Paul Skenes, the pitching phenom of the Pittsburgh Pirates, needs to be on the National League All-Star team. He has made just eight starts and is 30 2/3 innings short of qualified status. Doesn’t matter. And it’s not just because Skenes is the needed old-school drawing card of a starting pitcher that the game has been drumming out of fashion. It’s because he’s that good.
How good? Skenes is the second pitcher in history through eight starts to be unbeaten (4–0) with more than 60 strikeouts (61). The other was Masahiro Tanaka, then 25, who had pitched professionally in Japan for eight seasons before coming to MLB. Skenes, 22, was pitching in the College World Series last year.
Undefeated First 8 Games, Most Strikeouts
Only six pitchers struck out more batters in their first eight games than Skenes: Herb Score (77), Jose DeLeon (73), Kerry Wood (72), Stephen Strasburg (68), Tanaka (66) and Nolan Ryan (64). Skenes plowed through the Tampa Bay Rays on Sunday in a typically dominant Skenes start: one run over seven innings with eight strikeouts before Tampa Bay beat the Pittsburgh bullpen, 3–1.
Skenes will have three more starts before the All-Star Game, giving him 11 at the break. (He has pitched with five days of rest or more each time.) Those starts figure to be against the Atlanta Braves, the New York Mets and the Milwaukee Brewers. Mark Fidrych made 11 starts before he started the 1976 All-Star team. Hideo Nomo made 13 starts before he started the 1995 All-Star Game.
Skenes is a pitching outlier people want to see—a force who received an ovation after pitching on the road (St. Louis) and who has boosted attendance in his five home starts at PNC Park by 34% (6,944 above the Pirates’ average otherwise). A huge part of his appeal is that Skenes is the hardest throwing starting pitcher in baseball. We love the radar gun, and Skenes averages 99.3 mph on his four-seamer.
But here’s the most amazing fact about Skenes: his secondary stuff and command are far better than that attention-getting fastball. People are missing what sets Skenes apart: he is a better command pitcher than he is a power pitcher.
Other than velocity, his four-seam fastball has rather ordinary properties. It has little ride (but good horizontal movement) because it does not have true four-seam spin. He is not a long strider, so he does not get a boost with perceived velocity. Batters are hitting .282 against his four-seamer, including a first-pitch home run Sunday by Yandy Diaz.
I mention to his Pirates manager, Derek Shelton, that young starters such as Jared Jones, Dylan Cease, Tarik Skubal, Tyler Glasnow, Grayson Rodriguez, Cole Ragans and Logan Gilbert all have 96+ MPH four-seamers but throw the pitch less than half the time. Skenes throws his four-seamer only 40% of the time.
“I think we've seen the game trend that way,” Shelton says. “People want to talk about the average velocity going up on the fastball, but it’s more so that the average velocity has gone up on breaking stuff, if you look over the last 10 years. And the biggest thing is just command. The guys that you pointed out have the ability to command secondary stuff at a really high level, and then use the fastball almost kind of off it.
“We used to talk about it. It was pitching backwards if you used your breaking ball [often]. It’s not pitching backwards anymore. It’s pitching. It’s the way the game is. Organizations and pitching coaches have decided we’re going to weaponize your best pitch and attack you with it.”
One misconception about Skenes that needs clarification: his “splinker” is more of a sinker than it is a splitter. The pitch gets classified as an off-speed pitch (splitter) but Skenes thinks of it as a two-seamer. It is closer to a fastball than it is to an off-speed pitch. So, if you classify his splinker as a two-seamer, Skenes throws 67% fastballs.
“The splinker, we're talking about … it’s 93 to 95,” Shelton says. “It’s essentially a hard two-seamer that just has a lot of action to it. It’s still a hard pitch. I think that the ability to command the ball in the zone is the most important thing that happens with these guys.”
And therein lies the magic of Skenes: he is a command pitcher who happens to throw hard. Think about the nightmare menu a righthanded hitter faces against Skenes:
As the ball leaves his hand, it could move toward the hitter, away from the hitter, down or hold its plane. (Skenes gets many called strikes on four-seamers down). The degree of difficulty for the hitter is increased because most everything Skenes throws is around the plate—but almost never in the middle. What does that mean? It means he forces a difficult swing decision with virtually every pitch—and he does it with outlier velocity.
Consider how Skenes dominates the edges of the strike zone. Pitching is the inverse of chess: dominant the periphery, not the middle. MLB batters hit .217 on pitches on the edges of the strike zone.
There are 13 starting pitchers who average 92 mph or better with all their pitches on the edges. These are your true power pitchers. Among them, Skenes is the hardest thrower and the second best at keeping the ball on the edges.
Power Starting Pitchers Ranked by Edge %
Put it this way: Skenes, who throws 99, lives on the edges about as much as Angels lefthander Tyler Anderson (46%), who throws 89.
Skenes is 6-foot-6 and 235 pounds. He is built to pitch deep into games. And while his mechanics are quirky—he lifts his right elbow higher than his shoulder, though that usual red flag is mitigated by superb timing of his hip and trunk rotations—Skenes had the advantage of growing up as a two-way player without the usual pitcher-only overuse.
At 22, he is pitching elevated to its most advanced form: a power pitcher with command who grew up with technology, analytics and modern training methods as a first language. He was breaking down video of hitters at LSU. I used to think Jacob deGrom was the pinnacle of pitching advancement with his mechanics, velocity and command, but deGrom was 26 and throwing 94 mph when he reached the big leagues. He acquired what Skenes has now much later.
“His work habits are outstanding,” Shelton says. “We're really fortunate in this situation with the fact that Paul was with Wes Johnson at LSU. I mean, Wes and I were together in Minnesota when he was a pitching coach. I was a bench coach. I think the fact that he had essentially a major league pitching coach that had him his last year in college … the routine in between is really solid.
“The second thing that I’ve learned about him is he asks really good questions for a young player. And it’s not just the initial question, but it’s the follow-up questions that you usually don't get out of a guy that is just in the big leagues.”
Finally, when it comes to the full scouting report on Skenes, here are two pitches that complete the picture.
The first happened in the sixth inning last Monday against the Cincinnati Reds. Skenes was holding a 4–1 lead. Elly De La Criz led off with a single. Skenes, showing quick feet and athleticism, picked him off. With two outs, Spencer Steer singled and Jake Fraley won a seven-pitch battle with a single. Now the tying run was at the plate, Tyler Stephenson, and Skenes was at 83 pitches. It was clear his night was nearing an end. Shelton stuck with the rookie. On his 93rd and final pitch, Skenes reached back for a 99.9 mph heater. Stephenson tapped it in front of the plate. Skenes fielded it and threw him out.
The second happened six days later. Skenes was locked in a 1–1 battle with the Rays. It was the seventh inning. On his last pitch, his 98th pitch on a sweltering afternoon, Skenes threw a 101.5 mph fastball past Alex Jackson for his eighth strikeout.
Paul Skenes dials it up to 102 to get his 8th strikeout of the day. 😎 pic.twitter.com/LukBwwRu7Y
— MLB (@MLB) June 23, 2024
His last pitch was his fastest pitch of the game. It was the stuff of which All-Stars are made.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Paul Skenes Has Quickly Built a Compelling All-Star Case.
