3-31-24 – By Gary Morgan – @garymo2007 on Twitter
I sat down to watch the Indianapolis Indians as they faced the Louisville Bats at 2:00 PM. I often watch the affiliates play when the Pirates aren’t on, or I’ll listen to a game while I write, so nothing too odd about that part.
The difference today was The Pirates 1:1 selection in last year’s draft Paul Skenes was the starting Pitcher.
Now, all day long I’m already excited to watch Jared Jones make his debut with the Pirates at 4:05.
I’m sure at this point, this has to sound like a lot of your Saturday’s right? I mean, this is an exciting day, and in many ways feels like the payoff for our pain is coming, and fast.
Oh, don’t start deciding what I mean here, I’m not talking crazy. No World Series predictions coming here, in fact I won’t even consider bumping up my 84 win call, I still think there are growing pains to come. A few more youngsters need to flesh out their game, and cement their roles.
More still have yet to come but certainly will and when they do, they’ll be rookies, trying to crack a team that isn’t exactly dying for them to get there. We’re going to be talking soon about how to pump the brakes on prospects, but that talk is for another day.
Today is all about the show that was put on today.
Paul was, well, Paul Skenes. He looks like he knows exactly what he wants to do. He challenges guys, but not with meatballs hitters can close their eyes and hope to catch. 102 at the top of the zone with a tail, followed by 96 at the knees away with a pinpoint slider.
He went 3 innings today, 5 strikeouts, probably went a little deeper in some at bats than he’d like to, but every time he needed an answer he had one, and importantly, that answer wasn’t always here’s 103, come get it. Point being, he’s already showing some thought toward, and execution of being not only a thrower, but a pitcher.
Encouraging stuff, but fans of course want more. I really do think they could let him, but I also think he and the Pirates are trying to ramp him up slowly. Admittedly, it’s excruciatingly slow, even to me, who expected this.
For what it’s worth, Paul seems to be very much so on the same page with the Pirates, and I don’t mean in some of course the kid isn’t crap talking his new organization way, I mean he very clearly articulates his progress and process, and there’s very little he points to the team over.
What I think they’re trying to accomplish here, is keeping Paul under 160 innings if they can in 2024, a sizable jump actually from what he did in 2023, and they’d also like to have him not run out of gas, or gas they’re willing to let him expend anyway by September. To do that, I think we will see them try to escape April with Paul pitching 25 innings or less Spread out over 4 or 5 more starts.
At that time he’ll be up to 5 or 6 innings, maybe even 7 and all bets are off. If the team feels there’s a need I honestly don’t see the team feeling the need to wait.
I too would join the chorus of people happily telling you they’ll Super 2 him or whatever, but Jared Jones, part two of this all day feel good fest happened. That my friends was not characteristic, in any era of Pirates mismanagement we’ve watched through the years.
Indy would go on to lose 4-3 and not that it’s about him but Eric Lauer got lit up like a downtown Christmas tree.
4:05 PM
The Marlins take the field, just last season having ridden a seemingly non stop wave of top end arms to a playoff berth, and currently experiencing how everything can change in the blink of an eye. For the second straight day a big stuff reliever converted to starter while they wait out the IL crunch took the mound, Ryan Weathers. Talented kid, probably miscast in this role a bit, and light on experience on top of it, but he held his own for the most part.
Jared Jones just wasn’t fair. 5.2 innings, 2BB, 10K’s, 3ER and his first career MLB Win as the Pirates bats came alive to provide 9 runs of support.
The line doesn’t look nearly as good as Jared did in this contest. If there were rookie nerves, they showed up more in the interview than on the mound. If he got into trouble, he had multiple ways to go about getting out of it. He could of course go for the strikeout, or, he wasn’t afraid to take the easiest path of just baiting them into hitting something with the tip of the bat.
He didn’t look like a rookie, didn’t strut like one, didn’t let the moment get too big, in other words, he was in every way best case scenario.
As with all pitchers, he’ll get scouted now, and there are certainly more talented lineups out there than the Miami Marlins. It won’t always be peaches and cream most likely and seeing how he bounces back from that will in and of itself be an important thing to see and for him to experience.
Jared too will have to have his innings controlled in some way, and I’ve described how I think they’ll go about it in 5 Thoughts a couple times now. Again, that’s a story for later.
Today it was about two pitchers, very much so part of the future of this team. It sent fans to message boards predicting the rotation of the future. Skenes, Keller, Jones, Solometo, Chandler I must have seen about 25 times in the aftermath of this game and that certainly could happen, but it’s also incredibly hard to put that out there ignoring Oviedo, Priester, Burrows, Ashcraft and more. It ignores that right behind or near some of those guys is Kennedy, Mueth, Shim, I mean to tell you, this team has neglected some positional needs in the system, but they are loaded to the gills with pitching talent.
Take it as it comes, and for once, you aren’t watching a team that should have you pining for a distant enough to be unpredictable future. Instead you have some very real and very here arms, enough to have this team looking a whole lot more complete following 2024 than they looked following 2023, you know, growth, development, the fruits of sucking and trading and losing and drafting and signing and living off other team’s scraps and half empty ballparks.
It doesn’t have to be done this way, but if it is the path your team chooses, all that pitching is how you want it to come together. If there’s one place to feel like good pitchers might get pushed out, make it the position where you need 2 or 3 times what it takes to build a roster.
We got a taste today, and we’ll get bigger glimpses as the months roll by.
Today was a good day.
There’s no guarantee of tomorrow, but you certainly can’t reach a dream about the future until you fully experience today.
Maybe Mitch Keller said it best after the game, “I can already tell Skenes knows he belongs here. Jones knows he belongs here. It’s exciting.”
Oh, and Happy Easter!
Steel City Pirates 
Belated Happy Easter tonyou and yours too. Hope it was as good as Saturday. At least they survived a Falter start. Agree with your article on enjoying what we have coming up, it seems more exciting than it has been in a long time. I would love to see them squeak into the playoffs with Skenes and Jones with innings left to go with Keller. I can’t think of anyone I’d be afraid of matching up against with those guys.
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