This is your yearly reminder, for those who might have forgotten, that postseason achievements have nothing to do with baseball’s regular-season awards.
And maybe that should be a subtle reminder to Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes, as well. The former El Toro High star was the 16th unanimous National League Cy Young Award winner, as announced Wednesday, earning all 30 first-place votes after leading the National League with a 1.97 ERA and an 0.948 WHIP, and striking out 216 in 187⅔ innings.
The votes, from members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America selected for that voting panel, were due at the end of the regular season. That happened to be when Skenes’ season ended, while the Philadelphia Phillies’ Cristopher Sánchez – who received all 30 second-place votes – and the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who finished second and third respectively, played in October.
I suspect that Yamamoto, who got 16 of the 30 third-place votes, is just as delighted with the World Series MVP award and the championship ring he’ll be getting next spring.
During Wednesday’s post-announcement conference call, Skenes made it clear that the Cy Young Award was a high honor, all right, but that there’s going to come a time when he’s going to want to be where Yamamoto was this autumn, playing for a championship.
“Everybody has to have a ‘why’ to do what they do,” Skenes said Wednesday evening. “As I’ve thought about it and as I had some time to reflect, winning the Cy Young has never been a ‘why’ for me, but it’s an unbelievable recognition, regardless. … It’s not what motivated me this year, and it’s not what’s going to motivate me next year, either.”
His “why?”
“I think it boils down to winning,” he said. “Winning is kind of an abstract thing sometimes, especially in the offseason. Winning a workout, winning a throwing program, that kind of thing. Obviously winning games, but also just … being a winning person, in terms of relationships and the people that are around you.
“I don’t think you can do anything at the highest level if you don’t have a ‘why.’”
And, moments later, he revealed his main ambition:
“Winning championships. Winning World Series championships and multiples of them. … This is a team sport, an individual sport in a team concept, where I can get accolades like this but at the end of the day, our job is to win baseball games. And the people that do it best have the best careers, in my opinion.
“So that’s the goal, winning championships.”
And this is where the unfair nature of the game rears its head. What is the team owner’s “why?”
Bob Nutting has been the principal owner of the Pirates since 2007. In 19 seasons his teams have had a winning record four times, and have never been higher than 20th in the major leagues in payroll – and that happened once, in 2016. This season was more typical of his ownership: $86.464 million for the Opening Day payroll, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, and $84,675,509 for the end-of-season 40-man roster, in both cases 26th out of 30 teams.
This, with a team that plays in a jewel of a stadium and benefits from both revenue sharing and competitive balance taxes, much of that contributed by teams like the Dodgers and the New York Mets.
And the question is already out there: When the time comes, where will Paul Skenes wind up? Even before the award was announced Wednesday night, Randy Miller of NJ.com reported that Skenes has been telling his Pirates teammates he wants to play for the Yankees.
He’s creating the market, in a sense. Skenes, who received a $9.2 million signing bonus as the first pick in the 2023 draft, made $875,000 in base salary this season, according to Spotrac, plus $2.15 million from the pre-arbitration bonus pool. He’s still a year away from arbitration but will earn additional bonus money as the Cy Young winner, which Spotrac estimates will put him in the $4.3 million range.
At this rate, with a Rookie of the Year season followed by a Cy Young season and the potential for much, much more, Skenes will break the bank somewhere. It just doesn’t figure to be under Nutting’s watch. And this is another example of why, in the discussion over payroll disparity, the glaring light shouldn’t shine on those who have competitive payrolls but on those who, like the Pirates’ owner, are content merely to field a team.
None of that was part of the thought process when Skenes was growing up in Orange County.
“When I was 10, I’m working to get as good as I can to make the high school team,” he recalled. “And then when I’m in high school I’m working to get as good as I can, to go somewhere to play college ball and get free college and (get) a good job after, which is why I (originally) went to the Air Force Academy. I went there and I wanted to fly jets and do bad things to bad people.
“I think about when I was 12, 13, 14 and then in high school, it was very baseball first. I had to finish my homework before I could go to the cages or anything. And then I got to Air Force, and the focus is not at all on baseball until a couple months before my sophomore year ended. So once I made the decision to leave, I get to LSU and then it’s, ‘I want to get drafted and I want to be a big leaguer.’”
The Cy Young, he said, wasn’t something he thought of growing up, and in fact awards and accolades in general are not his prime source of motivation. He noted that “it doesn’t do justice to everybody that helped me this year,” referring to the teammates who made plays for him in the field that had a stake in it. Like Oneil Cruz, who made “the best throw I’ve ever seen in my life” to throw out a runner trying to score against Seattle, or Tommy Pham making a similar play to gun down a runner at home against St. Louis.
But the Cy Young is a stepping stone.
“It’s cool to think back on my journey as a baseball player and as a person over the past 23 years because it led me to this,” he said. “And it’s going to lead me wherever I’m going to go and whatever I’m going to do in the future.”
Wherever that might be.
jalexander@scng.com