Less than a year into his Major League career, Paul Skenes might already be the best pitcher in baseball.
That's not hyperbole. He¡¯s one of 79 pitchers to throw at least 140 innings since his May 11, 2024, debut, and among them he¡¯s first in ERA, second in strikeout rate, and tied for third in average against, heading into Tuesday night's start against the Cardinals. You might think that with all the success, and given all the hype around being the No. 1 pick in the 2023 Draft and subsequently being named the 2024 NL Rookie of the Year, that we¡¯d long since have nailed down a simple answer to a simple question:
Hey, what kind of pitches does Paul Skenes throw?
In the age of high-powered camera technology that can track the speed, spin and movement of a ball to fractions of an inch, that shouldn¡¯t be a complicated question ¨C and for most pitchers, it¡¯s not. But in Skenes¡¯ case, the prospect who came up throwing five pitches now throws seven, and that may yet be eight, because the cutter he was reportedly working on during camp hasn¡¯t actually shown up in a game yet.
Skenes is one of a handful of pitchers who throws multiple sliders ¨C a traditional gyro slider and a sweeper. He throws multiple fastballs, too ¨C a four-seamer and a sinker. Plus, he¡¯s one of a smaller handful of pitchers who throws both a splitter and a changeup, except the splitter isn¡¯t really the splitter you¡¯re used to, because it¡¯s a ¡°splinker,¡± and now we¡¯re starting to stretch the bounds of what pitch classifications really even are.
All of which means it¡¯s worth explaining what each pitch is, why it¡¯s labeled the way it is, and how it moves. If it¡¯s this hard to even pick apart pitch types to label them, just imagine what it must feel like for batters trying to figure out what¡¯s coming.
In descending order of usage, we'll start with the old standard: the heater.
FOUR-SEAM FASTBALL (39%, 98 MPH)
The number one. The good old stinky cheese. The high hard one that most every pitcher has had forever. Skenes throws his extremely hard, second only to Cincinnati¡¯s Hunter Greene (99 mph) in terms of average four-seam velocity among starting pitchers. Great, easy. Let¡¯s move on.
But ¡ even this, for Skenes, isn¡¯t straightforward. For one thing, he throws from a very low release angle, bordering on sidearm, and it¡¯s even lower in 2025 (18¡ã) than it was in 2024 (23¡ã, where 0¡ã is sidearm and 90¡ã is straight overhead). While a handful of relievers throw from funky angles like that, only four starters throw from such a low angle. It would be hard enough to pick up pitches from a 6-foot-6 pitcher throwing from that angle even if they weren¡¯t A) so numerous and B) so nasty.
It¡¯s because of this release point and associated spin direction (2 p.m. on a clock, from his point of view), that there was some pre-Draft discussion about whether the fastball had ¡®bad shape,¡¯ given that it doesn¡¯t have any of the rising action you¡¯d expect out of a four-seamer. (And it doesn't, with 5th percentile vertical break.) That was probably never really true, because of the velocity and command, but it¡¯s true that it doesn¡¯t really resemble the four-seamer that a more traditional pitcher like Justin Verlander is going to ride into the Hall of Fame. Only two four-seamers get more horizontal break than Skenes¡¯ 16.7 inches of arm-side movement, and the vertical action is well below-average.
Not, of course, that it¡¯s mattered. Skenes has thrown the pitch 906 times in the Majors, and allowed all of 14 extra-base hits ¨C one of which came when Shohei Ohtani managed to turn around 100 mph.
SPLITTER, a.k.a. ¡°SPLINKER¡± (35%, 94 MPH)
Let's dive right into the fun stuff. The ¡°splinker¡± is a sinker/splitter hybrid ¨C hence the name ¨C that was first popularized in the Majors by Minnesota¡¯s Jhoan Duran, and is now used by pitchers like Mason Miller, Ben Joyce and Red Sox rookie Hunter Dobbins.
At 94 mph, it¡¯s much faster than the average splitter (86.5 mph), just 4 mph slower than his four-seamer, and that¡¯s why it¡¯s not a splitter. With a spin rate of about 1750 rpm, it kills spin much more than the average sinker (2150 rpm), and that¡¯s why it¡¯s not a sinker, to say nothing of the clearly split grip he showed off in an interview with Rob Friedman last summer.
¡°It¡¯s not like any other sinker, and it¡¯s not like any other splitter,¡± Skenes told MLB.com¡¯s Sam Dykstra last year, when he was still pitching with Triple-A Indianapolis. ¡°It¡¯s a hybrid pitch. ¡ Call it whatever you want.¡±
Skenes, for his part, calls it a sinker, as he said both to Friedman and in a July 2024 Wall Street Journal article. For a while, so did Statcast, though his addition of a different kind of two-seamer ¨C more on that below ¨C forced a change for 2025 to keep them separate.
On one hand, ¡®Sweeper¡¯ was added as an official new pitch type for 2023 due to the sheer number of pitchers throwing one (nearly 300 of them in 2024). Conversely, the relatively small number of pitchers throwing splinkers or ¡®kick changes¡¯ or ¡®churves¡¯ or anything else like that means there is a high bar to clear before an official new categorization is made.
The end result is that Skenes¡¯ splinker is thrown harder than the average splitter (by nearly 8 mph) and drops more (+3 inches) than average and runs in to righties more (nearly +4 inches) than an average splitter. Whatever you want to call it, it¡¯s been a top-five most valuable pitch in baseball (+18 Run Value) since his debut.
