door to the possibility that they'll consider it.
"If they believe that they have absolutely no chance of signing him, then they should trade him," Passan said. "And you can make the argument that they should trade him now ... The truth is there are teams that already are going to ask about Paul Skenes at the trade deadline this year."
Jeff Passan on Pat McAfee: “You can make the argument the Pirates should trade Paul Skenes now.” pic.twitter.com/M6xUYf79Vg
— Andrew Fillipponi (@ThePoniExpress) May 14, 2025
On the one hand, you can understand where Passan is coming from here. Skenes' trade value will never be higher than it is now, with four-plus years of team control remaining before he hits free agency at the end of the 2029 season. If Pittsburgh doesn't think that it can contend in that timespan, or that it can sign Skenes to an extension, trading him makes cold, calculating sense.
On the other hand, it's worth being honest about what trading Skenes now or in the near future would mean: that the Pirates have essentially abandoned all hope of being a functional Major League team.
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Jeff Passan opens the door for Pirates to consider the unthinkable with Paul Skenes
It's one thing when small-market teams churn through their best players a year or two before they're set to hit free agency; we've seen the likes of the Cleveland Guardians and Tampa Bay Rays stay competitive through that upheaval, and while you can certainly argue that they should spend more money than they do, their financial reality requries some foresight.
But there's foresight, and then there's ... whatever this is. The entire point of being bad in the way that the Pirates have been bad of late is to acquire a player like Skenes for pennies on the dollar and then build a contender around him. Pittsburgh hasn't even really tried to do the latter yet; the team has some promising young pieces on the roster and in the Minors, but they're still very much acting like they're in the midst of a rebuild. To bail on Skenes now, before you've even made an attempt at winning with him, is to admit that you have zero interest in competing.
And for what, exactly? Sure, Skenes would fetch Pittsburgh a haul of young talent, which the team would then presumably fail to supplement and then try to trade years in advance. Until Nutting gets serious about this, even on a budget, the Pirates are doomed to have the same conversations year in and year out, and not even a talent as transcendent as Skenes can save them.