ARLINGTON, Texas — Paul Skenes looked like a summer intern reporting for duty in a light gray suit, white shirt and cream-coloured tie, teenage acne on his face and wonder in his voice.
In a ballpark filled with six dozen All-Stars, the 22-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher with 11 major league appearances was the center of attention.
“Pretty dang cool,” he said.
Skenes is hot, like the 102-degree temperature outside air-conditioned Globe Life Field, and will start Tuesday’s All-Star Game for the National League. He will have the fewest big league games of any player in the showcase’s 91-year history, a new flavour baseball likes to savour. His splinker, a hybrid that sinks like a splitter with the velocity of a sinker, has batters muttering.
“He’s very intriguing to me, and I’m honoured to sit next to him,” NL manager Torey Lovullo of Arizona gushed.
If not quite flustered by the flattery, Skenes wasn’t ripe for the hype.
“It’s an honour, but I’m 11 starts in,” he said. “Hopefully, there’s a lot more time that I can play this game.”
At this time last year, he was the top pick in the amateur draft, weeks after celebrating an NCAA title with LSU. Now he’s 6-0 with a 1.90 ERA, striking out 89 and walking 13 in 66 1/3 innings.
Cleveland’s Steven Kwan will get the first look at him Tuesday. He found out in a group text from his parents that he was the leadoff hitter for the American League, which will start Baltimore’s Corbin Burnes.
“Sometimes they’ll just post stuff that isn’t even correct,” Kwan said. “I did kind of a double take, and be like: Is this really true?”
Kwan leads the major league with a .352 average and was excited to face Skenes’ arsenal of fastballs, splitters, sliders, curves and changeups. Skenes’ 99.1 mph average velocity on his four-seam fastball leads the major leagues among those with at least 1,000 pitches.
“It’s generational talent,” Kwan said. “The guy has all of the pressure on him and people probably naturally want to see him fail because of that, but he continues to excel, he continues to succeed. He says the right things. It seems like his teammates really like him.”
An imposing 6-foot-6, Skenes already produced a pair of hitless outings of six innings or more, prevented from trying for a no-hitter by the pitch limits of the analytics age. He arrived in the major leagues with a celebrity girlfriend, the gymnast/influencer Livvy Dunne.
A mustache on Skenes’ boyish face gives him an old-time baseball look, like in a daguerreotype of some 19th-century founder. Yet he is a creature of 21st-century pitching practices that include warmups with footballs, PlyoCare weighted balls and water bags.
Skenes grew up in Orange County and went to El Toro High School, also known for Nolan Arenado, Matt Chapman and Austin Romine. He enrolled at the Air Force Academy and was a catcher and a pitcher. LSU coach Jay Johnson persuaded him to transfer after the 2022 season and he became a full-time pitcher last year.
“They stopped putting me in BP groups,” Skenes said. “I wanted to keep hitting as long as I could, but the upside on the mound, I think, was a lot better than the upside hitting, so kind of gave it up.”
His splinker, listed by Statcast as a splitter, averages 94.1 mph — 1.1 mph faster than anyone else with 1,000 pitches and well above the MLB average of 86.5 mph. Before Skenes, the pitch was known mostly for its use by Minnesota’s Jhoan Duran.
“I had a sinker grip I was throwing last year at LSU and kind of started fooling around with it between when the college season wrapped up and when I was going to report to the complex after the draft,” Skenes said. “Just figured out a different cue for it, started throwing it and got command over it and the last part of that is just throwing it to hitters and seeing how they react to it.”
He didn’t change his grip, only the release while playing catch.
“I just kind of discovered it on one random throw,” he said.
Skenes has struck a note for the next generation of pitchers since he warmed up to Charles Wesley Godwin’s rendition of “Cue Country Roads” for his May 11 debut at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park.
Skenes has thrown 75 pitches of 100 mph; the Los Angeles Angels’ José Soriano is second among starters with 36.
After Kwan, Skenes will face Baltimore’s Gunnar Henderson and the New York Yankees’ Juan Soto, then possibly AL home run leader Aaron Judge.
“He’s got a 100 mile-an-hour four-seam and I see it as a 95, 96 mile-an-hour two-seam fastball,” said the Mets’ Pete Alonso, who singled and doubled off splinkers on July 5 before taking a 99.4 fastball for strike three. “So for me it’s just getting being ready to hit 100 and then everything else seems semi-hittable if it’s over the plate.”
After working his way from rookie ball to Double-A last summer and starting this year at Triple-A Rochester, Skenes’ goal for 2024 was to reach the major leagues. He’s already sparked the attention of the sport’s elite.
“I didn’t necessarily think I would be here,” he said.
