Players like Paul Skenes make baseball exciting. Teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates may us want there to be a salary floor in MLB. At some point, something has to give. Water will eventually find its level. Skenes will become one of the highest paid players in baseball. Skenes is still in the pre-arbitration phases of his contract with the Pirates, but we can only imagine what a contract extension looks like.
Tim Britton of The Athletic wrote that "Skenes could target $44 million per free-agent season. That would be higher than the record average annual value established by Max Scherzer and tied by Justin Verlander in short-term deals with the [New York] Mets." Where things stand now, Skenes is pitching the 2025 MLB season on a base salary of $800,000. Pirates owner Bob Nutting has to be loving this.
For Skenes to even make or approach $44 million in average annual value, he needs to continue to pitch like the phenom he was coming out of LSU. The former Air Force cadet is arguably the most exciting rookie pitcher we have seen in baseball in close to a decade. He needs to continue to refined his arsenal, but he has the makings of a long-time, front-line starter in this league for years to come.
Unfortunately, his price point knocks the Pirates out of equation and into the Los Angeles Dodgers'.
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Paul Skenes has the potential to be a record-setter on contract extension
For a guy who grew up in California, going to the Dodgers may not be the worst thing in the world. Skenes does not hit free agency until 2030, so the Pirates have plenty of time to figure out what to do with their most important asset. My concern is that if he pitches like a Cy Young candidate for the next few years, what makes us believe the Pirates and Skenes' camp will see eye-to-eye in arbitration.
While it may serve the Pirates to get out ahead of this, what have they done in recent years that leads you to believe they will actually do this? We thought drafting Joe Burrow No. 1 overall, interestingly enough out of LSU, would be enough to change the Cincinnati Bengals' penny-pinching ways. While he did get his money, Mike Brown has been reluctant to pay the great players around him their coin.
What I am getting at is where you land matters. Skenes had no choice in the matter but to go to the Pirates once he was drafted by them. This is the downside to league's driven by parity. The best players in college go to the worst professional teams in the draft process. For better or worse, free agency is a way where teams who like to spend big each offseason can do so up to a certain point.
The Pirates employ their most talented player since Barry Bonds, so now is not the time to ruin this.