DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: How to keep Paul Skenes

DK’s Daily Shot of Pirates: How to keep Paul Skenes

[Music] [Applause] Paul SK again showed the baseball world exactly who he is and exactly who he’s going to be and exactly why he’s not expected to be that for a whole lot longer in our city. Good morning to you. Good Wednesday morning. I’m Dan Kawatu of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Pirates. that comes your way bright and early every weekday if you’re into football and or hockey. I also offer daily shots of Steelers and Penguins in the same place that you found this. Skines went three up, three down in the opening inning of Major League Baseball’s 95th All-Star game last night in Atlanta. Won eventually by the National League in a swingoff, although it goes down formally in the scorebooks as a 6-6 tie. Who cares about that? Skins threw 14 pitches, nine of them strikes. He struck out Clyber Torres and Riley Green before getting Aaron Judge to ground out on 100m hour for Seamer. If it looked to you as if skins was trying to strike out the side, our reporter on the scene for DK Pittsburgh Sports, Chris Hock asked Skins, well, exactly that. Were you trying to get three straight punch outs on him? Yeah, I mean that that’s what the Allar is for. They’re trying to hit a home run. We’re trying to strike everybody out. Uh yeah, I mean just trying to get them out. Didn’t didn’t want to walk anybody. um pissed me off last year. So, I don’t know. Experience. Must be nice, huh? I mean, he actually gets to be picky about how he pitches to that lineup to those three guys and decides to dial it up, which he really did. He was over a hundred officially three times, but over 99 for almost every pitch. He wasn’t messing around. And as you heard, he really didn’t want to walk anybody. So good for him. Star of stars. Want to hear something completely nuts related to that? What if I could tell you that there’s a way the pirates could keep him? And I’m talking about keep him keep him. You know, like Ben Rothllessberger, Sydney Crosby, keep him. Well, I’ll get this part out of the way first. It takes two. He would have to commit to the Pirates and to Pittsburgh. So, what I’m really bringing up here is feasibility, financial feasibility. And I’m going to raise something today that I’ve never raised on this program. Now that it feels convenient in a week where both Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball’s commissioner, and Tony Clark, the Major League Baseball Players Association’s chief executive, commented at length on the very, very real possibility that owners will push for a salary cap system in the next collective bargaining agreement following the expiration of the current one in late 2026. Six. Put simply, if there’s a cap system, pirates have the same financial chance as everybody else at skins. The same financial chance as everybody else. Now, before anybody gets cynical about this and starts repeating incorrect things that they’ve heard on talk radio or Facebook or wherever, I’m going to preemptively strike. Every salary cap system comes with both a ceiling and a floor. If your reflexive comment to that is, well, nothing’s going to spend to the floor. Yes, Bob Nutty might spent to the floor and it won’t matter because the range that exists in the existing cap systems are as follows. In the National Football League, it’s a $28 million difference between the ceiling and the floor. That’s the biggest difference. But it’s important to note that over time, teams are required to spend 89% of the ceiling on an average over four years. So, you can’t duck your way out of it. The NHL has a $23 million difference. The NBA has only a $14 million difference, but their teams have to spend to 90% of the ceiling. So, that’s your range. It’s right around 20 million or so if you average out those three systems. That’s it. That’s really not all that much. If nothing wants to cheap out in a salary cap system, no one’s even going to notice it. It basically takes the financial discussions and debates about the owner right out of the mix. Right out of the mix. Now, there’s still a lot of differences between good ownership and bad ownership in salary cap leagues, but it’s not this. Everybody’s pretty much around $20 million apart. That’s not being talked about anywhere. Drives me nuts. Even now that the cap is being discussed for the first time by somebody other than me on this continent, this part’s not really grabbing anybody’s attention yet. They hear the word cap, they think that’s the ceiling, and no, it’s not. It’s a cap system. So now within all of that, let’s swing back to skins. The Pirates retain Skins’s rights for this season, obviously, plus four more, almost all of the remainder, through the arbitration process. They’ll pay a lot, but they won’t pay anywhere near what he’d get on the open market. And to reiterate, he can’t be a free agent in the current system until 2030 when he’s 28 years old. And now I’m going to remind because I said this earlier that the current agreement expires after next season. So, even if you presume, and a lot of people are, and I’m kind of one of them, that the 2027 season is going to be lost to a labor dispute, like the entire season is just going to get blown up, then you’d better be very, very, very, very, very sure that the owners are going to not let an entire lost season go to waste. and they’re going to be even more determined to emerge with the salary cap system for the 2028 season. Well, at that point, no matter what your system looks like, no matter if it gets completely blown up, how many years you