Paul Skenes shows how MLB hopes shorter starts will equal long careers

Skenes is 11 starts into his major league career. His 12th will come in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game in Arlington, Tex., an acknowledgment by National League Manager Torey Lovullo that the rookie right-hander is the sport’s greatest attraction at the moment. Whether he allows 10 hits or none, he’ll come out of the game after the first inning.

“We have 11, 12 pitchers to get through,” said Lovullo, whose day job is managing the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Here’s the push and pull that baseball is dealing with, on display at the Midsummer Classic but present for the Pirates — and every single club that is trying to develop and protect young pitchers: People want to see the best pitchers perform more. Their clubs are continuing to ask them to do less.

Skenes has been nothing but a phenomenon since the Pirates called him up in May. After he won the 2023 men’s College World Series with LSU — where he posted an ungodly 209-20 strikeout-walk ratio and allowed 0.75 walks and hits per inning pitched — the Pirates made him the first pick in the draft. His numbers over seven starts in Class AAA this spring — a 0.99 ERA and 0.91 WHIP — earned him his promotion. His performance since — going 6-0 with a 1.90 ERA, a 0.92 WHIP, 89 strikeouts and 13 walks in 66⅓ innings — made him an all-star.

He is a skyrocketing star in a sport that needs them. Lovullo had the sense to seize on that.

“I wanted to just make sure that the world got a chance to see him,” Lovullo told reporters Monday in Texas. “We’re going to be on the biggest stage [Tuesday], and I am here to support and promote Major League Baseball the best way I know how. … He is potentially a generational talent. I want to give him every opportunity to go out on this stage and show what he can do.”

With limits, of course. That’s because of the exhibition nature of the All-Star Game, true. But it also defines modern baseball.

Skenes’s most recent outing — Thursday in Milwaukee — earned him the start in MLB’s showcase event. Through the first seven innings, Skenes allowed just one walk and no hits to the Brewers. He struck out 11. For 99 pitches, he was dominant.

And Pirates Manager Derek Shelton took him out of the game.

“You want to finish the game,” Skenes told reporters Monday in Texas. “You want to be able to finish what you started. Not just in that inning but every game that you pitch.”

That’s the right mentality for a starting pitcher. It does not reflect the reality of modern baseball.

Apologies for flogging an expired equine, but the diminishing demands on starting pitchers are damaging the sport. This isn’t Shelton’s fault. It isn’t the Pirates’ fault. It’s the fault of what cold, hard facts say — that starting pitchers are less effective the third time they see a hitter than the first — and an absolute dread among front-office types that their most promising young pitchers almost inevitably will break.

By being a model employee, Skenes is helping the Pirates work out of a squirrelly spot.

“Obviously, I am a 22-year-old, and the whole story, I think, has been about workload management, managing my volume this year,” Skenes said. “And then, you know, frankly, Sheltie said that I looked tired when he was talking to me in the dugout and as he was watching me.

“That’s kind of how I felt a little bit, too. I was laboring. It was 60-plus pitches in the first three innings. There are going to be those outings, and [it] kind of sucks that it landed on an outing like that.”

It’s happened twice now. In Skenes’s second big league start, he struck out 11 Chicago Cubs while walking one over six hitless innings. Shelton sat him for the seventh.

It may be smart. It also stinks. Maybe such caution extends Skenes’s season or his career. Unquestionably it robs the sport of moments it needs.

So much effort is being put into protecting players who increasingly play a lesser role in determining the outcome of a game. The average starting pitcher in the first half of this season completed 5.29 innings. Last year, it was 5.14. That’s somewhere between 15 and 16 outs, leaving a cadre of gas-throwing relievers to get the final 11 or 12. The bulk of the labor once fell on the starter; as recently as 2011, an average start was more than six innings. The burden has shifted, and it is shifting further.

Plus, cautionary tales are everywhere. The last pitcher to arrive as a rookie with Skenes’s level of attention was Stephen Strasburg, who struck out 41 and walked five over his first four starts with the Washington Nationals in 2010. In his 12th start, in August in Philadelphia, he shook his right arm. He was removed in the fifth inning. He had Tommy John ligament-replacement surgery on his elbow. He didn’t pitch in the majors again until the following September.

(In)famously, the Nationals then managed Strasburg’s innings the following year — to the point that he was removed from the rotation even as Washington reached the playoffs. What was brazen then is more commonplace now. Skenes has never thrown more than the 129⅓ innings he completed between college and the minors last year. He’s already up to 93⅔ this season. Baseball, as an industry, keeps close tabs on those numbers. The Pirates, just a game-and-a-half out of an NL wild-card berth, could be facing Strasburg-like questions.

There is, however, no foolproof method. Clubs keep monitoring pitchers. Pitchers keep blowing out their elbows. Let’s hope Skenes is different. His first 11 starts have been.

“Hopefully, there’s a lot more time that I can play this game,” Skenes said.

Fingers crossed. Breath held. What’s best for the sport is that Skenes is an outlier, that he stays healthy, because he is an attraction that sells tickets and draws eyeballs. What’s best for the Pirates may be that he gives up a first- or second-inning single every time out. That way, when Shelton does what he feels he’s obliged to do, he won’t be robbing Skenes — or the rest of us — of a moment that might have been.