Paul Skenes lights up Pittsburgh in MLB debut despite "mediocre showing" | Baseball Bar-B-Cast
Yahoo Sports senior MLB analyst Jordan Shusterman and senior MLB analyst Jake Mintz discuss the undeniable energy in Pittsburgh during Paul Skenes’ MLB debut, despite his mediocre showing results wise. Hear the full conversation on the “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
I wanted to see like a spark of the magic uh like I love brief glimpses and buzzes of hope in, in baseball.
And I knew that this would be that, that is your thing.
I really love that.
And so I wanted to be in person for it.
Also, I missed out on the Strasburg debut, blah, blah, blah.
And the energy in Pittsburgh for this was different than a normal Pirates game like undeniably.
And the closest it got to the Strasbourg debut is in the first inning where Skene strikes out Mike Taman to start the game.
He strikes out, say Suzuki the next batter and he's up 02 on Cody Bellinger.
And the crowd feels that and gets to its feet for the 02 pitch and he ends up walking Bellinger.
If he had struck out Bellinger, the crowd pop would have been amazing and it would have been that highlight that everyone wanted.
Instead he walks Bellinger Morell flies out to the wall and Skeens kind of settles in to results wise, was a relatively mediocre showing, but just the energy of seeing something like that was really cool.
It was really, really cool.
It was pouring all afternoon.
He like it was insane, dude.
He, it's pouring.
They take, it stops raining, they take the harp off the field.
It's cloudy.
The sun cracks through the sky at 321 and then schemes emerges from the dugout like an angel.
It was so freaking funny part of the ski story in the early going also uh regardless of their comparison to prospect for specifically zooming in on this game is, is wondering how long he was gonna go.
Now, part of that was going to be dictated by how he was pitching.
But also because the matter of workload and pitch count has been such an issue.
There was constantly, once we got past the third, it was like, all right, and, you know, people are upset that that's, you know, where we're at with starting pitching and, and how we're handling it and that's fine.
I understand that, you know, once he gets to the fourth and into the fifth, it's like, all right, it's just a matter of time, the fastball command was absolutely the most disappointing part of it.
It's not, again, this doesn't mean he's not like he, he's gonna have a good fastball command, but like that was clearly what was missing and that's what clearly put him into bad counts.
Um But the slider was the blinker thing is just stupid.
Yeah, I know that's the thing and, and you could see there were some cases where he threw where he probably shouldn't have and, and it probably helped the batter because it was easier to catch up to that than to 100.
But I think the stuff looked great.
He was holding the vilo.
I think you saw how it played like it.
I, I would say generally I was not disappointed whatsoever.
I think the stuff looked like some of the best stuff in the world as his, you know, AAA, pitching coach told me a few weeks ago.