Paul Skenes doesn't plan to lose any sleep after a rare shaky start in a loss to St. Louis

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Paul Skenes might still be relatively new in the major leagues. The Pittsburgh Pirates star isn't new to baseball.

The 22-year-old has been pitching for a while. He knows that some days — hopefully most of them — he's going to have dominant stuff that bends pitches to his will and leaves bats flailing in pursuit.

Tuesday night against St. Louis was not one of those outings. The Cardinals touched Skenes for three runs in the third and two more in the sixth in a 5-3 loss that dropped Skenes to 0-3 against Pittsburgh's longtime NL Central rival.

Skenes didn't blame the worst start of his still-young career on chilly temperatures or his still-developing relationship with catcher Endy Rodriguez. He simply missed spots a couple of times and the Cardinals made him pay for it.

“It’s not like they hit the ball into the river or anything like that,” said Skenes after giving up five runs, the most he's surrendered in his 26 big league starts. "They just found some holes and I got behind in some counts and kind of let them get good swings off. Not going to sweat it. It is what it is.”

Skenes zipped through the first two innings, retiring six batters without going to so much as a two-ball count. His quickly faltered in the third.

Pedro Pages singled on the first pitch he saw, Masyn Winn followed one batter later with a sharp single to left and Victor Scott II hit the first triple of his big league career on a shot to deep right-center field that scored two. Scott then trotted home on Brendon Donovan's run-scoring base hit.

While Skenes said his stuff felt “good,” his mistakes often wound up closer to the middle of the plate than usual. And the Cardinals pounced.

“It’s funny, a lot of the times you get away with those,” Skenes said. "Just didn’t get away with them today. Kind of is what it is.”

The 22-year-old reigning National League Rookie of the Year overpowered Miami and Tampa Bay to start the season. Skidding St. Louis, which had dropped six of seven coming in, proved to be a step up in competition.

The start was Skenes second with Rodriguez behind the plate. Skenes worked almost exclusively with veteran Yasmani Grandal last season, leaning on the veteran as he adjusted to life as one of the game's brightest young stars.

Skenes and Rodriguez kept it simple in Tampa last week, relying heavily on a couple of pitches against the Rays. Skenes dipped into his quickly expanding repertoire — not complete with a two-seam fastball and a split-fingered fastball — this time out, a step in the right direction.

Perhaps even more encouraging, there were times when Skenes would get ready to signal Rodriguez to call a specific pitch when Skenes' pitch comm would buzz with that exact call.

“That happened with Endy quite a few times today,” Skenes said. "We’re thinking very similarly. I don’t think I shook today. I’m a fan of the game that he called and that we called together. It just comes down to executing.”

The last truly bumpy start for Skenes came back home in Southern California when the Los Angeles Dodgers chipped away for four runs in five innings. He responded by winning each of his next two starts, giving up all of two runs in the process.

“We haven’t seen a lot of rough ones (from him),” Pirates manager Derek Shelton said. "But everything that has been on his plate, he’s handled very well. I expect him to come out the next time and be what we expect.”

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Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes delivers during the first inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals in Pittsburgh, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes delivers during the first inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals in Pittsburgh, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes delivers during the first inning of a baseball game against the St. Louis Cardinals in Pittsburgh, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of New York City nurses returned to the picket lines Tuesday as their strike targeting some of the city’s leading hospital systems entered its second day.

Union officials say roughly 15,000 nurses walked off the job Monday morning at multiple campuses of three hospital systems: NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai.

The affected hospitals have hired droves of temporary nurses to try to fill the labor gap. Both nurses and hospital administrators have urged patients not to avoid getting care during the strike.

New York City, like the U.S. as a whole, has had an active flu season. The city logged over 32,000 cases during the week ending Dec. 20 — the highest one-week tally in at least 20 years — though numbers have since declined, the Health Department said last Thursday.

Roy Permaul, an intensive care unit nurse who was among those picketing in front of Mount Sinai's flagship campus in Manhattan, said he and his colleagues are prepared to walk off the job as long as needed to secure a better contract.

But Dania Munoz, a nurse practitioner at Mount Sinai, stressed that the union’s fight wasn’t just about better wages.

“We deserve fair pay, but this is about safety for our patients, for ourselves and for our profession,” the 31-year-old Bronx resident said. “The things that we’re fighting for, we need. We need health care. We need safety. We need more staffing.”

The New York State Nurses Association said Tuesday that none of the hospitals have agreed to additional bargaining sessions with the union since their last meetings on Sunday.

It also complained that Mount Sinai, which operates seven hospitals, unlawfully fired three nurses hours after the strike started and improperly disciplined 14 others who had spoken out about workplace violence or discussed the union and contract negotiations with their colleagues.

Mount Sinai spokespersons said Tuesday the claims were “not accurate” and that they would provide more information later. Mt. Sinai has said approximately 20% of its nurses reported for work on the first day of the strike rather than picketing.

Meanwhile, Montefiore Medical Center said it has “not canceled even one patient’s access to care” during the work stoppage. The city Emergency Management Department said it hasn’t seen major impacts to patient care so far.

The hospital system also criticized unionized nurses for seeking “troubling proposals” such as demanding that nurses not be terminated, even if found to be compromised by drugs or alcohol while on the job.

The union said Montefiore was “blatantly mischaracterizing” one of its basic workplace proposals, which would have added protections for nurses dealing with substance use disorders and which has already been adopted in other hospitals around the state.

The labor action comes three years after a similar strike forced medical facilities to transfer some patients and divert ambulances.

As with the 2023 labor action, nurses have pointed to staffing issues as a major flashpoint, accusing the big-budget medical centers of refusing to commit to provisions for safe, manageable workloads.

The private, nonprofit hospitals involved in the current negotiations say they’ve made strides in staffing in recent years and have cast the union’s demands as prohibitively expensive.

On Monday, the city's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, stood beside nurses on a picket line outside NewYork-Presbyterian, praising the union’s members for seeking “dignity, respect and the fair pay and treatment that they deserve.”

Nurses strike in front of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Nurses strike in front of Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Nurses strike outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)