Pirates ace Paul Skenes continues to impress and make history by winning first Cy Young Award

Jason Mackey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Nov 12, 2025

Published in Baseball

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PITTSBURGH — It’s more than likely the first of several.

It also wasn’t much of a surprise given Paul Skenes’ dominance in 2025.

A year after he burst onto the scene by winning National League Rookie of the Year, Skenes took both an impressive and logical next step Wednesday when the Baseball Writers’ Association of America announced the Pirates ace had won this year’s NL Cy Young Award.

The Cy Young — which Skenes won over Cristopher Sanchez of the Phillies and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Dodgers — is the first for a Pirate since Doug Drabek in 1990 and third overall (Vernon Law, 1960).

Skenes was a unanimous winner, earning all 30 first-place votes. Sanchez got all 30 second-place votes. Yamamoto (16), San Francisco’s Logan Webb (10) and Milwaukee’s Freddy Peralta (4) split the third-place votes.

“I think it’s probably in a lot of guys’ heads,” Skenes said late in the regular season when asked whether he actively thought about winning a Cy Young. “It’s real easy to get lost in that. But it’s ultimately about pitching as well as I can every outing, then looking up at the end of the year and seeing where we’re at.”

Where Skenes is at individually is obviously really, really good. He’s the fifth youngest to win this award and just the third to win NL Rookie of the Year and NL Cy Young within his first two seasons.

There’s also much more to accomplish.

“Obviously pitched pretty well this year,” Skenes said. “I grew a lot and learned a lot. That’s the thing I’m most excited about. Learned what I need to do and what we need to do.

“It was a solid year for me, but there’s room for us to get better. We need to focus on that in the offseason.”

They certainly do, yes. The Pirates have wasted Skenes’ first two big league seasons, and there should be alarm-bell urgency this winter when it comes to building around the MLB star.

It’s also OK to leave that for tomorrow and appreciate what Skenes, still only 23, did in 2025, leading the NL in ERA (1.97), WHIP (0.95), FIP (2.36) and ERA+ (217) — the final number essentially saying he was 117% better than average.

Skenes went 10-10 over 187 2/3 innings, walking 42 and striking out 216, the most for a Pirates right-hander in the modern era (1900-present). He also became the first starting pitcher to win a Cy Young without a winning record and posted the second-best rate of strikeouts per nine innings (10.359) in franchise history.

“The book’s out on me ... and it’s always changing,” Skenes said. “There are times when I felt like I was able to stay a step ahead. There have been times where it hasn’t felt that way. That’s baseball.

“But I learned a lot about how I need to prepare and what I need to do for my body. ... It’s exciting for next year.”

One thing that changed with Skenes in 2025 was his pitch mix. He threw a sweeper about 6% more, and it became his second-best pitch, according to Baseball Savant’s run value metric.

Opponents hit just .150 against Skenes’ sweeper and slugged .215. We also saw Skenes’ change-up evolve into an elite pitch. He threw it 11% of the time, basically twice as frequently as 2024, and opponents hit just .103 against it.

The finesse and evolution with Skenes further proves he’s not just some hulking dude who just blows fastballs by hitters. He’s a pitcher, thinking through the game along with the best of them while trying to continuously evolve.

“I get to see what I’m made of every time I pitch,” Skenes said.

Of course, that does involve plenty of heat.

Skenes’ four-seam fastball produced a run value of 22. Only three offerings across MLB performed better. If you look at overall pitcher run value, Skenes and Yamamoto (both 42) were tied for second behind Detroit’s Tarik Skubal (51).

However you want to slice the individual numbers, it’s been everything the Pirates could have hoped for and more when they drafted Skenes first overall out of LSU in 2023, the pitcher already accumulating 13.5 wins above replacement, per Baseball Reference. The next frontier, of course, involves Pittsburgh correctly and aggressively building around Skenes.

For now, however, it’s OK to celebrate a tremendous individual accomplishment, Skenes officially recognized as the best pitcher in his league — and probably the sport, too.

Taking nothing away from the AL Cy Young winner, Skubal, but the conversation with Skenes has become bigger and deeper, requiring historical context.

For example, Skenes currently has an ERA+ over his two MLB seasons of 215. You don’t need to know the ins and outs of the stat, but just know these two things:

— 100 is considered average.

— Dwight Gooden, who also won NL Rookie of the Year and the NL Cy Young in his first two seasons, had an ERA+ of 176 at that point in his career.

“Guys like Paul don’t come around often,” Pirates manager Don Kelly said in September. “I played with [Justin] Verlander and [Max] Scherzer, and that’s what you see in Paul.

“If he can continue to develop that and continue to grow as a pitcher — he’s not a thrower — with the way he works, he’s definitely a guy you want to build around.”