Paul Skenes threw seven innings against the Cubs on Saturday and allowed two runs on four hits, the kind of start that wins games more often than it loses them. He walked off with a 3-2 lead intact, thanks in part to Ryan O’Hearn’s three-run homer, and handed things to a bullpen that had all summer to fix itself. Gregory Soto walked pinch-hitter Matt Shaw with the bases loaded to tie it, then hit Nico Hoerner to give Chicago the lead for good. Final: Cubs 4, Pirates 3. Skenes didn’t factor into the decision at all, which in Pittsburgh in 2026 is somehow the most predictable part of the story.
Manager Don Kelly pulled Skenes after 82 pitches, and the reasoning wasn’t unreasonable on its face. “Around PCA, and he’s had a lot of pitches on that arm already this year, so we wanted to stay with what we had working,” Kelly said after the game. Fair enough. But the Washington Times’ full breakdown of the eighth inning reads like a rerun nobody asked for: a lead, a reliever, a walk, and a season that keeps finding new ways to waste its best pitcher.
The record undersells him badly. Skenes is 10-11 with a 3.78 ERA and 185 strikeouts in 162 innings, numbers that would be Cy Young-caliber on a team that could hold a two-run lead for six outs. He’s the same pitcher piratesbreakdown.com flagged back in August, when his 9-11 record despite strong performances already made his win total the least reliable measure of his actual stuff in baseball. A month later, it’s the same problem wearing a different date.
DK Pittsburgh Sports had the shape of it nailed before the box score even finished loading:
Paul Skenes and Ryan O’Hearn surely did their part, but things unraveled for Gregory Soto in the eighth inning of the Pirates’ 4-3 loss to the Cubs Saturday afternoon at Wrigley Field.
José Negron reporting from Chicago: https://t.co/j1xwo3CZ3I
— DK Pittsburgh Sports (@DKPghSports) September 12, 2026
That’s the whole season, condensed into one Saturday at Wrigley. Skenes and O’Hearn do their jobs. The bullpen doesn’t. Nobody’s shocked, least of all the fans who’ve watched this exact inning happen with different names attached since April.
Ben Cherington did try to fix this. The trade deadline additions were real: Camilo Doval, Luke Weaver, Kirby Yates, Lake Bachar, names and prospects thrown at the exact problem everyone in Pittsburgh saw coming. And the bullpen has still blown 19-plus saves this year, per Pittsburgh Baseball Now, a number too high to pin on any one reliever’s bad Saturday. Adding arms isn’t the same thing as fixing whatever makes those arms come apart with the bases loaded in September.
Soto isn’t broken, and singling him out misses the larger point. He’s one guy in a unit that’s failed this specific way for five months running. The problem is structural, and it predates whatever Soto did in the eighth inning at Wrigley. Skenes is out there building something real, start after start, outing after outing. The rest of the roster keeps handing it back to him unfinished.
Pittsburgh doesn’t need a rebuild of the guy on the mound. It needs somebody in that front office to finally admit the ace was never the issue.
