The Pitcher We Started With Is 'Struggling.' The Numbers That Matter Say He Isn't.

The Pitcher We Started With Is “Struggling.” The Numbers That Matter Say He Isn’t.

This newsletter began on a Paul Skenes number: a 67.5 ERA that looked like the end of the world and meant nothing, because it came from one ugly inning. A hundred issues later he is back in the headlines for “struggling.” Everything he controls says he is not.

The Sports Page · The Professor · the founding subject, and the founding lesson

9–9

Skenes’ record — on a team that has stopped scoring for him

11.3

strikeouts per nine, right where his Cy Young year was

67.5

the ERA in Issue No. 128 that also meant nothing at all

The question: Paul Skenes has a worse ERA and a .500 record. Is he actually declining?

The answer: almost certainly not. Everything a pitcher controls — strikeouts, walks, home runs allowed — is where it has always been. The damage sits entirely in the parts he does not control.

Why that is surprising. ERA and won-lost look like measures of the pitcher. Both are mostly measures of the eight men behind him and the nine who bat for him.

The surface reads like a fall from grace, and the headlines have duly written it that way. You have probably seen one this week.

Look at what a pitcher actually controls

So separate what he owns from what he does not. A pitcher cannot bat; he cannot field the seven positions behind him; he cannot make his teammates score for him. Ask yourself which of the numbers you quote actually stay on his side of that line.

Figure 1 · Everything Skenes controls held flat — and his ERA doubled anyway

So where did the ERA come from?

It came from the space between the pitcher and the scoreboard — the part that isn’t his. A few more of the balls in play found grass instead of gloves. A few more fly balls carried over the fence, and home runs are among the streakiest, most luck-tinged things in the sport. The sequencing turned against him, the singles bunching into innings instead of scattering harmlessly. ERA is often described as a pitching statistic, but it is really a blend — the pitcher, plus his defense, plus the ballpark, plus the coin-flips of which inning the hits arrived in. When a man’s strikeouts and walks are untouched and his ERA still doubles, the extra runs did not come from him. They came from the dice.

And the won-lost record is worse still, because it adds one more thing the pitcher cannot touch: whether his own team bothers to score for him.

So the two numbers we quote most about a pitcher are the two that tell us least about him. Watch how often that pattern repeats once you start looking for it.

The Professor

One delta that isn’t noise

Here is the honest complication, and if you are reading carefully you have already found it. Almost everything about Skenes this season is where it was — almost.

What to take home: the number will come back to him

Which is why we are not looking at decline; we are looking at regression waiting to happeni. When the things a player controls stay steady, the noisy parts are the ones that move back.

There is a nice symmetry in the founding subject of this newsletter turning up again to teach the founding lesson. You met him in Issue No. 1 with a 67.5 ERA; you meet him now with an ugly one, and the lesson has not moved an inch.

Notes & sources

Skenes’ figures are from the MLB Stats API for the 2024–2026 seasons, reconciled to his won-lost record per this newsletter’s standard. In 2024 he went 11–3 with a 1.96 ERA (Rookie of the Year); in 2025, 10–10 with a 1.97 ERA (Cy Young); in the current 2026 season he stands at 9–9 with a 3.90 ERA across 23 starts and about 124⅔ innings. His strikeout rate (about 11.3 per nine), walk rate (about 2.3 per nine), and WHIP (about 1.11) are in line with his first two seasons — the skill metrics a pitcher most controls have not declined, while the ERA and record, which fold in defense, luck, and run support, have. Home-run and sequencing variance and weak run support are the usual culprits for exactly this gap; public advanced metrics have also pegged his expected ERA well below his actual mark this year. The one genuine exception is velocity: his four-seam fastball has averaged about 98.8, 98.2, and 96.9 mph across 2024–2026 (MLB Stats API pitch-arsenal data) — a near-two-mph slide that, unlike ERA, is a sticky, leading signal worth watching, even though it has not yet dented his strikeout rate.

The distinction at the heart of the piece — between a player’s own skill and the team-and-luck outcomes credited to him — and the expectation that results drift back toward skill are developed in the primer on Regression to the Mean (Concept No. 3). The 67.5-ERA reference is Issue No. 128, this newsletter’s first, published on MLB Opening Day 2026; find it in the archive.