TORONTO -- Looking to bounce back from an uneven start his last time out, Pirates ace Paul Skenes again found himself walking off the mound after allowing multiple runs in the sixth inning on Saturday against the Blue Jays.
Skenes immediately found himself on his back foot in Saturday’s 5-2 loss in Toronto, as it took just three pitches for Toronto to get on the scoreboard. George Springer drove a 97.8 mph fastball above the zone over the left field wall for a leadoff homer and an early lead.
Despite allowing some more traffic in a 21-pitch opening frame, Skenes limited the damage to just Springer’s blast and eventually settled in -- however it was anything but the dominant level Skenes has reached over his first three big league seasons.
The 23-year-old ace put up zeros through the next four innings, but just two of those outs came via the strikeout before he ran into trouble in the sixth.
The Blue Jays broke through by stringing together four consecutive hits off the reigning NL Cy Young winner, scoring twice to chase him from the game with two on and no out as Yohan Ramírez entered in relief, who allowed one of Skenes’ runners to score.
“There was good and bad,” Skenes said of his start. “[I] need to get ahead in counts. I wasn’t super unhappy with some of the execution on some of the pitches, but could have executed a number of them better.”
Things came to a head for the Pirates coaching staff in the sixth, as both pitching coach Bill Murphy and manager Don Kelly were ejected for arguing with umpires over multiple checked swing calls.
Pittsburgh’s biggest objection came with a no-swing call on Jesús Sánchez, who drove in Toronto’s second run of the game with a double later in the at-bat.
Although he cruised through the middle innings, retiring 12 of the 15 hitters he faced between the second and fifth, Skenes exited with a final line that showed a career-high nine hits allowed to go with four earned runs and just two strikeouts.
It was the first time in Skenes’ career that he has allowed three or more earned runs in consecutive starts.
Skenes compared Saturday’s game to his last time on the mound against the Phillies, saying that it was “probably not as bad as the line would suggest.”
It’s also rare to find a Skenes appearance with as little swing-and-miss as he generated against the contact-heavy Blue Jays lineup. Saturday was just the fifth time in his three-year career that he completed five-plus innings with fewer than five strikeouts.
“I think in every start, there’s a little bit of that cat-and-mouse game,” Skenes said. “At the end of the day, just got to get ahead of guys.”
Skenes got into 14 two-strike counts over his five innings of work, but wasn’t able to finish off his at-bats against Toronto.
“They found a way to foul some balls off and put some balls in play,” Kelly said. “It just didn’t seem like he was able to put them away as efficiently as he normally is. They’ve got some really good hitters up there. They’ve had some success, and when you look back at last year, they typically don’t strike out that much.”
Ultimately, though, the Pirates would like to give Skenes some more run support.
Right before the Blue Jays put together the decisive rally in the sixth, it looked like the Pirates were going to pick their starter up. However, Patrick Corbin held Pittsburgh’s bats quiet through six, with their lone run coming on Marcell Ozuna’s RBI double in the top of the sixth.
“I think from a team standpoint, we continued to fight and grind,” Kelly said. “But we have to be better with two outs, runners in scoring position to begin with and find a way to get some runs across.”