have to stay with a team before free agency and everything else, the sport will emerge with a financial structure that’ll allow the Pirates to pay as much money as the Dodgers to this player. And it’ll have nothing nothing nothing to do with the current owner except if you want to give him some attabo for being in favor of the cap through that long and arduous process. When it comes to the money, the owners are basically out of the equation in a cap system. So go ahead and process that next time you’re watching this extraordinary young man pitch when we come back. J1Q. [Music] If you’re looking for a great dining experience, look no further than Northshore Tavern. Located directly across Federal Street from PNC Park, next door to Mike’s Beer Bar, Northshore Tavern is Pittsburgh’s home for steak on a stone. Enjoy your steak finished on a hot lava stone in front of you where you ensure each piece is cooked to exactly your liking. or try their rotating selection of entre, hot sandwiches, salads, and burgers, all while enjoying the ambiance dedicated to the great players and history of the Pittsburgh Pirates all around you. Come see why everyone’s talking about Northshore Tavern and Steak on a Stone. It’s Gun Storage Check Week. Help prevent unwanted access to your firearms. No one wants their unsecured gun to be used in an accident, a suicide, or a crime. Use lock boxes, safes, and locks to secure your firearms. Learn more at gunstoch checkck.org. That’s gunstorage check.org. Brought to you by NSSF, the firearm industry trade association. [Music] And today’s J1 Q comes from Hudge who says, “DK, I look at the NHL and I love that a team like Columbus has the same chance to win the Stanley Cup as Los Angeles. Let’s get this done. The Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association.” Hutch, I’m with you. The Winnipeg Jets, who are based in the smallest market in the league, went into Manhattan and ripped apart the New York Rangers late this past regular season. And it was just no big deal. The Green Bay Packers, based in the smallest market of any big league team probably anywhere in the world, would dismantle either of the NFL’s two New Jersey teams by only about a billion points, give or take a million touchdowns. But what I want to seize upon here, because I understand that every time this subject comes up, it’s almost as if all of this pent up and to a very large extent righteous anger with Bob Nutting makes everyone feel like, yeah, but something something nutting. I can’t leave nutting out of this. So, they bring him into it. And again, that’s fine. I I’ve said a I don’t even know how many times in how many different ways that he needs to sell the team. He’s not the right owner and he’s made wrong move after wrong move after wrong move. The difference between me and most people when it comes to the nutting subject is I don’t put his payroll structure or his payroll limitations even within the top 10 of the things that he does badly as owner. If you do, if you’re in the overwhelming majority and you do, awesome for you, great. But understand a couple of things here. The reason that the Winnipeg Jets can beat up on the New York Rangers is that they’re very, very well-run. They have a razor sharp general manager and Kevin Chevel off. They have a razor sharp team president and Mark Chipman. Both are passionate. Both are committed. and both are part of a foundation that’s been really stable there in Winnipeg for a while. The Rangers are based in New York and it doesn’t matter. In fact, that more often than not goes against them because of the whole, you know, big market pressure and we’ve got to produce a winner this year or we’re all out on the street. The same thing happens in other NHL markets of significant size. But the main thing here is that the Winnipeg hockey franchise is run well. The Pirates, if a salary cap system was instituted this afternoon, would still suck. I want that on the record. And I want it in all capital letters and boldface, neon, and the whole deal. Why? Because the people that they have running it are losers. Exactly. the kind of losers that you could see in this absurd video they put out after the Major League Baseball draft of all these people in this room when they the Pirates made their first pick, sixth overall, some high school pitcher who’s half a dozen years away. As if they’d done something right, as if their major league team wasn’t on a 65 win pace for the 2025 season. They operate in some other reality. They create this delusion around themselves that the results at the top don’t matter. That the results in Pittsburgh don’t matter. All that matters is their beloved process and you have it right there on video to see with your own eyes. and Nutting’s in there and Travis Williams is in there and Ben Cherington’s in there and it’s Christmas morning for these guys while the team that is the only actual objective of the entire process or should be just lost eight in a row before salvaging one win from that road trip and they’re in there partying like it’s 1999 or 1979 more appropriately. ly losers. This is what losers do. So, please don’t ever conflate when I say that the Pittsburgh Baseball Club and this sport in our city needs a salary cap more than anything else with my suggesting that oh, everything’s going to be just fine as soon as they have one. No, it won’t. Not under this stewardship, not under this management. I appreciate everybody who listens to this show. God only knows why you do. But we’ll be back with another one tomorrow. [Music]

A very real way to keep Paul Skenes.

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