Reigning Rookie of the Year Sets Wildly Ambitious Goal For 2025 MLB Season
The reigning National League Rookie of the Year wants to do something no major league pitcher has done in the last 10 years.
Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes was asked by John Perrotto of Pittsburgh Baseball Now at the team’s FanFest to identify an “ideal number of innings” to pitch in 2025.
Pirates writer @JPerrotto talked to Paul Skenes about his goals for the season.
Skenes said he wants to throw 240 innings this year.
No one has thrown that many innings since 2014, but Skenes said that’s how he’s going to train. Very impressive.
— Austin Bechtold (@AustinRBechtold) January 21, 2025
His answer: 240.
Matt Dirksen/Chicago Cubs/Getty Images
“I’m gonna be ready to throw 240 innings,” Skenes told Perrotto. “It’s not gonna be 160 innings again. I know that. It’s gonna be much more, ‘Take the ball and pitch.’ We haven’t spoken about it, but it doesn’t affect … frankly I felt that I was ready to throw 240 innings last year, too. You don’t know what you don’t know. I think toward the end of the season I did know that my body was built up for it. I felt good in September.
“That kind of told me that what I did last offseason was right. The training that I did during the season, too. Obviously, you don’t want to be built up for 160 and throw 185. That’s stupid. Build up for 240 and land where we land.”
More news: MLB Power Rankings: Top 10 Starting Pitchers
Skenes, 22, threw 160.1 innings in 2024 — 27.1 at Triple-A and 133 in the majors. He went 11-3 with a 1.96 earned-run average, 0.947 WHIP, and 170 strikeouts to claim the NL Rookie of the Year Award.
Skenes also finished third in NL Cy Young Award voting and picked up some downballot MVP votes.
More news: Bob Uecker Dies: MLB World Remembers Legendary Announcer, Actor, Catcher
As Perrotto notes, the last pitcher to throw as many as 240 innings was David Price in 2014. That year, Price made 23 starts for the Tampa Bay Rays, 11 for the Detroit Tigers, and averaged approximately 7.1 innings per start to reach 248.1 innings.
Price threw eight more innings in his only postseason start, bringing his total for the season to 256.1. Remarkably, he exceeded 240 innings the following season (including the 2015 postseason) and 230 innings the year after.
More news: Penguins Star Loses Stanley Cup Rings in Home Burglary: Report
It’s doubtful the Pirates will let their most valuable pitcher challenge Price’s durability in only his second full season as a professional. But clearly Skenes is placing an emphasis on efficiency in hopes of going deeper into starts than he was allowed in 2024.
“There are a couple things that I’ve been focusing on this offseason, basically just throwing more strikes, attacking the zone, getting hitters out faster and then just keep learning,” Skenes told Perrotto. “Learning outing by outing. We’ve learned some stuff from last year that we’ll transfer over kind of as an overarching thing into the next season. Just continue to just learn the game, learn from outing to outing and just go from there.”
For more MLB news, visit Newsweek Sports.
