ARLINGTON, Texas — It’s special because it never lasts, like childhood, precious and fleeting and full of possibility. Paul Skenes is living that moment now, that blissfully simple stage of an athlete’s career before contracts and injuries, expectations and loss.
Skenes is perfect now, undefeated in 11 starts — two of them hitless — in his two-month major-league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. He throws a pitch with a funny name, the splinker, that baffles even the best: 11 fellow All-Stars have faced Skenes, and he’s held them to a .156 average.
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At the All-Star festivities last summer, Skenes’ name was the first to be called at the amateur draft. Now he’s preparing for a stroll down the red carpet with his famous girlfriend, gymnast Livvy Dunne, on his way to start the All-Star Game for the National League.
“Paul is everything that is right about this game,” said Torey Lovullo, the NL manager, praising Skenes’ humility and maturity. “I couldn’t be more honored sitting next to him.”
Lovullo spoke at an interview table here Monday, his dress shirt unbuttoned at the top, no sport coat. Bruce Bochy, the AL manager now guiding his fifth All-Star team, wore a casual, short-sleeved shirt. Corbin Burnes, the AL starter, wasn’t here yet; his wife just gave birth to twins.
Skenes wore a suit and tie, a sharp-dressed man ready for his close-up.
“Pretty dang cool to even be in this position, to be at the All-Star Game in the first place,” said Skenes, who is 6-0 with a 1.90 ERA. “Just super grateful to be given the opportunity to start it.”
Only four other rookie pitchers have started the All-Star Game: Dave Stenhouse in 1962, Mark Fidrych in 1976, Fernando Valenzuela in 1981 and Hideo Nomo in 1995. None of them ever did it again.
Nomo was a veteran of the Japanese League. The others — well, it was a different time. Stenhouse had thrown four complete games in a row before his All-Star start. He was 6-24 the rest of his career. Fidrych and Valenzuela led their league in complete games as rookies. Neither made an All-Star team after age 25.
Skenes is 22. He is 6 feet 6 and 235 pounds, with the discipline of cadet at the Air Force Academy, where he played for two years before transferring to Louisiana State and winning a title in 2023. The threat of an arm injury stalks pitchers now, especially hard throwers. But the Pirates trust that Skenes’ rigorous pre-start routine will help.
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“That’s what I feel is going to allow this man to stay healthy,” Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin said. “Because he is a big guy and a rotational mover, I think this is what’s going to allow him to keep the range of motions that he wants to keep, to keep his delivery free and flowing.
“When I mention the word ‘flow,’ he has that stitched on his glove. That is his word for what he wants to feel: ‘I want to feel like I’m flowing.’”
Throwing a football, Marin said, helps Skenes find that flow. Throwing a softball helps keep his hand behind the baseball, to impart maximum backspin to his four-seam fastball. There’s band work, plyo balls, water bags. He’s finding new techniques as he goes.
“I think building volume on your body is important,” Skenes said.
Skenes did not dream of a pitching career while growing up near Los Angeles. He’s been pitching for only six or seven years, he said, and played catcher at Air Force, batting .367/.453/.669 with 24 homers.
Wes Johnson, his pitching coach at LSU and now the head coach at Georgia, said Skenes could have been drafted as a catcher, likely toward the 10th round. The less-is-more life of a major-league starter isn’t really his style.
“He’s just barely two years out of it: 100 swings in the cage, BP on the field, throw, and then not just play first base or DH — but catch,” Johnson said. “Obviously, he knew it was too much, but there were times that he really liked the way his body felt.”
Skenes said he wanted to keep hitting but showed too much pitching promise at LSU. Johnson, the former Minnesota Twins pitching coach, helped him add a sweeper and curveball and find the feel for a changeup. Johnson also studied the way Skenes’ body moves: he is a tall, wide, right-handed power pitcher, like Roger Clemens, but needed much different mechanics.
