PITTSBURGH — Paul Skenes is a numbers nerd. Well, most of the time anyway.
The Pittsburgh Pirates ace will make it a point to glance up at the ribbon boards that instantaneously spew out the data following each pitch — velocity, drop, horizontal movement — to get a feel for whether the ball is doing what he wants it to do after it leaves his hands.
He considers the practice educational. A way for the former Air Force cadet who once majored in military strategy before transferring to LSU to decipher what’s working and what’s not during a given start.
Yet there are two numbers the 23-year-old insists he isn’t paying much attention to, at least publicly anyway: his personal win-loss record.
Those numbers remained stuck at 7-9 following six occasionally fiery innings in what became a 5-2 victory over American League-leading Toronto.
Facing a team that entered the night with the highest batting average and fewest strikeouts in the majors — and with almost certain future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer watching intently from the Toronto dugout — Skenes allowed five hits and struck out eight.
When he slowly loped, head down as always, from the mound after fanning Blue Jays third baseman Ernie Clement to end the top of the sixth, a sizable chunk of the PNC Park crowd rose to its feet.
Standing ovations when Skenes is finishing up a day’s work are becoming the norm.
All too often during what has become a frustrating season for a last-place team, so is the result.
When the Pirates failed to break a 2-2 tie in the bottom of the sixth, it meant that Skenes was left a no-decision for the 10th time in 26 starts. In nine of those starts, he’s allowed two runs or fewer, one of the main reasons he could become the first starting pitcher with a losing record to claim the Cy Young.
That prospect puts him at the forefront of the increasingly charged debate around whether “pitcher wins” are a valuable metric in determining a pitcher’s actual worth, something that’s not lost on him.
Yet asked if the lack of “Ws” under his name bothers him, he shrugs.
Yes, he cares about winning. More specifically, he cares about the Pirates winning. Whether he gets credit for it on the days he gets the ball is beside the point.
“I mean definitely the fact that we have more runs than (the opponents) do at the end of the game, that’s the biggest thing,” Skenes said.
Skenes then broke down why reliever Evan Sisk picked up his first big league victory by pitching a scoreless seventh before the Pirates took the lead for good in the bottom of the inning when Henry Davis dashed home following a wild pitch.
“I grinded, frankly, to get through six,” Skenes said.
He pointed directly at a 24-pitch third inning, when Toronto became the first opponent to score an earned run against Skenes at PNC Park since June 3. If he navigates that part of the game a little more efficiently, maybe he’s out there for the seventh. Maybe even the eighth.
“If I do that, there’s probably a ‘win’ next to my name,” he said.
Instead, he stood on the top step of the dugout and watched Sisk, Kyle Nicolas and Dennis Santana get the final nine outs as the Pirates won for just the second time in nine games.
Yes, getting the victory would have been cool. But there was joy in having the 28-year-old Sisk get dumped in a basket after picking up his first major-league victory following seven long seasons in the minors.
As Sisk openly wondered what he might do with the ball commemorating the moment, Skenes jokingly suggested from a couple of stalls away that Sisk might not want to play catch with it.
It was a rare and welcome moment of levity for a team that began the year with heightened expectations (internally anyway) before reality set in.
Skenes’ won-loss record isn’t a reflection of his remarkable performance — he leads the majors in ERA (2.16) and is in the top six in innings, strikeouts and batting average against — but his team’s offensive ineptitude.
The Pirates rank at or near the bottom of the majors in nearly every major statistical category. That part of the equation is out of Skenes’ control. So he is trying to focus on what he can, namely the process of navigating the rigors of a 162-game season and everything that comes with it.
He’s still trying to figure out how to make sure he gets enough sleep given the erratic schedule. To make sure his diet doesn’t slip when the club is on the road. To consistently do all the little things behind the scenes that help him be at his best every fifth day.
“If you aren’t taking care of your routine and everything now, it can catch up to you in five, ten years, two years,” he said. “So you can’t cut corners because at some point, you’re going to run out of paper.”
