Jon Heyman is reaching embarrassing new lows to connect Paul Skenes to Yankees

At some point, the Paul Skenes-to-the-Yankees discourse has to become embarrassing even for the people manufacturing it.

Jon Heyman might have finally reached that point.

In his latest New York Post column, Heyman attempted to find a Yankees connection to Skenes through — and this is genuinely the premise here — Livvy Dunne's real estate search.

Dunne, Skenes' girlfriend, reportedly tried to purchase Babe Ruth's former apartment on the Upper West Side last summer. She didn't get it. She ultimately found another apartment elsewhere in New York. That's the story. Or at least, that should be the story.

Instead, according to Heyman, "Yankees people" apparently viewed Dunne's interest in Ruth's old apartment with "deep interest" and hoped it was some sort of signal that Skenes dreams of eventually wearing pinstripes. That is an absolutely spectacular reach.

Heyman even asked Skenes about it, forcing the Pirates ace to explain the exceedingly obvious: Dunne is a baseball fan, Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth and liking an apartment once owned by one of the most famous athletes in American history does not constitute a coded free-agency message to the New York Yankees.

"That's probably reading a little deeper into it than what is true," Skenes told Heyman.

Probably? That's Skenes being diplomatic. This is reading so deeply into it that we're drilling toward the Earth's core.

Skenes has now been connected to the Yankees because the Yankees reportedly asked the Pirates about him, because he will eventually become expensive, because he happened to be playing a series at Yankee Stadium and, now, because his girlfriend almost bought an apartment that Babe Ruth once lived in.

What's next? If Skenes watches Seinfeld, does that mean he prefers New York? If Dunne orders a bagel, is Brian Cashman allowed to start discussing extension numbers? If Skenes listens to Billy Joel on the flight home, should Pirates fans start preparing themselves for the inevitable?

The funniest part is that Skenes once again gave absolutely no fuel to the narrative. Asked about the Yankees, he didn't gush about the history of the franchise or Yankee Stadium. He said he hoped the Pirates swept them. Asked about his priorities, he said he wants to win.

Considering the Pirates are actually doing that this season, perhaps it's time for the national baseball conversation around Skenes to acknowledge the organization he currently plays for rather than constantly brainstorming ways to remove him from it.

The Pirates finally put together the kind of offseason their fans have spent years begging for. They increased payroll, added legitimate major league talent and built a team that entered this Yankees series squarely in the National League playoff conversation. Skenes himself told Heyman how much he has enjoyed it.

Yet even when Pittsburgh is winning, apparently the storyline still has to be about when the Yankees can have their best player. And that brings us to the most maddening part of the entire exercise.

Paul Skenes-Yankees propaganda exposes MLB’s biggest competitive balance problem

Heyman writes that the Pirates have "practically no chance" to extend Skenes under baseball's current economic system because he could eventually command more than $50 million annually. Maybe that's true. But perhaps national baseball writers should stop presenting that outcome as some immutable law of nature while simultaneously treating every attempt to address baseball's enormous payroll disparities as unnecessary.

You cannot spend years telling fans of teams like the Pirates that baseball's economic structure is perfectly healthy, then casually write that Pittsburgh has virtually no chance of retaining the best pitcher it has developed in decades because wealthy teams will inevitably price them out. You don't get to have it both ways.

Columns like Heyman's are a perfect illustration of why small-market fans find the national conversation so exhausting. Skenes isn't approaching free agency. He isn't demanding a trade. The Pirates aren't shopping him. They aren't even selling at the deadline. He's under team control for years. They're trying to make the playoffs. And somehow, we're still analyzing his girlfriend's apartment search for clues that he secretly wants to be a Yankee.

The Yankees are allowed to love Paul Skenes. Every baseball team on Earth would love Paul Skenes. They can ask about him every trade deadline from now until the Pirates block their number. But turning Dunne's interest in Babe Ruth's old apartment into Yankees trade propaganda is just fan fiction with a press credential.

And the harder the New York baseball media has to work to manufacture these connections, the clearer the actual story becomes. Paul Skenes is a Pittsburgh Pirate, the Pirates are winning, and for once maybe everyone else should learn to deal with it.

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