Pirates' Paul Skenes Reveals Whether He Changed Anything During Latest Outing
· Yahoo Sports
Whenever right-hander Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates doesn't have a perfect outing, there are going to be questions about how he feels.
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Skenes, undoubtedly one of the best starters in Major League Baseball, and there will probably even be an argument that he'll go down as one of the best ever if things continue on this trajectory, had a few rough outings by his standards.
I won't sit here and act like Skenes was the same type of starter that he typically is over the past two months, even if I've come out and said multiple times that I think it's ridiculous that anybody is questioning the guy.
Speaking to reporters after his outing on Tuesday night against the Atlanta Braves, a game in which he threw six innings of two-run baseball and only struck out four, Skenes sounded a bit happier with his execution.
He wasn't great, only striking out four and giving up eight hits, but this was a step in the right direction.
“I don't think so,” Skenes said of switching things up en route to the win, per MLB.com. “Again, I think throughout the past stretch, there have been a couple kind of clunky outings. But there has also been a lot of weak contact, and I think today was kind of more of the same. Just got some runs put up earlier and made my life easy.”
The one important thing for Skenes is that, while he wasn't throwing the baseball at the level he hoped for, he is still a young man who only cares about winning.
I understand that he was likely upset about how he was performing, but it sounded like much of his frustration was actually coming from his team losing in his starts. That's what the Pirates skipper had to say, and that really goes to show the type of young man Skenes is, and the reason why he's been as dominant as he has throughout his career.
“We just want to win,” Pirates manager Don Kelly said. “And whether it's Paul or whoever that's on the mound … I don't know if it's about the streak, I think that it's just Paul is a competitor that wants to win, and he does block out the noise very well, and it's hard. That's hard to do when you're as good as he is, and the expectations that he puts on himself to be able to navigate that.”