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“I talked to Paul when I got him and I just said, ‘Here’s the way your hips work, you need to be rotational, and it’s OK if your arm slot is not over the top,’” Johnson said. “We wanted it to unravel naturally so that he maximized his arm speed instead of trying to climb and come over the top and ‘be downhill.’ And the first thing he (said) was, ‘Man, I like this.’ It felt easy on his arm, his recovery got better, a lot of things. Once we saw his hips and how his body wanted to work, it made it very simple.”
Skenes rotates uncommonly fast, Marin said, with a lower arm angle than hitters usually see from a pitcher that size. What helps even more, he added, is that though Skenes’ fastball averages 99.1 mph — the hardest of any pitcher in the majors with at least 60 innings — he has an exceptional feel for sequencing.
“I don’t care if he’s throwing 120, if you don’t locate it, we’re going to figure it out at some point,” said the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, who is 0-for-3 with a strikeout against Skenes. “It’s his location, his command of the baseball — that’s why he’s so good. And when you do make a mistake, it’s still 100 so we’ll foul it off. That’s the beauty of it, being able to command the baseball with that kind of stuff.”
Skenes has 89 strikeouts and 13 walks in his 66 1/3 innings while holding opponents to a .202 average. The players here have been even worse against him: a sickly 5-for-32. Skenes has struck out 10 of the 11 fellow All-Stars he’s faced (all except Teoscar Hernandez), and only Pete Alonso, Shohei Ohtani and Will Smith have gotten hits.
Alonso, who was 2-for-3, said he thought of Skenes’ splinker — a mashup of “splitter” and “sinker” — as a two-seamer, or a sinking fastball with more run but lower velocity than a four-seamer.
“I was ready to hit 100, and that kind of made everything else slower,” Alonso said. “A lot of people, when they think ‘splitter,’ it’s more of a changeup or an off-speed pitch. But for me, it’s two separate fastballs: It’s a 100 mph four-seam and a 95, 96 mph sinker. I mean, both are power pitches, very good pitches. So just be ready to hit a 100 mile-an-hour fastball and hopefully, you can see the sinker.”
Skenes said he discovered the splinker while playing catch — after the draft and before reporting to the Pirates — by fiddling with the release on the sinker grip he learned at LSU. Several hitters and coaches said that just one other major leaguer, Twins closer Jhoan Duran, has a pitch that behaves like Skenes’ splinker.
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“It’s not fully a full split,” Marin said. “Guys aren’t splitting their fingers completely, and they’re not (putting their) fingers together like a traditional two-seam. It’s the in-between of both, which I think is super interesting and great.”
For Skenes and the Pirates, that is. For hitters like the Milwaukee Brewers’ Christian Yelich — part of a lineup that went hitless in seven innings against Skenes last week — the splinker could be a problem for years.
“That pitch kind of takes him to the next level because it moves so much,” Yelich said. “It’s a variation off his fastball, and he does a good job locating it. He was kind of changing speeds on it with us … and it had a different action every time. It was just hard to square up. It was something you could tell was not a fastball, but then you kind of just hit the top of it because it had so much late depth and movement.”
There are 60 NL pitchers with more starts than Skenes this season, including several other All-Stars. But to Lovullo, who grew up near Hollywood as the son of a television producer, there was only one choice for the start.
“I wanted to just make sure that the world got to see him,” Lovullo said. “We’re going to be on the biggest stage tomorrow, and I am here to support and promote Major League Baseball the best way I know how.”
It’s a ceremonial honor, just one inning, but it’s more than showmanship. Skenes is as close to unhittable as any pitcher in baseball. This is his moment, and this is how to mark it.
(Top photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo / Getty Images)
Tyler Kepner is a Senior Writer for The Athletic covering MLB. He previously worked for The New York Times, covering the Mets (2000-2001) and Yankees (2002-2009) and serving as national baseball columnist from 2010 to 2023. A Vanderbilt University graduate, he has covered the Angels for the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise and Mariners for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and began his career with a homemade baseball magazine in his native Philadelphia in the early 1990s. Tyler is the author of the best-selling “K: A History of Baseball In Ten Pitches” (2019) and “The Grandest Stage: A History of The World Series” (2022). Follow Tyler on Twitter @TylerKepner
