Skenes Exits the Drought, But Cy Young Race Shows the Gap

Paul Skenes is back. After a nine-start winless streak that carried him from mid-May through early July, the Pirates right-hander has posted a 2.45 ERA across his last three outings with three wins. His most recent start at Cleveland—seven innings, one run allowed on exactly 100 pitches—marked his cleanest execution of the season and his first seven-inning outing from a Pittsburgh starter since May 21. Tomorrow against the Cubs, Skenes will try to extend the run in a divisional matchup that has treated him well historically.

The mechanistic underpinning of Skenes' resurgence is pitch economy. In his postgame comments after Cleveland, he identified the formula: early outs and sub-eight-pitch at-bats compress his workload and preserve his velocity deep into games. That's not a coincidence—when a starter avoids long counts, fastball velo typically holds steady into the sixth or seventh inning, and command sharpens. Skenes' last three starts validate this: he's generated early contact and worked efficiently, the inverse of the bloated pitch counts (115+ per outing) that characterized his May-June collapse.

Historically, Skenes has dominated the Cubs. In eight lifetime starts against Chicago, he owns a 2.77 ERA with 12.2 strikeouts per nine innings. His only 2026 meeting came May 28—coincidentally the eve of his 24th birthday—when he fanned 10 but lost 7-2 in support. Ian Happ is 5-for-15 lifetime against him, and Pete Crow-Armstrong 4-for-15. That track record suggests Skenes' strikeout upside is intact against this opponent.

But there's a ceiling on his Cy Young trajectory that the market hasn't fully priced into his next-start props. Baseball Savant's new run-value tracker positions Skenes in the 21st percentile for offspeed effectiveness—a stark gap behind National League frontrunners Jacob Misiorowski (71st) and Cristopher Sánchez (100th). His fastball has returned to form, but his slider and changeup lack the whiff rates of the elite tier. Against a Cubs lineup that has made a diet of fastballs the past two seasons, Skenes can still accumulate strikeouts through volume and fastball command. Yet the depth of his pitch mix isn't separating him from second-tier arms. His strikeout prop should be playable, but at elevated juice; his ERA prop carries embedded risk if the Cubs run pressure early and force him into longer counts that undo his recent efficiency gains.

The prop path forward favors strikeout volume (he's 12.2 K/9 against these batters) over ERA lines. The mechanism is simple: Cubs hitters chase fastballs, Skenes has rebuilt command on the heater, and the math works. But buy strikeouts only if the line sits at or below his historical median against Chicago. Any juice above consensus suggests the market has already absorbed his recent form. The Cy Young gap is a reminder that one good week doesn't flatten a three-month learning curve.