considered how to unleash the best pitching prospect in a generation on the baseball world, they landed on a plan with which they felt entirely comfortable and positively uncomfortable. No matter how well-thought-out the steps, how sound the logic, how reasoned the process, the success of a pitcher hangs in the balance. Even if a team does everything right, it still can go very, very wrong.
For the last month, Paul Skenes, the subject of all the planning, has carved up Triple-A hitting. His long-awaited debut in Pittsburgh is imminent, with the Pirates announcing he will start Saturday against the Chicago Cubs, and Skenes will arrive with a bullet train full of hype. He went to the Pirates with the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft, the deepest in recent memory. He is capable of doing things with a baseball unlike any man before him: No starter in the big leagues ever has thrown as consistently hard as Skenes.
None of that hoopla factored into Pittsburgh’s approach to his 2024 season, but the alarming rate at which it has watched the game’s best pitchers hit the injured list certainly did. The Pirates didn’t want to rush the right-hander — and they didn’t want to hold him back, either. They loved everything about him — except for all of the things they couldn’t know. They drew a roadmap they hoped would bring out the best in him — and acknowledged they had no clue whether it would succeed.
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