SARASOTA, Fla. — The magic of Paul Skenes is obvious, visceral.
Pittsburgh’s superstar hurler is a goliathan who can throw a baseball abnormally hard. In other words: One does not need a deep, sophisticated understanding of pitching to appreciate the entertainment value of a Paul Skenes heater.
That’s because, when the hurler uncoils his 6-foot-7 frame and lets one rip, the rawhide flies out of his hand like a bullet, crescendoing into the catcher’s mitt with an echoing pop. Skenes’ style of motion, too, is undeniably distinct. Few people so large can move with such intent, such violence; he is a rhino doing ballet, Godzilla practicing Capoeira.
And the result, as showcased by his shimmering 2024 NL Rookie of the Year season, is downright overpowering.
Anytime Skenes climbs the hill, whether in March or September, it’s an event, an excuse to lock in. And this spring training, the 22-year-old has given the baseball world another reason to overanalyze his outings. The sport’s most enrapturing pitcher is toying with two brand-new pitches.
On Thursday evening, a chilly one by Floridian standards, Skenes unleashed the beta versions of his new offerings, a two-seam fastball and a cutter. In his second start of this spring training against the Baltimore Orioles, Skenes worked into the fourth, striking out three while surrendering four hits and two runs. It was a tune-up, one that Skenes said was the best he’s felt all spring.
Through it all, he was, predictably, the main attraction. As Skenes entered the visitors’ bullpen down the left-field line to warm up 20 minutes before first pitch, he was greeted by a huge throng of onlookers. Fans, their arms draped over the fence railing, oohed and aahhed as Skenes uncorked high-90s fastball after high-90s fastball. One kid, about 10 years old, quipped to his father: “Dad, I don’t think I’d be able to hit that.”
During that bullpen, Pittsburgh’s eye-catching ace appeared to feature five offerings, a fact discernible via the glove signs communicated to catcher Endy Rodríguez. Besides the combination of four-seam fastball, “splinker” and slider that Skenes leaned on last year, he clearly motioned for a two-seamer and a fifth pitch that was almost certainly the new cutter. Because the game was not available on television or MLB’s public-facing Statcast pitch-tracking system, there’s no specific data besides Ed Smith Stadium’s unreliable jumbotron radar gun.
For many hurlers, spring training is a time of tinkering and testing, an opportunity to experiment in an environment in which the results mean nothing. That Skenes is playing around with new pitches is not exactly surprising. But given the context — he’s coming off the most dominant rookie campaign in MLB history and already has six effective pitches — it’s a compelling development.
It also raises a straightforward, revealing question: Why?
Why does a pitcher so overpowering need more ingredients? Skenes is already a force of nature with a deep arsenal and a hair-raising heater. He throws outrageously fast with elite deception. Hitters, as evidenced by a microscopic 1.99 ERA last year, can’t touch him. Why bother futzing with the recipe?
“Really, [I’m] just trying to create more swing decisions,” Skenes told MLB.com’s Alex Stumpf last month. “That’s what it boils down to.”
Both pitches, at least in theory, give Skenes coverage in areas and situations in which he was undermanned last season. Let’s start with the two-seamer.
Below is a heatmap of Skenes’ pitch location frequency against right-handed batters in two-strike counts. That inlet of blue stretching from the inner third to the middle of the plate indicates that Skenes rarely pitched inside in such situations. The new two-seam fastball has tailing action toward the hitter, but unlike his “splinker,” this offering doesn’t have downward movement. That should enable Skenes to use the pitch up in the zone.
The new cutter fills a less obvious situational void but has a chance to be the more effective pitch. That’s because the cutter — which was in the 90-92 mph range with a smidge of gloveside break on Thursday — gives Skenes a pitch in a velocity range that was vacant in 2024.
While Skenes’ slider and sweeper move similarly to his cutter, the new pitch is thrown much harder.
“I didn’t have anything like that before, and it was kind of like, ‘Well, I throw 100. Why don’t I throw a 90 mph slider,’ basically?” Skenes explained after being asked about the cutter’s utility by Yahoo Sports after his outing Thursday. “Why don’t I throw a breaking ball that’s around 90? Because I can. My sweeper was around 85 last year, and so that’s part of it, but the sweeper is so big that if I don’t get any swings on the cutter, it’s still going to get me swings on the sweeper.”
Some around the game have whispered skepticisms about the additional offerings. The trepidation has nothing to do with the new pitches — they say anything Skenes uses will grade out well just because he throws so hard. The concern is more about a potential reduction in the usage rates of Skenes’ even more dominant offerings. Adding the two-seamer and cutter would mean tossing his other pitches less often, which could also be tossing hitters a lifeline.
In other words, you’re telling me the likelihood that I see a Paul Skenes fastball or splitter just went down? Sign me up!
The counterargument alluded to by Skenes is all about unpredictability. Skenes thrives, more than many other arms, on creating a sense of total discomfort for the hitter. His size, velocity, mechanics and release point all contribute to that dynamic. More pitches mean more decisions, and more decisions mean more discomfort. All of which is good for Skenes.
How effective these pitches will be and how much Skenes will lean on them remains to be seen. There still isn’t even pitch data on the two-seamer or cutter (that will happen at his likely next start on March 11 against the New York Yankees). But no matter how this pans out, it’ll be must-see TV because, well, it’s Paul Skenes.
