Pirates’ Paul Skenes dominates Dodgers in battle of aces

Friday’s ballyhooed pitching matchup between Paul Skenes of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Yoshinobu Yamamoto night half-delivered on expectations. While Yamamoto, the National League’s ERA leader coming into the night, struggled with his control while allowing three runs in five innings, Skenes was in vintage form and did the heavy lifting in Pittsburgh’s 3-0 win over the reigning World Series champs.

Skenes’ line:

Of his 108 pitches, 69 went for strikes. He leaned mostly on his four-seamer, which averaged 98 mph and touched 99.7 mph. In all, Skenes threw six different pitches to parry one of MLB’s top offenses. Impressively, Skenes against the Dodgers registered more swinging strikes (18), called strikes (19), and foul balls (17) than he allowed balls in play (15). While Skenes’ hard stuff owned the night, this changeup he threw to Tommy Edman to end the sixth may have been his single-most impressive pitch of Friday’s outing:

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t include this highlight of Skenes whiffing Shohei Ohtani:

With the effort, Skenes dropped his ERA to 2.39. In 37 ⅔ innings, he has struck out 39 against just four walks with only one home run permitted. That’s good for an FIP of 1.69 for the 22-year-old “sophomore.” For Skenes, his dominance of the Dodgers comes after they roughed him up for a 5.73 ERA in two starts last season – far and away his worst numbers against any opponent during his rookie campaign.

The Pirates win, anchored by Skenes, drops the Dodgers to 16-10 and gives them their second three-game losing streak of 2025. They remain in third place in the hotly contested NL West. Pittsburgh, meantime, improve to 11-16 but remain in last place in the NL Central.

As for Yamamoto, two of the three runs he allowed were unearned, which means his ERA for the season remains an enviable 1.06. It’s early of course, but health permitting it won’t be a surprise if these two aces wind up dueling for NL Cy Young honors this season.