Because Paul Skenes cleaned up during awards season, he was able to take home several million more dollars in bonuses. Skenes and Kansas City Royals budding superstar Bobby Witt Jr. headlined the slew of pre-arbitration players in their bonus pool allotment. The Pittsburgh Pirates fireballer netted $2,152,057 in bonuses for winning NL Rookie of the Year and placing for the Cy Young award.
It should be noted that all players who have not amassed three years or more worth of MLB service time are eligible for these pre-arbitration bonuses. Witt may have been extended previously by Kansas City, but we have to wonder if cheapskate Pirates owner Bob Nutting will do the same. Skenes is the franchise's most promising player since arguably Andrew McCutchen, who is pushing 40 now...
I feel like we have been through the same dog and pony show for the better part of 40 years now with the Pirates. They have had some excellent players of the years. While they were a playoff team at times roughly a decade ago, that was also a decade ago. Skenes probably has very few memories about the team that McCutchen and Neil Walker starred for in the middle part of the previous decade.
To be quite frank, Skenes is the closest thing to a superstar to play for the Pirates since Barry Bonds.
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Paul Skenes' pre-arbitration bonuses are making him way too expensive
While we have seen the Pirates try to extend some of their own players in recent years, namely Bryan Reynolds and Ke'Bryan Hayes, they have a bad reputation organizationally of taking the easy way out financially. The Pirates often target the player who will sign for the cheapest amount of cash coming out of either high school or college. They do draft well, but their stars usually star somewhere else.
Truth be told, we are way too far away for a player of Skenes' stature to force a trade out of town. The Pirates could be an ascending team next year in some capacity. The NL Central is jumbled closer together than most people want to realize. It does not have a bottom-feeding team like the NL East has in the Miami Marlins and the Washington Nationals or the NL West has in the Colorado Rockies.
Overall, we have to root for players like Skenes to succeed anyway on teams like the Pirates. If you want to grow the sport in the manner it was always intended to, you need to have teams outside of the Los Angeles Dodgers contending for championships all the time because their ownership group can afford to spend a billion dollars on a team to lose in the NLDS more often than not. It is ridiculous.
Skenes did not even make the team out of Spring Training, so keep that in mind with regards to this.