A baseball season is very long and offers plenty of time for everyone involved to forget the stuff they would rather forget. For that reason among many others, it would make a great deal of sense to have long ago consigned Team USA's performance in March's World Baseball Classic to the ol' memory toilet. They were uniquely joyless in an event otherwise defined by goofball cheer; in place of the light nationalism that sets the WBC's otherwise highly variable stakes, Team USA was scowling, half-assed, and haplessly coppish.
In a fun and loose exhibition event, Team USA alone dared to ask whether ballplayers too might not be a kind of special operations-style troop. Then they lost to Venezuela in the final, despite locker-room inspiration from one of the half-dozen or so SEAL-turned-influencer guys who claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden. Taken altogether, it was a perfect illustration of a certain American way of being in the world—the kind that makes an embarrassing scene at a jet-ski rental counter while wearing a Grunt Style T-shirt, a version of Uncle Sam that keeps the pointing finger but is also worryingly sunburnt and wearing blade-style sunglasses on the back of his head.
But that was a long time ago, and a great deal of baseball has been played since. Enough baseball, in fact, that players like Paul Skenes are already giving retrospective interviews to their hometown papers about where things went wrong. The Pittsburgh Pirates were eliminated from playoff contention last weekend, despite a modest trade-deadline splurge aimed at shoring up what had been a terrible bullpen. There are things to be hopeful about in Pittsburgh, even in that bullpen, and also reasons for concern.
Skenes, uncharacteristically, fits more into that second category than the first. The 2024 National League Rookie of the Year and 2025 Cy Young Award winner struggled for the first time as a pro this year, wrestling with his mechanics throughout and losing two crucial ticks on his fastball as the campaign wore on. Skenes still threw quite hard, but the high-test gas on his fastball that had previously made its suboptimal shape unimportant in previous seasons was for some reason no longer in the tank. While Skenes has not been nearly as ordinary as his comparatively pedestrian top-line numbers suggest—his 3.91 ERA is nearly two runs higher than his league-leading 1.97 mark last year, to use the topmost of those—he has been much closer to it than he ever has been. During a 14-start stretch spanning from May 17 to July 31 he was both somewhat unlucky and authentically ineffective. The Pirates went 3-11 in those starts; Skenes' ERA was 5.18.
In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published Monday, Skenes identified his participation in the WBC as a prime reason for his struggles. "I don't want to put everything on that," he said, "but I feel like that was kind of the root of it a little bit. Usually that time of year, you're kind of ramping up and it's a little bit slow. You can kind of get onto the slope and find your body ... And that wasn't the case this year. Looking back, I don't think that really helped."
Skenes pitched very well in his two WBC appearances, as it happened, but the departure from his normal process was disruptive enough to leave him out of sorts all season long. He believes that he'll be able to make the necessary mechanical fixes to reclaim his feel for his secondary pitches and get his velocity back over a more normal offseason, and I see no reason to disagree with that assessment. One season spent honing an Aaron Harang impersonation every fifth day in no way suggests that he won't reemerge as Paul Skenes next season.
There's another factor that might help for 2027: not hanging around the Team USA clubhouse. A number of players who starred in the WBC have gone on to be excellent in the bigs this season: Eduardo Rodriguez went straight from winning the WBC final into arguably the best season of his Major League career, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto has just kept on pitching like Yoshinobu Yamamoto. But a striking number of the Team USA roster has kept the miserable vibes flowing all season long.
Yes, Pete Crow-Armstrong is having an MVP-worthy campaign, but Gunnar Henderson followed three stellar seasons by putting up Yuniesky Betancourt's triple-slash line. Cal Raleigh hasn't seemed right since he no-sold a Randy Arozarena handshake; his OPS is currently in the range of an average Dave Valle season, and even poetry aficionados are scoring points on him. Aaron Judge is currently back in the "expected to receive platelet-rich plasma injection sometime soon" zone. Alex Bregman, who has been fine statistically, just had a foul ball break his face. Logan Webb, Skenes' co-ace, has shed 31 points of ERA+ this season, which in one admittedly rude metric corresponds to the difference between his 2025 season and Terry Mulholland's age-41 campaign. (Bobby Witt Jr. has been fine, but everyone else on the Royals has played like they are enduring an It Follows situation, which raises some questions of contamination.)
It is the nature of baseball's difficulty to make even relatively small things seem big. Skenes blaming his troubles on the wrinkle that the WBC put in his preparation for the season both has a queasy loserish feel to it, and is quite probably correct in ways that he would necessarily understand much better than anyone else. But another takeaway here is that vibe hygiene matters and should be a part of any winning player's preparation for the season ahead. If you get an offer to play for your country in the WBC, by all means take it. Just make sure that doing so doesn't require you to sit in front of your locker and get power-washed by a spiral-eyed Tier-One Operator wearing a T-shirt for the assassination-themed energy drink he co-founded. The risk is just too high.
