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Welcome to another Sliders x The Windup crossover event! Sliders is my weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on the timely and timeless elements of the game. You can read this week’s full story here. Up first, Pirates talk:
Clicking: How offense, Skenes revitalized Bucs
As long as Paul Skenes pitches for the Pirates, he will always be their headliner. He is just that good.
Skenes is the constant from last season to this one, dominant as ever, leading the majors in WHIP (0.64), strikeout-to-walk ratio (8-to-1) and hits per nine innings (4.5) with a 1.98 ERA. But while the Pirates’ thin offense doomed him to a 10-10 record last season, Skenes is 6-2 in 2026.
The vastly improved lineup isn’t just making Skenes look better. It has helped the Pirates to a 24-20 start and positioned them as true contenders for the first time in a decade.
Through yesterday, Pittsburgh was averaging five runs per game. No Pirates team has finished a season averaging five runs per game since Debs Garms was winning the batting title in 1940. Generations of great hitters — from Kiner to Clemente to Stargell to Parker to Bonds to McCutchen — have come and gone since the Pirates produced like this.
“The simplest thing is we’re deeper, and we have fewer guys that are struggling as big-league hitters,” manager Ben Cherington said. “I think it’s sustainable, because I actually don’t believe we’ve gotten to our best offense yet. We’re not quite clicking against left-handed starters.”
Critically, though, center fielder Oneil Cruz is hitting .327 against lefties, who held him to a confounding .102 average last season. Cruz still strikes out a lot, but he improved his defense over the winter (with help from four-time Gold Glover Kevin Kiermaier) and is close to a 40-40 pace for homers and steals.
The 2025 season, when Cruz hit .200/.298/.378, was humbling and motivating.
“He just seems more mature, physically and mentally,” Cherington said.
Cruz bats leadoff because of his potential for damage, but behind him is a collection of patient hitters who have helped Pittsburgh to a .337 team on-base percentage, ranking third in the majors. The offseason additions to the lineup — second baseman Brandon Lowe, right fielder Ryan O’Hearn and designated hitter Marcell Ozuna — have made the kind of impact the players expected.
A few days after the opener, the Pirates added to that offense by promoting rookie shortstop Konnor Griffin and signing him to a club-record nine-year, $140 million contract. Griffin struggled as a teenager, hitting .182 with no homers — but since turning 20 on April 24, he’s batted .324 and gone deep three times. He also has 10 steals without being caught.
“He’s, in our view, played very consistent, good defense,” Cherington said. “He’s run the bases well. And the offense, for the first three weeks or something, was going through some challenges, as you’d expect, and it’s pretty consistently trending forward.”
Pretty consistently trending forward could describe the franchise as a whole. After seven losing seasons in a row, the Pirates, at last, are more than just their ace.
More Skenes: Jayson Stark sets up what could be the greatest National League Cy Young race ever.
Just Sport: Nothing but baseball
The Louisville Bats, the Triple-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, have a full slate of colorful promotions coming up. There’s Dessert Day, where five fans will win Bundt cake for a year; Root Beer Float Day; Paw Patrol Night; Peanuts Halloween Night; and several games in which they will call themselves the Louisville Humidity.
On Tuesday against Indianapolis, though, they tried something different: Nothing Night, an annual tradition at Louisville Slugger Field. The Bats’ marketing director, Vincent Zielen, noticed the idea as an intern in the California League, where the Lake Elsinore Storm did it, and thought it offered an ideal counterbalance to the usual minor-league mayhem.
“People love it,” Zielen said. “You know, it is such the opposite of what you normally get in minor-league baseball that I think it sticks out enough and people rally behind it. The great thing about it is, we spend all this time and effort into these big Bluey-theme nights, Nickelodeon-themed nights. And all we’ve got to do is just open up the gates and let baseball happen. And the fans fall in love with it.”
