We briefly interrupt game week for a little Paul Skenes love

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Paul Skenes entered professional baseball with as much hype as any player in history.

Talent evaluators called him the most talented pitching prospect they had ever seen. Fans marveled at his triple-digit fastball, his pinpoint command and his mysterious “splinker” pitch that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Now on Sunday, barely two years after the Pittsburgh Pirates chose him with the first overall pick in the 2023 draft, Skenes will make his 50th major-league start. And it’s fair to say he hasn’t merely lived up to those massive expectations—he has exceeded them in just about every conceivable way.

In fact, Skenes has been so spectacular that there’s now a reasonable case to be made that the 23-year-old is having the best start to a major-league career of any pitcher in more than a century.

Since joining the Pirates last May, Skenes has been practically untouchable. He leads MLB over that span with a 2.07 ERA, having allowed 66 earned runs in 287 innings. He ranks second in opponent batting average (.198) behind Cincinnati’s Hunter Greene and second in opponent on-base-plus-slugging percentage (.558) behind Detroit’s Tarik Skubal.

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