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Paul Skenes seemed to arrive in the pros like Aphrodite rising from the sea: fully formed. The Pittsburgh Pirates drafted him last year with the No. 1 pick, shortly after he led Louisiana State University to a College World Series title; in a playoff game against the University of Tennessee, he’d thrown a hundred and twenty-three pitches, forty-six of which were fastballs at or above a hundred miles per hour—including a stretch of seven straight.
Then he developed an even better pitch: the so-called splinker, a hybrid—thrown by just one other major leaguer—with the velocity of a sinker and the vertical dip of a splitter. It’s classified as a offspeed pitch, but Skenes can throw it at ninety-five miles per hour. He discovered how to throw it when his grip slipped, and the ball drove into his index finger, killing some of the spin. It was an accident, like penicillin.
Skenes is six feet six, weighs two hundred and thirty-five pounds, and has a trim mustache for good measure. His hips rotate with unusual speed, which lets his arm whip around easily. His coaches rave about his work ethic, his discipline, his ability to incorporate feedback. Only a few years ago, Skenes was a catcher at the Air Force Academy, and a good one—but catchers receive the action, and hitters respond to it. Skenes is the action. He transferred from Air Force to L.S.U. to work with the pitching coach there. He grew the mustache and started dating Livvy Dunne, an L.S.U. gymnast with eight million followers on TikTok.
He could have come straight to the big leagues this season, but the Pirates sent him to Triple-A, ostensibly to get him used to professional baseball and to get him some practice with that splinker. But everybody understood the real reason. The Pirates wanted to push back the date when his elbow would explode, which seems inevitable. Pitchers’ elbows are constantly exploding these days. “I don’t claim that we have any sort of scientific master formula for how we’re doing this,” the team’s general manager, Ben Cherington, told ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “I don’t know for sure that this plan is right. I can’t say that.”
They sent him to the Triple-A team, in Indianapolis, where his earned-run average was less than one and he struck out an astounding forty-five batters in just twenty-seven and a third innings. He was called up to the majors in May. In his second start, against the Chicago Cubs, he threw a hundred pitches and was pulled from the game after six innings; he had not given up a hit. This happened again, against the Milwaukee Brewers, in early July: seven innings, no hits, ninety-nine pitches, and his day was done. It outraged many people that the Pirates would pull Skenes from the game without letting him try to finish it, and notch an official no-hitter. The team said that Skenes was “tired.” And he probably was. But, once upon a time, pushing through that fatigue in order to pursue one of baseball’s most revered feats—the first official no-hitter was recorded in 1876—was a big part of what the game was all about. Romance, which depends on risk, has been leaching out of baseball for a while now.
Skenes, like Shohei Ohtani—one of the few figures in baseball who has overshadowed him (and everyone else) this season—is in an odd position. He is a charismatic, heroic figure in an antiheroic era. In the post-“Moneyball” landscape, front-office figures and even player-development gurus—the folks who are developing ever more effective strategies for game managers, or techniques for training the body to goose the velocity of a slider—often serve as the game’s main characters. The wealth of data that teams now collect, and their better and better ways of understanding it, has enabled decision-makers to optimize almost everything, or try to: where a fielder should stand for any particular batter, how many rotations a pitcher should try to put on a ball, where a catcher should set up, how many times a pitcher can face a batter before familiarity and fatigue dull his edge. A decade ago, starting pitchers went six innings or more about sixty per cent of the time. Now they do so about forty per cent of the time.
This is partly to keep pitchers from running through the lineup too often. But it’s also because of injuries, at least in theory. Players throw fewer pitches, but throw them in ways that put more stress on the arm. For all the emphasis on efficiency, no team has figured out how to optimize the ulnar collateral ligament, a fibrous band only a few millimetres wide, that keeps the elbow stable. Pitching is an incredibly violent motion—all that force travelling from the ground into the legs, the speed of the hips’ rotation, the power travelling from the back and shoulders through the elbow to the hand. Throwing hard with a lot of breaking action is a good way to rack up strikeouts, which is what every pitcher these days wants to do. It’s also a good way to tear your U.C.L.
Eighty per cent of the players who started this M.L.B. season on the injured list were pitchers, and most of the game’s most well-known pitchers have been injured for parts or all of this season. The L.A. Dodgers alone have had eleven starting pitchers injured this year—not counting the two-way player Ohtani, who tore his U.C.L. a year ago, for the second time, and so is only hitting this season. The situation seems unlikely to improve. The incentives to throw harder and harder are so high, and teams are rotating through pitchers quickly even in the best of circumstances—treating them more and more as fungible commodities, at least to a point. And pitchers seem to treat their elbows as fungible, too—when one breaks, they go under the knife and come back a year later with a new one.
Skenes started in the All-Star Game, in July, becoming just the fifth rookie to do so. He was an obvious choice: undefeated in eleven starts, with an E.R.A. under two. But he was riding a four-start winless streak until he got the win on Friday night, over the Seattle Mariners. His first-inning fastball velocity has been dropping. According to Codify Baseball, in his first five games, he threw fifty-three pitches at or above a hundred miles per hour. In the next five, he threw less than half that—and in the following five, he threw only four. His splinker, though probably still the best pitch in baseball, has not been totally untouchable. Is Skenes pacing himself, or wearing down? We’re unlikely to find out. Skenes is still pitching well, but as the Pirates have tumbled out of playoff contention, rumors have circulated that the team will be even more conservative with their use of him, and fans are concerned that they’ll even shut him down for the rest of the season. (The team has said it has no such plans.) Some, knowing the risk, may be hoping for it.
A sport has a problem when the best thing to do with your best player might be to keep him from playing. The league has commissioned a study to address the rash of pitcher injuries; last week, league officials told ESPN that the commissioner’s office was considering a host of rule changes, from shrinking the allowable number of pitchers on a roster to mandating that starting pitchers throw at least six innings in each game, except in special circumstances. That might encourage pitchers to pace themselves rather than max out with every pitch. Or maybe it would just lead to more injuries. “I think I speak for the dominant portion of pitchers when I say that most of us will take the higher injury risk associated with throwing harder in exchange for a better chance of getting hitters out,” an anonymous pitcher wrote in Baseball Prospectus this past winter. As Ben Cherington said, we don’t have a scientific master formula for how we’re doing this, and I don’t know for sure if this plan is right. ♦
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