How Paul Skenes’ splinker helped propel him to instant MLB dominance

ARLINGTON, Texas — The first thing Paul Skenes told the Pirates after he signed was that he wasn’t good enough.

At least, not yet.

It was late July 2023, and the just drafted No. 1 overall pick — fresh off one the greatest pitching seasons in college baseball history — was in Bradenton, Florida, for an intake meeting with his new employer. Skenes, director of player development John Baker and pitching coordinator Josh Hopper settled into Hopper’s office at the Pirates’ spring training complex.

Even the most optimistic outlook for Skenes couldn’t have predicted this future. Less than a year later, the 6-foot-6 hurler is slated to start the All-Star Game for the National League on Tuesday. He is the first player to make the All-Star team the year after being drafted first overall.

And those honors are deserved: Skenes has taken MLB by storm, dominating hitters to the tune of a 1.90 ERA across his first 11 starts, capturing whiffs, imaginations and eyeballs along the way.

But the road to professional stardom first weaved through the Gulf Coast of Florida, where the three men congregated to sketch out a developmental path. The goal of their meeting was self-evident: figure out how to guide the most enthralling pitching prospect of the past decade to big-league dominance. Baker and Hopper came prepared with a set of suggestions but asked Skenes to self-assess before they shared them.

“Without looking at our list, he listed [our recommendations] off in the exact order,” Baker, who holds a similar meeting with every player who joins Pittsburgh’s minor-league system, told Yahoo Sports. “Things that he’d been thinking about himself. It’s the only time I’ve ever been in an environment like that with a new player.

“And his list was more comprehensive than ours, and it was also more self-deprecating.”

One of the top items on Skenes’ agenda was the addition of a consistent third pitch, one that could help him better neutralize left-handed hitters. He incinerated all batters in his junior year at LSU — posting a 1.69 ERA in 122 2/3 IP with 209 strikeouts and a .449 OPS allowed — but did so while relying almost exclusively on a two-pitch, fastball-slider combo. The mustachioed flamethrower occasionally flashed a quality changeup, but he told Baker and Hopper that he wanted something different, something better, something that could fool the best hitters on the planet.

And so Skenes got to work, crafting and tinkering with what would eventually become the “splinker,” a unicorn offering with the velocity of a sinker and the vertical depth of a splitter. It’s a whiff-snatching, grounder-inducing cheat code that has helped fast-track Skenes to superstardom.

The development of such an effective pitch in such a short period of time exemplifies so much about what makes Skenes unique. Only someone with his rare combination of athletic aptitude, competitive intensity, work ethic and intellectual humility could have learned and deployed such an offering.

Skenes made the splinker, and in turn, the splinker made Skenes.

While Skenes toyed around with the pitch during his brief, five-start pro debut last summer, Pirates officials didn’t see the pitch in person until late last winter.

Sources told Yahoo Sports that Skenes spent a portion of last offseason at the University of Georgia working alongside Bulldogs head coach Wes Johnson. Johnson, one of the most respected minds in the pitching world, was Skenes’ pitching coach at LSU and played a crucial 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 journeyed to Athens, Georgia, to see the pitch in person. Their report back was borderline unbelievable.

“I remember hearing about it … that he was throwing something 95-96 that had negative [vertical movement],” Baker told Yahoo Sports. “No one’s ever seen that before.

“It was one of those situations where, if I hear that about another player, I’d go, ‘Yeah, right.’ But you hear it about [Skenes], and you go, ‘Yeah, that’s probably true.’ And we got to see it when he showed up to spring training.”

Pirates catcher Henry Davis also saw early renditions of the pitch during the offseason.

“It was more vertical than the changeup at times and more depth-y,” Davis told Yahoo Sports. “But this is when he was throwing it closer to 92-ish, like 92-94. He wasn’t fully ramped up, just seeing how it would kind of complement the arsenal.”

Said assistant director of pitching Jeremy Bleich: “The biggest thing is he had a vision for what it was going to be. Our staff helped guide him maybe the last 5 yards.”

The finished product is a pitch unlike any other: an offering with so much vertical movement that Statcast classifies it as a splitter. Yet it averages 94.1 mph and has touched as high as 97 on multiple occasions. On a rate basis, the pitch — which Skenes refers to as a sinker — has already become the single most effective offering in MLB this season, according to Statcast’s Run Value metric.

“It’s crazy … some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen, obviously,” Davis said. “And he’s been a full-time pitcher for, what, two years?”

Indeed, it was just over two years ago that Skenes played his final game at the Air Force Academy before transferring to LSU. That contest, a regional playoff game against the University of Texas, featured Skenes catching and batting cleanup for the Falcons.

Once Skenes arrived in Baton Rouge, it became apparent rather quickly that his future was on the mound. The instant the swaggering hurler started competing in fall scrimmages, his new teammates began to grasp the kind of person and player who had joined their program.

Two of Skenes’ former LSU teammates — Nationals outfielder Dylan Crews and Rays first baseman Tre’ Morgan — were in Arlington, Texas, over the weekend to participate in this year’s Futures Game featuring the best prospects in the minor leagues. In interviews with Yahoo Sports, neither expressed a modicum of surprise about Skenes’ lightning-quick path to big-league stardom.

“When I was in college with him, I thought he was a big leaguer starting for a big-league team at that moment,” said Crews, the No. 2 pick in last year’s draft. “He’s a special talent.”

Even so, Morgan marveled at how seamlessly Skenes’ dominance has translated to the highest level. “It’s awesome watching him do what he did in college — literally the same thing — against the best hitters in the world,” he said.

But Skenes is not entirely the same pitcher now that he was a year ago. The splinker has sophisticated his mix and made him a more formidable force against not just the lefties for which he was seeking another answer but right-handers as well. It’s not something he had last season, when he was carving apart collegians. That has changed.

Then again, the essence of Skenes — the determination, the fastball, the slider, the energy on the mound that resembles a satisfied rottweiler enjoying himself while he chews up opponents — that’s unwavering.

Beyond that, the investigative introspection and constructive self-criticism are a huge part of what makes Skenes generational. It would have been easy, understandable even, for him to rest on his laurels and stubbornly cling to the pitch mix that propelled him to outrageous heights in college. Many pitchers, ballplayers, people in general, first need to experience failure in order to admit that change is necessary.

Not Skenes.

“He wants to be — not [just] great,” Bleich said. “He wants to be the best.”

The present and future of the Pittsburgh Pirates adapted before he needed to, even before his bosses had the chance to tell him to. His willingness to evolve — and the freakish physical aptitude to craft a magnificent new pitch — enabled his rapid ascent and historic first 11 major-league starts.

“He could have gotten major-league hitters out with just fastball-slider,” Baker said, looking back.

“But I don’t know that he’s an All-Star.”