ARLINGTON, Texas — The first thing Paul Skenes told the Pirates after signing was that he wasn’t good enough.
At least, not yet.
It was late July 2023 and the newly drafted No. 1 overall pick, fresh off the greatest pitching season in college baseball history, was interviewing with his new employer in Bradenton, Fla. Skenes, director of player development John Baker and pitching coordinator Josh Hopper were seated in Hopper’s office at the Pirates’ spring training facility.
Not even the most optimistic outlook could have predicted this for Skenes. Less than a year later, the 6-foot-6 pitcher is scheduled to start in the National League All-Star Game on Tuesday, the first player to be selected to the All-Star team the year after being drafted first overall.
And the honor is well-deserved: Skenes has taken MLB by storm, dominating hitters with a 1.90 ERA through his first 11 starts, striking out batters, capturing imaginations and eyeballs along the way.
But the road to professional stardom first runs through Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the three met to plot a path of development. The objective of their meeting was clear: find a way to lead the most enticing pitching prospect of the past decade to major league dominance. Baker and Hopper had prepared a series of proposals, but before sharing them, they asked Skenes to evaluate himself.
“He listed (our recommendations) in that exact order without even looking at our list,” Baker, who holds similar meetings with every player entering Pittsburgh’s minor league system, told Yahoo Sports. “It was something he was thinking about on his own. This is the first time he’s been in that environment with rookies.”
“And his list was more comprehensive than ours, and also more self-deprecating.”
High on Skenes’ list of priorities was adding a reliable third pitch that could more effectively neutralize lefty batters. He dominated hitters as a junior at Louisiana State University, posting a 1.69 ERA, 209 strikeouts and allowed a .449 OPS in 122 2/3 innings, but that was while relying almost entirely on two pitches, a fastball-slider combo. The mustachioed flamethrower occasionally chucked a quality changeup, but he told Baker and Hopper he wanted something different, something better, something that could fool the best hitters on the planet.
So Skenes invented and refined what would become the “splinker,” a unicorn pitch with the velocity of a sinker and the vertical depth of a splitter, a cheat code for eliciting strikeouts and inducing grounders that helped propel Skenes to superstardom.
That he developed such an effective pitch in such a short time speaks volumes about how unique Skenes was: only someone with a rare combination of athletic ability, competitive drive, hard work and intellectual humility could have mastered and deployed such a pitch.
Skenes made Sprinker, and Sprinker made Skenes.
Skenes had been toying with the pitch during his brief pro debut, which saw him pitch in five games last summer, but Pirates officials hadn’t actually seen it until late last winter.
Sources told Yahoo Sports that Skenes spent part of last offseason at the University of Georgia, working with Bulldogs head coach Wes Johnson. Johnson, one of the most respected figures in pitching, served as Skenes’ pitching coach at Louisiana State and played a key role in developing the Air Force transfer into one of the best pitching prospects in MLB history.
Late last offseason, Hopper and Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin traveled to Athens, Georgia, to watch the pitches for themselves. Their report was incredible.
“I remember hearing about it… he was throwing a 95-96 mph ball with negative (vertical movement),” Baker told Yahoo Sports. “Nobody had ever seen anything like it.”
“It was one of those situations where you hear those stories about other guys and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s true.’ But then you hear about Skenes and you’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably true.’ And then when he showed up to spring training, that’s what we saw.”
Pirates catcher Henry Davis also saw an early rendition of the pitch during the offseason.
“It was a pitch that was more vertical than a changeup and had more depth,” Davis told Yahoo Sports, “but he was throwing it around 92 mph at the time. He wasn’t fully up to speed yet and was just seeing if it could add to his arsenal.”
“The biggest thing is he had a vision for the future, and our staff guided him the last five yards or so,” assistant director of pitching Jeremy Breich said.
The resulting pitch is unlike anything else he’s seen before — it has so much vertical movement that Statcast classifies it as a splitter — but it’s averaging 94.1 mph and has topped out at 97 mph on multiple occasions. And based on velocity, what Skenes calls a sinker is already the most efficient pitch in MLB this season, according to Statcast’s Run Value metric.
“That’s incredible — the best I’ve ever seen,” Davis said. “And how many years has it been since he’s been a full-time pitcher?”
In fact, it was just two years ago that Skenes played his final game at the Air Force Academy before transferring to LSU. In that regional playoff game against the University of Texas, Skenes played cleanup catcher and batter for the Falcons.
When Skenes arrived in Baton Rouge, it was immediately clear that his future was on the mound. From the moment the dashing pitcher began taking part in fall scrimmages, his new teammates began to understand the kind of person and player they had in the team.
Two of Skenes’ former LSU teammates, Nationals outfielder Dylan Cruz and Rays first baseman Tre Morgan, were in Arlington, Texas, over the weekend to play in this year’s Futures Game, a gathering of minor league prospects. In interviews with Yahoo Sports, both expressed little surprise at Skenes’ lightning rise to big league stardom.
“When I went to college with him, I thought he was a big leaguer at that point, a starter for a major league team,” said Cruz, the No. 2 pick in last year’s draft. “He’s a special talent.”
Still, Morgan marveled at how Skenes’s dominance is still on full display at the highest level: “It’s great to see him doing the same things he did in college, literally the same things, against the best hitters in the world,” he said.
But Skenes isn’t quite the same pitcher he was a year ago. Sprinker has refined his pitching combinations, making him more formidable against righties as well as lefties, where he needed a different answer. That wasn’t the case last season, when he dominated college players. That has changed.
But Skenes’ essence — his determination, his fastball, his slider and his energy on the mound, like a contented Rottweiler having fun while he’s beating up opponents — remains unshakeable.
Plus, probing self-reflection and constructive self-criticism are a big part of what makes Skenes a generational player. It would have been easy, and understandable, for him to rest on his laurels and stubbornly stick to the pitch combination that propelled him to incredible heights in college. Most pitchers, baseball players, and people in general need to experience failure before they can admit that change is necessary.
Not Skenes.
“He doesn’t just want to be great, he wants to be the best,” Bleich said.
The present and future of the Pittsburgh Pirates adapted before he was needed, before his bosses told him to. His willingness to evolve and his freakish athleticism to create amazing new pitches enabled his rapid promotion and historic first 11 major league starts.
“He could have gotten major league hitters out with just his fastball and slider,” Baker said.
“But I don’t know if he’s an All-Star.”
