There was no sophomore slump for Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes. Instead, the LSU product followed up his 2024 NL Rookie of the Year campaign by unanimously winning his first NL Cy Young Award.
The two-time All-Star beat out the Philadelphia Phillies’ Cristopher Sánchez and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto for the 2025 honor Wednesday after posting an MLB-best 1.97 ERA this season. No other qualifying major-league starting pitcher had gone sub-2.00 since Justin Verlander did it with the Houston Astros in 2022.
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Although Skenes’ 1.97 ERA was a hundredth of a point higher than his 1.96 ERA from last season, it was the lowest by a Pirates starter with at least 140 innings pitched since 1916, per the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He logged enough innings to become the first qualified pitcher in his age-23 season or younger to notch an ERA that starts with a 1 since Dwight Gooden in 1985, according to MLB.com.
The 2023 No. 1 overall pick needed a stellar start the last week of the regular season to accomplish the feat. He delivered one, spinning six scoreless innings and striking out seven batters against the playoff-bound Cincinnati Reds on Sept. 24. The Pirates prevailed in extras, so Skenes didn’t get the win, an all-too-familiar tale, as he finished the season with a 10-10 record that didn’t reflect his excellence.
Run support was hard to come by for Skenes this season, which saw now-former Pirates manager Derek Shelton fired after a seven-game skid dropped Pittsburgh’s record to 12-26. Skenes remained a silver lining for a club that finished with a losing record for the seventh season in a row.
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Skenes is a cornerstone piece for new manager Don Kelly, who took over for Shelton this spring before earning an extension at the end of September. Pirates general manager Ben Cherington drove that point home in spite of outside noise about the organization potentially trading Skenes in the near future.
“The question gets asked, and it’s always respectful,” Cherington said of fellow teams probing for Skenes’ availability at MLB GM meetings in Las Vegas this week, per Front Office Sports. “Teams have to ask the question, right? I suspect that won’t end. But the answer’s been consistent.”
The hard-throwing righty was part of a Pittsburgh pitching staff that recorded the fourth-lowest ERA (3.59) of any team in the majors from May 9 through the end of the regular season, per MLB.com.
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Among all MLB pitchers this season, Skenes ranked second in wins above replacement (7.7), fourth in WHIP (0.948), tied for fourth in strikeouts (216) and first in fewest home runs allowed per nine innings pitched (0.528).
As for Skenes’ 216 strikeouts, those are the most a Pirates right-handed pitcher has ever tallied in a single season. He broke Mitch Keller’s record of 210 from 2023.
Skenes became the first MLB pitcher to start the All-Star game in each of his first two seasons.
Now he’s the first Pirates pitcher to win the Cy Young Award since Doug Drabek in 1990. Skenes has been as great as advertised.
