My recent travels took me past the Washington Observer-Reporter, on Main Street in a sad western Pennsylvania town, disheveled by opioids and crime. Roger Goodell attended Washington & Jefferson College and worked in a bar as a student. The O-R is owned by Bob Nutting, and a friend subscribes to determine how many delinquents have died. I began my career there covering cross-country meets at 17.
This is what the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates does. Nutting owns Ogden Newspapers. Mark Cuban, from Mt. Lebanon, wanted to buy the team and was rejected. Mario Lemieux, the hockey legend, was told no. Thomas Tull is worth $5.3 billion and would have promised Paul Skenes the highest contract of any pitcher who ever lived. He also was told no.
Instead, the sports world must deal with numbing thoughts that Skenes will be traded at some point. All because Nutting runs the Pirates like a broken-down publisher and a small-town skunk. He is worse than Jerry Reinsdorf in Chicago and Bruce Sherman in Miami. He is uglier than even Rachel Phelps, who rooted for her Cleveland Indians to lose in “Major League.” Because Nutting’s franchise reeks and has reached the postseason only three times in 33 years — without a World Series title since 1979 — he was allowed to draft Skenes atop the 2023 draft. With the right owner, the kid is blessed with a brilliant mind and supersonic stuff and would alter the direction of baseball in Pittsburgh.
He pitches in a wonderful stadium that overlooks downtown. If we toss out an Athletics team that plays in West Sacramento and a Tampa Bay team that played in a minor-league ballpark, the Pirates had the third-worst attendance in the majors. Fans try to show up for “Skenes Days” on the North Shore, but after a while, why bother? The team was 71-91 and has finished 147-177 in Skenes’ two seasons. Nutting doesn’t spend nearly enough, with a payroll of $87.6 million — fifth-worst in the game when the Los Angeles Dodgers spent $500 million with luxury taxes. Some days, people go to PNC Park expecting to see Livvy Dunne, Skenes’ girlfriend, and very few others.
So, why wouldn’t Skenes spend his first Cy Young Award celebration knocking down rumors that he wants to be traded to the New York Yankees? Has a party ever been such a turndown? Or, rather, a reminder of the team he always has supported? His record was 10-10 with an earned-run average of 1.97 and 216 strikeouts. His teammates couldn’t score for him, an all-time travesty. Skenes should be mentioning the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Mets, the Phillies, the Braves, the Blue Jays. According to an unnamed Pirates teammate, who apparently spoke to NJ Advance Media, Skenes has “no confidence the Pirates ever are going to win.” Then he added, “Trust me, he wants to play for the Yankees. I’ve heard him say it multiple times.”
The reason the talk is worthwhile — though no one is sure about writer Randy Miller — is that Nutting and general manager Ben Cherington would load up with four or five credible everyday players. Might they improve the Pirates the way the Dallas Cowboys eventually won three Super Bowls after trading Herschel Walker in 1989? Of course, the Pirates aren’t going anywhere with or without Skenes. But if the return helps the team, wouldn’t the owner move forward? If the Yankees are involved, the Dodgers would be involved. As a kid in Orange County, Skenes rooted for the Angels and Mike Trout. Imagine if he joined Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow in the rotation.
For now, as a good-natured kid of 23, Skenes is staying true to Pittsburgh. Notice how he answered questions about the Yankees but never denied the full story. Can we blame him?
“I got shown the Tweet and really didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “I got some texts about it. I’m on the Pirates, my goal is to win with the Pirates. I love the city of Pittsburgh.”
The report? “I don’t know where that came from, the goal is to win. I don’t know the reporter that reported it,” Skenes said. “I don’t know the player who supposedly said that, but the goal is to win and the goal is to win in Pittsburgh.”
He said he relates to fans in that city, the same way Gerrit Cole once did before he left for Houston and signed a blockbuster deal with the Yankees. “Pittsburgh, the way that fans see us outside of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is not supposed to win,” Skenes said. “There are 29 fan bases that expect us to lose. I want to be a part of the group, a part of the 26 guys that change that. The fans are hungry to have a winner in Pittsburgh and I want to be a part of the group that did that. I think about it the same way when I was at the Air Force Academy. We had never been to a conference championship, and my sophomore year we ended up winning the conference. We’d never finished in the top four in the conference before that.”
The Air Force Academy … the Pirates. This man should occupy October and let October occupy him, every year. The sport wastes him when he returns home in late September. In the setting of soccer’s Premier League, the Pirates would be relegated to a second tier. Never, ever relegate Skenes, who knows the last playoff appearance came in 2015.
“It’s been 10 years, the second-longest playoff drought in the big leagues. Someone can check my math on how many years it’s been since we won a World Series: 46 years? Sorry, I went to LSU. Yeah, 46 years without a World Series championship,” he said. “This is why I’m going to show up to the ballpark and I’m going to work to get everybody pushing in the same direction. I know there are other guys that will do the same. That’s all the truth.”
What does he want from Pittsburgh? Where are his wildest dreams? “Winning World Series championships,” he said, “and multiple of them.”
For now, Nutting and Cherington are clinging to him. “What we’re going to focus on is just how do we win games with him in a Pirates uniform,” the GM said. “I have a ton of respect for the Yankees, but we’ll just focus on what we need to do.”
In a division with the Brewers, Cubs and Reds, the Pirates will stumble again and reach the All-Star Game overloaded with the usual gossip. This is a tale that will engage baseball until a trade is made. It’s sad for Pittsburgh, Pa. But Paul Skenes deserves a place where everyone is watching, which won’t happen with a newspaper guy in charge.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.