PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Nathan Lukes has opened a lot of eyes this season. At 31, a full decade since his A-ball debut, he’s an everyday big-leaguer for the first time and an above-average hitter with positive defensive grades on the AL’s best team. He’s one of the biggest surprise stories on a surprise contender.
But Paul Skenes isn’t surprised. He already knew. The NL Cy Young frontrunner faced Lukes on April 30, 2024, at Victory Field in Indianapolis, where he was making his second-last triple-A start prior to reaching the majors. Lukes was hitting second for the Buffalo Bisons that day, and in the first inning, he dug in, sold out for a fastball, and doubled to left off a 101-m.p.h. heater.
Two innings later, back up with a runner on first, Lukes sat on a first-pitch fastball again, this time sending it the opposite way for a single.
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As he made his way up the dugout steps for his third plate appearance leading off the sixth inning, Lukes was responsible for two of the three hits Skenes had allowed in the game. He turned to Casey Candaele — the Buffalo Bisons manager who recently became the winningest in the franchise’s modern era — to ask his thoughts.
“I’ve got him twice off his heater,” Lukes said. “There’s no way he goes back to it, right?”
“It’s his best pitch,” Candaele responded. “I think he’s going to give it to you again.”
Sure enough, first pitch heater, 99-m.p.h. inside, and Lukes shot another ball to left. Three pitches, three hits, and one huge grin from Candaele in the dugout as Lukes looked into his dugout from first base.
A year-and-a-half later, with Lukes now a key component of a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Blue Jays outfit, and Skenes perhaps the single best pitcher in the game, the two finally met again at PNC Park. Of course, Lukes once again sold out for a heater. And Skenes knew that he would, so he threw him a splitter, which Lukes chopped foul.
The next pitch? Another splitter. But this time Lukes shot it through the right side for his fourth hit off the first five Skenes pitches he’d seen. Only seven big-leaguers have four hits off Skenes since his MLB debut last May. The 23-year-old has allowed fewer than four hits in over a third of his 49 starts since.
Alas, Monday against the Blue Jays wasn’t one of them. Skenes allowed five. And a couple runs. That’s one hit and two runs shy of his career highs.
When you think about it that way, the Blue Jays offence didn’t have a bad game on the absurdly curved scale Skenes’ opponents must be graded on. But their starter, Kevin Gausman, did by his standards, getting leaned on by a pesky Pirates offence that drove him from the game after five innings with two runs on his line.
So, too, did Brendon Little, who allowed a run on a wild pitch, committed an error on a pickoff attempt, walked a pair, and somehow invoked a bizarre benches-clearing incident that brought Tommy Pham and Tyler Heineman face-to-face, in a chaotic seventh inning as the Pirates took a late lead.
Oh, and John Schneider got ejected, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. left the game with left hamstring tightness, and the Blue Jays lost, 5-2, to a team that’s 21 games under .500.
A lot to unpack there. Managers get ejected sometimes, no biggie. Guerrero, however, doesn’t leave games unless they’re inconsequential or he absolutely must. The one play that stood out from his night was a long stretch off first base to corral a Bo Bichette throw that forced Guerrero into the splits. He played another inning defensively but didn’t take his next at-bat.
And the seventh-inning dust-up appeared to be much ado about nothing, as the ever-volatile Pham bat-flipped a four-pitch walk and then appeared to believe he’d heard Heineman say something to him while he crossed the plate. Nothing escalated, nothing continued, nothing picked back up later.
Yet things didn’t improve for the Blue Jays, as errors by Seranthony Dominguez and Heineman in the eighth allowed the Pirates to put the game out of reach. And now the Blue Jays must reckon with the severity of Guerrero’s injury and what it means for his availability going forward.
It all started so well. Toronto’s approach against Skenes was to lean into the nine-against-one mantra its coaching staff has been preaching since spring training, each hitter in the lineup playing a different role in a coordinated attack meant to drive the opposing starter from the game.
Some were asked to dirty box in the clinch and grind out long, tenacious plate appearances, like Heineman, who saw six pitches in his first trip. Some were focused on peppering jabs and putting balls in play, such as Ernie Clement and Lukes, who each singled in the second inning. Some were up there to throw haymakers and take A-swings against specific pitches in specific spots, like Bichette and Addison Barger, who each took aggressive, early-count cuts in the game’s opening innings.
Yet it was Barger who gave Skenes his toughest plate appearance of the night in the third inning, working the count full and fouling off three straight 98-m.p.h. fastballs before crushing a fourth — this time 99 — to the wall in right at 115.8-m.p.h., the hardest-hit ball Skenes has allowed in his career.
The ball was hit so hard that a sprinting George Springer didn’t have enough time to score from first. But he came home a batter later, when Guerrero grounded out to third, before Barger scored, too, on a Bichette single the opposite way. They were the first runs Skenes had allowed at PNC Park since June 8, a span of 29.1 innings.
And he spent his next three innings beginning a new streak, retiring nine of his next 10 to get through six. It’s hard to call scoring two over six a win, but in doing so, the Blue Jays became only the fourth team in Skenes’ last nine starts to score at all. They’ll take it.
Yet they couldn’t capitalize with Skenes out of the equation, going three-up, three-down in the seventh, erasing Springer’s leadoff single with a Barger double play in the eighth, and going down on eight pitches in the ninth.
Gausman, meanwhile, had his typical fastball velocity and splitter action but had trouble missing bats when he needed to and ending plate appearances quickly. Too much ball in play burned him in the second inning, as two singles sandwiching a five-pitch walk scored Pittsburgh’s first run. And again in the third, as the first two batters reached on hits before a fielder’s choice — Heineman dropped Guerrero’s throw home on a Bryan Reynolds grounder — cashed another.
Gausman got his outs from there, but not without a fight. He threw 24 pitches to three hitters in the fourth, 14 to three in the fifth, and that was it at 96 on the night. It was the first time Gausman didn’t complete six innings in over a month.
