The third pitch of the game. A 95 mph fastball on a 2-0 count. JJ Wetherholt — Pittsburgh-area kid, grew up in Mars, Pa., about 25 miles north of PNC Park — deposited it over the Roberto Clemente Wall at 107.7 mph exit velocity before Paul Skenes had even broken a sweat. Two batters later, Jordan Walker launched a sweeper into the seats. Cardinals 3, Pirates 0. First inning. Done before it started.
That was April 30. St. Louis finished their first four-game sweep at PNC Park since 2019, winning 10-5, dropping Pittsburgh to 16-16 and extending their losing streak to five. Skenes ended with 5 innings, 7 hits, 4 earned runs, 9 strikeouts, 102 pitches. By any reasonable measure, that’s a performance that looked like a disaster and an elite outing at the same time, split cleanly across the first inning and everything after. His record against the Cardinals: 0-5 across 7 career appearances.
The First Inning Is Where Skenes Dies
The 0-5 career record is the thing everyone’s quoting, but the number that actually matters is the one Cardinals fans don’t lead with: Skenes holds a 2.74 ERA across those 7 appearances. That’s still elite. What it means is that the Cardinals aren’t actually dismantling him — they’re ambushing him, banking the damage early, and then letting the Pirates’ inability to generate run support do the rest of the work.
The April 30 start illustrated this perfectly. Skenes entered with a 16-inning scoreless streak — the longest active in MLB. The Cardinals ended it in roughly four minutes. Then he struck out nine in five innings. A pitcher with a sub-2.00 career ERA — the lowest through 60-plus starts in the Live Ball Era — got torched in the first and competent for the rest of it. The Cardinals had 7 hits but needed exactly two of them to decide the outcome.
Paul Skenes:
vs Cardinals vs everyone else
4 L’s 3 L’s pic.twitter.com/lu9YKtJgrq
— Cardinals Talk (@theredbird_way) May 7, 2025
Pittsburgh fans absorbed this with predictable dark humor, but the underlying frustration is pointed in the right direction: at the roster, not the ace.
What the Cardinals Actually Do Differently
There are two things the Cardinals do against Skenes that should logically cancel each other out but somehow both work. First, they attack early — Wetherholt swung at a 2-0 fastball on the third pitch, Walker jumped a first-look sweeper — before Skenes can settle into his rhythm. The idea is to get him before his command sharpens and before his arsenal fully locks in. Second, they work deep counts to bleed his pitch count. Skenes threw 102 pitches in five innings. Those two tactics — swing early, grind late — are in tension with each other, but the Cardinals seem to run them simultaneously depending on where they are in the lineup.
Alec Burleson is the single most clarifying data point here. The 2025 Silver Slugger winner is hitting .353 against Skenes all-time (6-for-17). That’s the best individual mark of any hitter across the league against him. Burleson went 3-for-4 with 3 RBIs in the series finale. He isn’t a better hitter than Freddie Freeman or Yordan Alvarez — he’s just a Cardinal, and apparently that’s enough.
Skenes’ postgame explanation for the matchup problem was its own kind of masterpiece: “They score more runs than us.” It’s technically correct, analytically unsatisfying, and perfectly Skenes. He’s not wrong. The Cardinals scored 3 before he’d thrown 20 pitches. The Pirates answered with five across nine innings. That’s not a pitching problem.
A Pattern That Demands an Answer
The closest historical parallel is Clayton Kershaw’s October — elite pitcher, inexplicable contextual pattern, statistics that don’t fully explain the outcomes but can’t explain them away either. Kershaw wasn’t suddenly bad in October. Neither is Skenes suddenly bad against St. Louis. The difference is that Kershaw’s demons were situational; Skenes’ are divisional. The Cardinals are in Pittsburgh’s division. They play each other twelve times a year. Every series where Skenes gets a loss that shouldn’t be a loss is a potential half-game in the NL Central standings.
The Cardinals completed the sweep with their own rotation in various states of flux. This wasn’t a case of St. Louis running out generational pitching and beating the Pirates with sheer excellence — they won Game 3 in their ninth. They won Game 4 with Skenes on the mound, which remains the part Pittsburgh can’t accept.
The issue the Pirates need to solve isn’t Paul Skenes. He gave up two runs per nine over five innings after the first. The issue is that the Cardinals have identified the specific window — attack early before Skenes locks in, then grind his pitch count once he does — where the best pitcher in baseball is briefly, barely vincible. Until Pittsburgh builds a lineup that punishes teams for even thinking about playing for early damage, Skenes will keep doing everything right in the aggregate and watching his record against St. Louis stay stuck at zero.
