PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – He didn’t join the Pirates until May last year, so Friday was the first Home Opener for Paul Skenes. He saw and heard a lot. From the USA chants after a military flyover to the loud boos for his manager and ‘sell the team’ outbursts from the stands.
Skenes said the frustration is misplaced.
“Mr. Nutting and Shelty aren't the ones playing,” Skenes said. “We're the ones playing. If we're 8-0 through however many games we've played right now, the fans aren't booing. We got to play better.”
The Pirates are doing it as much, if not more, to themselves than teams flat-out beating them. No team in the National League averages more errors per game than the Pirates (0.88). Then there are the mental mistakes before you even get to the poor execution.
“I think pretty much everything has room to improve,” Skenes said Saturday. “We can play a lot better. Today is an opportunity to do that, tomorrow is an opportunity to do that. Just got to go out there and execute.”
“We all know how to play baseball. We've all played on teams that were winning before. It was a lot of fun to be here last year in parts over the summer. We know how to do it, we just got to get back to doing it, get back to executing at a high level and consistently.
It's pretty simple.”
It doesn’t look simple, any of it, right now for the Pirates. Skenes said it’s a long season where it all evens out. He said he wasn’t even aware of their record right now, saying he knows there will be a stretch where they win seven out of nine. It’s just going in the wrong direction right now.
However he did learn a valuable lesson last year about wasted opportunities.
“If we give away a game, that game two weeks later doesn’t get handed back to us by some other team,” Skenes said. “Every win matters. Every loss matters. We just got to execute and other teams are executing better than us right now.”
Behind closed doors Skenes says he sees what gives him hope about turning the corner. What the second-year star said he also sees behind closed doors, is an ownership group and coaching staff trying to get it done
“They want to win,” Skenes said. “We want to win. Obviously, we're not doing enough right now to win. You can put that on whoever's shoulders, but we just got to get back to execution. They're not in the building behind closed doors seeing what's going on. I think a lot of the time they don't get the full-scope of things, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad ways. But at the end of the day we just gotta play better.”