Pirates’ Paul Skenes Shockingly Not Among MLB Insider’s Top-10 NL Cy Young Candidates originally appeared on SportsNet Pittsburgh.
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Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes allowed a career-high nine hits in his most recent start, allowing four earned runs and recording just two strikeouts in Saturday’s loss vs. the Toronto Blue Jays.
Skenes still leads MLB in WHIP though at 0.81 and has gone 6-4 with a solid 3.00 ERA and 65 strikeouts across 60 innings pitched covering 11 starts this season.
Skenes’ numbers are a far cry from his 2025 NL Cy Young campaign though, when he led the senior circuit in ERA (1.97) and strikeouts (222), among other categories.
ESPN.com MLB writer and analyst Bradford Doolittle laid of his top-10 NL Cy Young candidates entering Tuesday and Skenes is surprisingly not on the list.
For what it’s worth, Doolittle’s group of 10 is based solely on AXE, which is a “rating system developed to combine the results from the leading publicly available value metrics to create a consensus evaluation of each player.”
Those include “bWAR, fWAR, win probability added and championship probability added.”
The top five pitchers on Doolittle’s list are Cristopher Sanchez, Jacob Misiorowski, Chase Burns, Shohei Ohtani and Max Meyer.
Skenes has had a largely successful spring, but three underwhelming starts (Opening Day vs. New York Mets, May 17 vs. Philadelphia Phillies and Saturday vs. Blue Jays) have skewered his numbers quite a bit.
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