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Pirates star pitcher Paul Skenes unanimously won his first Cy Young award on Wednesday, netting him a $2.5 million bonus.
It’s nearly three times his salary for the 2025 season.
The No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 MLB draft, Skenes rose through the minor leagues in just one year and made his major league debut in 2024; the Pirates have him under team control for four more seasons, and he’s not eligible for salary arbitration until after next season. Teams can pay pre-arbitration players whatever they want, and Skenes was paid the league minimum of $875,000 in 2025. (Even the notoriously low-payroll Pirates, whose 2025 roster was mostly pre-arbitration players, paid four players more than $2.5 million last year.)
MLB’s collective bargaining agreement also expires after next season. When the players and owners negotiated the last CBA in 2022, getting pre-arbitration stars like Skenes more money was a major priority for players, and that CBA established a $50 million pool that pays pre-arbitration players performance-based bonuses. Skenes got a $1.5 million bonus from the pool in 2024 for finishing third in the Cy Young balloting as a rookie, doubling his $740,000 base salary from that year.
In 2025, Skenes went 10–10 with an earned run average of 1.97 while striking out 216 batters over 187.2 innings pitched. He led MLB in ERA and became the first starting pitcher to finish with a sub-2.00 ERA since Justin Verlander in 2022. Skenes received all 30 first-place votes for the Cy Young award, making him the first unanimous winner since Sandy Alcantara in 2022.
Despite having baseball’s best pitcher, the Pirates went just 71–91, which ranked as the fifth-worst record in MLB. The notoriously frugal Pirates haven’t played in the postseason since 2015, and rumors about Skenes’s future are already swirling, with the star pitcher reportedly telling teammates he wants to play for the Yankees one day.
After winning the Cy Young on Wednesday, Skenes denied the Yankees report.
“I don’t know where that came from,” Skenes told reporters. “The goal is to win, and the goal is to win in Pittsburgh.”
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