It's been another rough year for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2025 as the MLB season winds down, with the team set to be on the outside of the playoffs looking in. The Pirates currently sit 20 games below the .500 mark at 69-89 with just a few games to go until they can hit Cancun, and the fanbase is running out of reasons to be optimistic about the squad's future prospects.
One of the lone beacons of hope for the Pirates over the last couple of years has been the play of starting pitcher Paul Skenes, the former first round pick out of LSU who burst onto the scene as a rookie in 2024, quickly establishing himself as one of the best players in the game at his position. Although things have been a bit rocky during certain stretches of his sophomore campaign, Skenes remains an elite player who is seemingly a major building block for the team moving forward.
Recently, MLB insider Jeff Passan of ESPN stopped by the Pat McAfee Show to break down why the Pirates should never consider trading Skenes and should instead build around him.
“That's all Pirates fans want. They want a reason to go to the ballpark,” said Passan, per Pat McAfee on X, formerly Twitter. “They want to feel like ownership cares as much as they do, and right now, that's just not the case. But in this offseason, you sure can make the case that it is. It's right there for the taking for the Pirates, and the eternal question for that organization is, ‘will they?'”
A tough reality for the Pirates
Indeed, the Pittsburgh Pirates have long been considered to have a notoriously cheap ownership group, unable to buy their way into championship contention the same way other squads like the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees have.
“I understand, it's unfair the landscape in Major League Baseball right now when you have one team that's spending $500 million in the Dodgers, and another team that's not spending even a quarter of that, and there are a few of those teams,” added Passan.
It remains to be seen which path the Pirates will take.
