Skenes adds ANOTHER pitch to his arsenal?

BRADENTON, Fla. -- Of all the pitches in Paul Skenes’ arsenal, he happened upon his best by accident. The “splinker” -- his hybrid splitter/sinker -- was born during catch play last year and refined into one of the best offerings in the game. Skenes is a tinkerer, and that natural curiosity led to a gem.

“It’s kind of amazing what you can do with a baseball if you really want to,” Skenes said, the same way Beethoven might have said it about a piano or Julia Child about chicken.

This winter, Skenes’ tinkering yielded two new pitches: a cutter and a sinker. The cutter was born out of a desire to have a breaking ball in the 90 mph range, and he’s offered a peek at it in his first three Spring Training outings. The sinker, on the other hand, hadn't been used much, until Monday in his penultimate spring start.

"I got a couple outs on it today, so that's all [the feedback] I need,” Skenes said. “I haven't thrown it a ton before today in Spring Training, but I'm happy with where it is."

Identifying what is a splinker and what is a sinker isn’t exactly easy work. After all, one pitch is half of the other pitch. Going by Baseball Savant’s data, Skenes’ splinker averaged 94 mph, 30.3 inches of vertical drop, 14 inches of horizontal break and 1,760 rpm of spin last season. (His splinker is currently classified as a sinker on Baseball Savant.)

Skenes saying he got a couple outs with the sinker Monday is the best clue we have to work off of, but looking at the movement profile of his fastballs, there are some outliers that look like sinkers:

Bearing in mind that it’s a small sample size, that bushel of outlier pitches that don’t quite fall into the four-seamer or splinker pockets averaged 97 mph, 22 inches of drop, 14.3 inches of horizontal break and about 2,250 rpm of spin. In short, Skenes is trading some vertical movement for extra velo and spin.

Or if you’d rather see it in action rather than just pore over the data:

• Another first for Skenes -- an Opening Day start

Those two results might also offer a peek of how the pitch could be used. Skenes has talked this spring about wanting to be more efficient, and he wasn’t exactly his most productive early Monday, throwing 85 pitches and needing to be lifted in the fourth inning so he could guarantee a fifth frame. What better way to get a quick out than a first-pitch inside sinker, like he did to Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers there for a groundout to third?

Or this spot later in the third, with two runners on and one out, where he went to a presumed sinker again, this time getting Jose Miranda to pop out:

"Just giving it another shape, I think, for hitters to respect,” Skenes said about why he added the pitch. “I think it complements my other pitches well by missing barrels.”

Of course, there is the argument that Skenes’ pitch mix is already pretty nasty, and sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. He was mainly a fastball/slider pitcher in college and was selected first overall in the 2023 Draft. The base model version of Skenes is quite good. But if he wasn’t willing to tinker or try out new pitches and grips, the splinker wouldn’t be a hitter’s nightmare today.

“[It’s] not just him, but guys that have weapons like him don’t need to tinker at times,” Pirates manager Derek Shelton said. “You can just use the elite fastball, the splinker, whatever he has. But the other part of Spring Training is the process of working on things, and there’s very few guys that have it in their back pocket where they can go get it and use one pitch at a time, and we’ve seen him be able to execute that.”

There’s always the chance that this sinker is not Skenes’ final pitching frontier. He said half-jokingly Monday that he might add a new pitch at some point in the regular season, too. You never know when inspiration, or the right kind of tinkering, could strike.

“I’m never going to stop doing that,” Skenes said. “Maybe I’ll throw a knuckleball 10 years from now.”