The Pittsburgh Pirates probably are not yet feeling desperate, but desperation can't be very far off. For the first time in recorded history, the organization made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline, beefed up their bullpen, and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There is one problem: They share a division with the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball. There is another problem: They also share a division with the Chicago Cubs, who have 66 wins, a .574 win percentage, and a huge lead atop the wild-card standings, and who also made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There are other problems: Five other NL teams I haven't even named are presently ahead of Pittsburgh in the wild-card standings, and the Pirates are presently below .500 on the season, and going into Wednesday night's tilt in Milwaukee they'd lost 11 of 18 since the All-Star break.

The troubles of one man, amid all these hardships, might not otherwise rate very highly, except that Paul Skenes is The Man in Pittsburgh, the face of the franchise, and his job Wednesday night, as the ace of the pitching staff, was to take matters in hand and yank the foundering Pirates back onto the right trajectory. But another problem for the Pirates is that Skenes hasn't been his usual world-devouring self this season. By almost every measure, Skenes has been a less reliable, less dominant pitcher than he was across his first season-and-a-half of service time. The increase in Skenes's WHIP looks modest—from .948 last season to 1.118 in 24 starts this season—but he's allowing about double the number of dingers per nine innings. He's giving the Pirates fewer innings per start, and although he's had only the one blow-up performance—Opening Day, when he was undone by lack of control and horrendous team defense and failed to complete one inning of work—Skenes has allowed five or more runs in six starts this campaign, something he'd done only once prior to the start of this season.

Wednesday night presented a worryingly typical performance from Skenes in 2026. Facing Milwaukee's pesky, relentless, deeply fucking irritating lineup, Pittsburgh's ace looked much more like a guy than a dude. He started the game with a non-competitive four-pitch walk, then threw a wild pitch, then hung a 3–2 slider that Jackson Chourio pounded to center for a very loud fly-ball out. Skenes escaped the inning unscathed, but it took him 23 pitches. He labored again in the fourth, allowing consecutive one-out walks, then consecutive RBI knocks, and then another walk, before getting out of the inning with his pitch count up to 83. His ERA on the season climbed above 4.00 before a clean fifth brought it back down to 3.97, which for most other pitchers is fine but for Paul Skenes is like a giant deafening klaxon positioned centimeters from your eardrum.

Also worrying: None of the 93 pitches Skenes threw Wednesday night touched triple digits. It's maybe hard to remember now that Jacob Misiorowski has become the God of Velocity, but when Skenes entered the majors he was arguably the hardest-throwing starting pitcher of all time. His four-seam fastball, in 2024, averaged 98.8 miles per hour, per Statcast, and he threw exactly 100 triple-digit fastballs, or more than twice as many as any other starter in baseball that year, in only 23 appearances. This season that fastball is down to 96.9 miles per hour in average velocity, and Skenes has touched triple digits not once. Some of that is by design, according to Skenes and his manager, but it is probably not also the case that the corresponding dip in overall efficacy is by design. The Pirates are trying to be good, finally, but this season they have played to an impossible-seeming 9–15 record in games started by their best damn pitcher. That's bad.

Yes, two years ago we were all hoping that Skenes would back off the terrifying heat in order to preserve his various arm ligaments and whatnot. But watching this reduced Skenes it's hard not to worry that the loss of velocity is because of a shredded arm, and not only a measure to reduce the danger of future shredding. When it seems like Skenes should at least sometimes be reaching back for that supernatural oomph, to blow away some pesky jerk in the batter's box, instead he is flinging it in there at Dustin May speeds. It's very hard to accept a world where Skenes sits in the 84th percentile for average fastball velocity.

Bad luck is still plaguing even this reduced Skenes. His expected ERA, per Statcast, is nearly a full run lower than that sad-sack figure in his standard stats. And, in any case, he's still a long way from a bum: The Washington Nationals have used approximately 11,000 pitchers this year and at least 10,998 of them would sell their firstborn to produce Skenes's de-powered numbers across a full season. Kiri Oler at FanGraphs looked at Skenes's situation back in early July and concluded that on at least one front—home runs per fly ball—he was due some amount of natural regression. But Oler also found that Skenes's stuff—how fast and spinny and darting his pitches are—has decreased alongside his overall velocity, and could find no evidence in the math that Skenes even has access to his best, most wicked shit when he needs it: With runners in scoring position, Skenes's fastball saw an average uptick in velocity of just a tenth of a mile per hour. Travis Sawchick of MLB.com noted that overpowering velocity was key to Skenes overcoming a suboptimal shape on his four-seam fastball, the bread-and-butter pitch of most MLB starters:

Also keep in mind there were concerns about Skenes' fastball shape coming out of LSU, one of the few blemishes on his scouting profile. He possesses well-below-average vertical movement on his fastball. Less velocity can make a suspect shape more vulnerable. Moreover, with less velocity generally comes less spin—his fastball spin rates are down by about 70 rpm—and that means less spin-based movement.

Skenes swears he's feeling good. At the All-Star break he downplayed both his dip in velocity this season and the importance of 99th-percentile heat on the numero uno. "I don’t think velocity is something I need to pitch well," Skenes said on July 15, noting that he only gets asked about velocity after disappointing outings. "I think it’s probably the first time in my career the velo has kinda dipped. It’s not something that I’m stressed over at all. I’m healthy. I’m feeling good and still pitching at a high level." The problem: In four starts since giving that quote, Skenes has allowed 14 earned runs in 21.1 innings pitched, on 22 hits and 12 walks, for an ERA of 5.91. That is actually not pitching at a high level. That's Miles Mikolas type shit. You could have Patrick Corbin do that.

Things are getting a little bit strained. For Wednesday's start the Pirates shelved catcher Henry Davis, who previously had caught every one of Skenes's starts this season, in favor of Endy Rodríguez. Rodríguez is having a bit of a breakout season, posting a 134 OPS+, and deserves all the playing time he can handle. Pirates manager Don Kelly said it was about getting Rodríguez's bat into the lineup against Milwaukee's Kyle Harrison, but it seems reasonable to suspect that Davis is a little bit less important to Pittsburgh's operations if he and Skenes aren't producing dominant pitching performances. Rodríguez did sock a homer, but he could not coax a vintage performance out of his pitcher. There was, meanwhile, an ace-like performer sharing the mound Wednesday night. Harrison was deadly, posting 10 strikeouts and allowing only two baserunners in five-plus innings of work. Harrison took the win and Skenes the loss. It was the latter's 10th in 24 starts.

It was all frustratingly familiar: Skenes once again suffered from hilariously feeble run support, but also just really never looked like that dude we were all freaking out about two years ago. He pitched like a guy, instead of like the dominant force the Pirates need atop their rotation. Things are getting down to it in the wild-card race, and Pittsburgh has a lot of ground to make up. If Skenes has more to give from that golden right arm, now is the time.