Paul Skenes MLB Player of Year: Pirates’ Unlikely 2025 Star

The following article dives deep into one of the most fascinating pitching seasons in modern baseball history. It looks at how Paul Skenes captured the 2025 National League Cy Young Award while carrying an almost impossible statistical contradiction — historic dominance paired with a perfectly ordinary win–loss record.

Paul Skenes and One of Baseball’s Great Statistical Paradoxes

Wins and losses have long been the shorthand by which people judge pitchers. Even with analytics pushing the conversation forward, old habits die hard.

In 2025, Paul Skenes forced everyone — voters, analysts, traditionalists — to confront how outdated that measure can be. The Pirates’ young ace was the unanimous National League Cy Young winner, yet he finished with a 10–10 record that just looked… off.

Skenes wasn’t just good. He was historically elite in almost every category that actually measures pitching performance.

Dominance That Defied Conventional Logic

Skenes started all 32 games and averaged just under six innings per outing. That’s a modern workload, but he paired it with overwhelming efficiency.

He finished the season with a 1.97 ERA, a league-leading 0.95 WHIP, and 216 strikeouts. These numbers put him firmly among the pitching elite.

By advanced metrics, he was unmatched. Skenes led all of Major League Baseball in Win Probability Added, showing that no pitcher influenced outcomes more when he was on the mound.

Historically, very few pitchers since 1969 have recorded a sub-2.00 ERA, a sub-1.00 WHIP, and thrown at least 180 innings in the same season. Almost all of them posted gaudy winning percentages far north of .500.

A 10–10 Record That Makes No Sense

Context matters. In Skenes’ case, no number screams for context more than his .500 record.

Compared to past pitchers who logged 30 or more starts with similarly low ERAs, Skenes is the outlier. He’s the rare ace whose brilliance didn’t translate into wins.

Through 55 career starts, his résumé becomes even more staggering. His 1.96 ERA over that span is the lowest for any pitcher’s first 55 starts in the live-ball era. That’s better than legends like Vida Blue and Dwight Gooden.

The Pirates’ Offensive Black Hole

The explanation is painfully simple: run support. The Pirates’ offense just vanished when Skenes took the mound.

Projection models suggest that with even league-average scoring, his record through those 55 starts would sit around an eye-popping 41–3. In 2025 alone, the struggle was glaring.

Skenes was just 4–8 as late as mid-July, even though he pitched at an elite level. Between April 19 and July 11, he won only two of 16 starts while posting a microscopic 1.77 ERA.

Elite Performance Even in “No-Win” Games

Maybe the clearest indictment of the win–loss stat is how well Skenes pitched in games he didn’t win. In those outings, he still recorded a 2.66 ERA, a 0.94 WHIP, and 10.3 strikeouts per nine innings.

On most teams, numbers like that would rack up plenty of victories.

A Statistical Oddity for the Ages

This might be the strangest nugget of all. In his three career starts of eight innings or more, Skenes is 0–3 with a 1.48 ERA.

Over the past two seasons, every other starter combined to go 141–22 in such outings. That’s just wild, isn’t it?

A Transcendent Pitcher, Trapped by Circumstance

Paul Skenes’ 2025 season will stick in people’s minds as a turning point for how we talk about pitching greatness. His Cy Young Award didn’t just mark dominance—it pushed back against some seriously outdated ideas.

The Pirates’ offense keeps letting the team down, but Skenes has already shown he’s a generational talent. He’s the kind of pitcher whose brilliance just cuts through whatever’s happening around him.

 
Here is the source article for this story: MLB’s Strange But True Player of the Year? Paul Skenes for the win!