Not bad for a pitch he discovered by accident while playing catch after the College World Series.
CHANGEUP (9%, 88 MPH)
Mainly a weapon against left-handed hitters, Skenes started using his changeup more at the end of last season ¨C 40% of his career changeups thrown came in September alone ¨C and it¡¯s easy to separate this one from his splinker simply by looking at the grip. While the splinker has a splitter-esque grip, with the index and middle fingers split wide, Skenes¡¯ changeup is split between the middle and ring fingers, as he showed off in this 2023 video during the College World Series.
Like pretty much everything he throws, Skenes gets more velocity on this one than average (+2 mph). Like the four-seamer, it¡¯s a lot more about the horizontal break than the vertical action, because this changeup gets nearly 5 inches more tail than average ¨C or about as much as Devin Williams¡¯ famous ¡°Airbender,¡± just without the same dropping action.
SWEEPER (5%, 85 MPH)
Or, as Skenes has called it, ¡°the short one and the long one,¡± referring to the slider and the sweeper. (¡°He doesn¡¯t throw a cutter, but I may call for a cutter or a slider depending on how big I want it,¡± said Grant Koch, who caught Skenes in Triple-A last year, showing that there really is a difference between the sweeper and the slider.)
While both are thrown at the same velocity, the sweeper gets 10 inches more break than the gyro slider does, and that¡¯s mostly because he¡¯s using the spin more efficiently. (Last year, the sweeper had 37% of spin contributing to movement, while the slider was at 26%.)
It¡¯s absolutely wild to watch a video like this and realize that Skenes is throwing a thing like this only one out of every 20 pitches.
SLIDER (5%, 85 MPH)
¡°The short one¡± does have a different usage than the sweeper, because while it has similar drop and velocity to the sweeper, it doesn¡¯t make that hard left turn that the big one does. That all makes it hard to tell the difference until it¡¯s too late, which gives Skenes the ability to steal a strike or get some weak contact.
Like almost all of his pitches, this one is something of an outlier. In this case, it's the way it hangs up, in that while you'd expect most sliders to have at least some downward movement, Skenes' doesn't. It actually stays up longer than the hitter expects, as opposed to diving more, so while you might read "fourth-lowest vertical drop in baseball among sliders" as a negative, it might be better to be more extreme in an unexpected direction than to simply be average.
SINKER (5%, 97 MPH)
We haven't really seen all that much of one of Skenes¡¯ new offerings this year, though the early results are intriguing ¨C a 97 mph fastball that gets 3 inches more drop and 3 inches more tail than the average sinker certainly sounds like a real weapon.
Given that he¡¯s only thrown nine of them this year, it¡¯s hard to do anything other than gawk ¨C it¡¯s thrown nearly as hard as his four-seamer but drops seven more inches, which seems deeply unfair. What's most interesting about this one is what it means for his continuing unpredictability going forward. Between this, his four-seamer, his changeup and his splinker, he now has four different pitches that have arm-side movement, with multiple different velocity and movement profiles. What do you even do with that, as a hitter?
CURVEBALL (2%, 84 MPH)
Barely seen this year due to increased usage of his splinker, changeup and sinker, the curveball is a somewhat unusual pitch because it really doesn¡¯t move like a curveball ¨C or, really, much at all. Despite average spin, he¡¯s getting six to seven inches less break than average in both directions on it, making it almost more of a slower gyro slider variant than anything else. Only about half of the spin on the pitch is actually going toward movement, and while you don¡¯t have to have perfect spin to have a good curveball, it¡¯s worth noting that most curves have at least three-quarters of their spin used for movement, and, in some cases, all.
It is, for now, more of a show-me pitch. It remains an open question as to whether Skenes is using it to add some deception to his slider ¨C the spin direction is at least a little more vertical ¨C or if this is yet another weapon that still has some more refinement available in the future.
NOT USED (YET): CUTTER (0%)
But wait! There¡¯s more. Maybe. That cutter he showed off in Spring Training looked really good, and yet he hasn¡¯t flashed it yet so far this season.
Where, you might be wondering, could that even fit in? Fortunately, he told Jake Mintz of Yahoo exactly that in March.
¡°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? 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.¡±
He¡¯s right. There is still an unused part of the velocity band, because he throws three pitches at 93 mph or harder (four-seam, sinker, splinker), and four pitches in the 80s (changeup, slider, sweeper, curveball). There¡¯s a gap between the 88 mph changeup and 94 mph splinker, to say nothing of the fact that a cutter wouldn¡¯t move like either of those pitches. It would fit a slot he has left open. It would drive batters batty.
¡°Really,¡± he added to MLB.com¡¯s Alex Stumpf, "[I'm] just trying to create more swing decisions. That¡¯s what it boils down to.¡±
Skenes, as it turns out, is not just a physically gifted pitcher, though he¡¯s of course that. He¡¯s also a tinkerer, always looking for a path to improve, even if he¡¯s already so valuable that he¡¯d be a superstar by just doing nothing at all differently than he does now. That, it seems, is not going to change.
¡°I¡¯m never going to stop doing that,¡± Skenes said this spring. ¡°Maybe I¡¯ll throw a knuckleball 10 years from now.¡±
We¡¯d like to see that. He¡¯d probably be great at that, too.