Strictly speaking, many of baseball's starting pitchers have more pitches in their arsenals than they need. I'm not complaining! Take Shota Imanaga, the delightful 31-year-old rookie southpaw for the Chicago Cubs: Statcast says Imanaga has used eight distinct pitch types this season, including a four-seam fastball that he's thrown a whopping 53 percent of the time, and a slow curve that he's thrown exactly once. His pitch profile is a hoot: Overwhelmingly Imanaga relies on a combination of the four-seamer and a deadly splitter, effective against righties and lefties, but then there are six whole other damn pitches—two more than Luis Castillo has in his entire repertoire—that Imanaga throws just here and there, evidently whenever he is feeling zany. This is how you know starting pitchers are artists, or mad scientists, or both.
Paul Skenes, flame-throwing phenom and rookie ace of the Pittsburgh Pirates, has a changeup. I'm not totally sure I knew that. Skenes has thrown over 700 fastballs this season, but entering Tuesday's start against the Chicago Cubs he'd thrown the changeup just 60 times. Like Imanaga, Skenes has a combination of go-to pitches that, when it's working, tends to be overwhelming. His fastball is, of course, terrifying, and the dreaded splinker, an average of five miles per hour slower than the heater, is a diving, sliding, vanishing nightmare against which major-league hitters are slugging just .248. A changeup is a more complicated offering, something a lot of pitchers have to feel around for early in a start; Skenes can just rear back and hurl the splinker, and for good measure he's got his choice of three effective breaking pitches. The changeup is in Skenes's toolkit what a hand-cranked sausage maker has turned out, regrettably, to be in mine: A fun but clunky thing to play with, which might not be used more than a handful of times between now and 2050.
Circumstances did some light conspiring Tuesday night, in Skenes's start against the surging Chicago Cubs. First of all, he appears to have dialed back some of the velocity of the fastball, whether by design or because of wear. Skenes, you may remember, threw a ridiculous 17 100-mph fastballs in his first major-league appearance, back in May. But even for a big beefy fellow like Skenes, who seems to reach back for that hellacious velocity a little too easily, that is an awful lot of violence on the throwing arm, and the Pirates are attempting to use this season to stretch out their ace for a future of vastly heavier workloads than he's ever experienced before. Skenes has completed just over 141 innings* of work this season, including 27-plus innings down in the minors, already far surpassing in total the competitive innings thrown in any other season of his career.
"You have to learn how to get through a major-league season," explained Pirates manager Derek Shelton, in August. Skenes was called up to the majors before he'd completed a full minor-league season; for that golden arm, this is uncharted territory, both in terms of total innings and time of year. "You look at a majority, if not 95 percent of major-league players—not just major-league pitchers—who are doing it, they have at least one season in the minor leagues, if not two," Shelton said. "What he's doing is something that's very different, it's very special. It's something we also have to be very mindful of." From July 23 until Skenes's start against the Reds on August 22, he did not throw one single triple-digit pitch.
Tuesday night, against the Cubs, Skenes threw eight of them, but the circumstances were far from ideal. His command was off early in the game, and all three of his breaking pitches appeared to have abandoned him. He loaded the bases in the first inning and again in the second, and appeared to reach back for the extra oomph in situations where he might otherwise have opted for something with movement. As electrifying as it is, probably Pirates fans do not want Skenes hitting 101 mph on the radar gun in his 26th pitch of an inning. That he has that extra juice is nice, but every time he goes for it you cannot help but worry that his arm is going to shear apart like a meteorite in the upper atmosphere, sending grisly chunks flying all over the diamond and severely dampening the mood of the game at hand.
This is where it pays to be a lunatic artisan. When pitches one through five aren't doing the job, simply recall the mechanics of that sixth pitch, lean on it heavily, and proceed to shut down one of the hottest teams in baseball. "Had to reach into the bag of tricks a little bit," said Skenes, after holding the Cubs scoreless through five gutsy innings of improvisation, "but it worked out." Skenes, who threw just three changeups in his last start and threw nine total in the month of July, used the pitch 19 times Tuesday night. The changeup accounted for five of his six strikeouts on the evening. Cubs hitters took 11 swings at it and made contact once, for a foul ball. The changeup helped Skenes survive the chaotic early innings, when he needed 77 pitches to record nine outs, and he was still going to it in the fifth, when he used it for back-to-back strikeouts to end his night.
One of my favorite things to watch in baseball is when a veteran pitcher has to juke his way through a start after discovering that some part of his arsenal is unavailable. Sometimes he can't locate the numero uno and has to become a junk-baller; sometimes all he has is the fastball, plus precision and moxie. In that sense this was normal Ace Shit from Skenes, feeling out a workable selection of pitches and troubleshooting his way to a quality start. The key word up there is "veteran." I find it worrying that this person can go so deep into the bag of tricks as a 22-year-old rookie who for most of his baseball career has had no trouble overwhelming batters with his fastball alone, certainly never really requiring more than one or two secondary pitches. That level of resourcefulness is supposed to be earned via experience, over a career spent facing down the world's best hitters. It's not supposed to just be there, at the disposal of a baseball child, ready to be sprung on a veteran lineup like some damn booby trap.
The Pirates haven't been eliminated yet—almost no one has—but they're headed nowhere this season. Sooner or later Shelton and general manager Ben Cherington will probably want to take further steps to protect Skenes's arm down the stretch, balancing their developmental ambitions with the kinds of workload restrictions that might reasonably lower the odds of his elbow ligaments snapping like old guitar strings in games that otherwise do not matter. I can't predict how this stuff might factor into anyone's decisions, but the guy who emerged unscathed from Tuesday's start against the Cubs does not appear to need a whole lot of seasoning. It's genuinely dizzying to consider that there may still be things for Skenes to learn about pitching.