The Bats still operate a scoreboard and use their public-address announcer, so the players have the same information they’re used to. The mascot still does his thing – “Buddy Bat is the star of the show; we will always have him out and about,” Zielen promised — but there’s no walk-up music, and for one precious night, nothing is sponsored.
“We have 75 home games,” Zielen said, “so we tell our partners, ‘Hey, you get 74 home games, because that one home game is going to be Nothing Night.’”
Actually, it’s 73 — this year’s Nothing Night went over so well, Zielen said, that the Bats will stage another on July 8. But first, tomorrow, it’s Star Wars Night in Louisville, which means 25 characters roaming the park, Ahsoka-themed jerseys, costume contests, droid racing and music from the Cantina Band between innings.
Still, it’s nice to know that in an era of “louder is better” — this means you, Chavez Ravine and Yankee Stadium — there’s still a night or two on the calendar devoted to the sounds of the sport.
Off the Grid: Traded for a bag of baseballs?
If you want your team to trade a player, and don’t care what it gets in return, there’s a baseball saying for that: “Trade him for a bag of balls.” It actually happened to Tim Fortugno.
Before his three-team tour in the 1990s — with the California Angels, Reds and Chicago White Sox — Fortugno was pitching for the independent Reno Silver Sox. The Milwaukee Brewers wanted to buy his contract, and offered Reno $2,500. That wasn’t enough for the Silver Sox, but when the Brewers also offered a dozen baseballs, they got their man.
After three seasons in Milwaukee’s farm system, Fortugno got a chance with the Angels in 1992. Late that season, at home against the Kansas City Royals, Fortugno surrendered George Brett’s 3,000th career hit. Then he did this:
“I was the most surprised person in the ballpark,” Brett said later, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. “I was right in the middle of a sentence to (first baseman Gary) Gaetti and they picked me off. He asked me if my wife was here and I said, ‘Yes, and I had friends here from Kansas City.’ … He didn’t even let me finish the sentence. Believe me, my mind wasn’t on being picked off.”
(A couple of points about that night: Future Mets All-Star Rick Reed threw a shutout for the Royals, and Brett had four hits in the game. He also had four hits in Game 7 of the 1985 World Series.)
Fortugno stayed in baseball as a scout, signing players like C.J. Wilson and Scott Feldman for the Texas Rangers. For much more on his fascinating life, here’s a gripping Bleacher Report profile from 2015 by Danny Knobler.
Read this week’s full Sliders column for more nuggets from Tyler, and follow all his work here.
Handshakes and High Fives
At 41, Justin Turner is now the star player for the Tijuana Toros after he couldn’t get an MLB gig. Sam Blum and Dennis Lin went to Tijuana to understand why he refuses to let his baseball career die.
Keith Law published his top 100 prospects for the 2026 MLB Draft, led by UCLA shortstop Roch Cholowsky.
Reds star Elly De La Cruz is becoming an MVP candidate by prioritizing consistent results over flashy Statcast metrics, as Ken Rosenthal explains.
Don and Preston Mattingly are embracing a unique partnership in Philadelphia as what’s believed to be the first father-son manager-GM duo in MLB history. A little awkward!
Before the Subway Series starts tonight, our Mets and Yankees beat writers put together a primer on where each team stands. Related news: Mets catcher Francisco Alvarez underwent knee surgery yesterday, and the team is hopeful he can return in about eight weeks.
A fan was hospitalized after falling more than 10 feet and landing in the visiting bullpen at a White Sox game on Wednesday. The fan’s condition was unknown as of yesterday morning.
Cal Raleigh went on the injured list with an oblique strain just two days after busting a career-worst slump. His return timeline is TBD.
On the latest “Rates & Barrels,” Eno Sarris, Trevor May and Derek VanRiper discussed how music — specifically, microtonal math rock — might help us understand more about the possibilities in pitch design. Listen or watch here.
Most-clicked in our last newsletter: Tarik Skubal’s newfangled loose-body surgery, explained.
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