Paul Skenes Might Never Lose Another Game For The Rest Of His Career

Another night of dominant baseball from Paul Skenes worth talking about. But first, I didn't know he was this good: 

The guys at Codify know what they're talking about. What a remarkable stat with respect to framing his importance. Obviously he's good and obviously the Pirates have been shitty for a long time. And it's pretty clear Paul Skenes is going to carve MLB hitters as long as he's healthy. But to have a chance to win every single start so far? We could go years before seeing a true clunker for this big bastard. 

Btw what fuckin pitch is this? 

Are we doing splinker full-time now? Have we gotten that nasty so consistently? I always thought of Splinkers like Turduckens in that they're real but impractical. 

Digging just a little deeper. Let's talk numbers.

33 fastballs off 96 pitches. You can call the splitter a fastball because it's technically a split finger fastball. But the split finger refers to a mechanism that slows the fastball down. Thus, the splitter is technically an offspeed pitch, closer to the changeup. So having a near 1:1 ratio off your 4-seam/splitter is pretty fuckin outrageous. Cole Hamels would teeter on that level with his change and that's Cole Hamels, King of the Changeup. 

Paul Skenes is doing that while averaging 99 on his 4-seamer. And then he's mixing another 10 changeups off the splitter, which really blows my tits back. That's effectively 3-tiers of changing speeds before we even talk about the curveball/slider usage. 

Truthfully, Paul Skenes could ditch his breaking balls and still pitch to a sub-3 ERA in his rookie season. That's as much of a guarantee I can offer on something that would never, ever happen. 

So from a pitch usage standpoint, without even considering the quality of his stuff, I would say this is borderline video-game distribution. Closest thing I can think of his Ken Griffey Jr. on Super Nintendo where you could command that range of velocity. Otherwise it just doesn't make any sense to me. 

And on top of all that, footwork? 

Yes. 

Footwork.

Most importantly though is the Pirates don't suck when he plays. In fact they're quite good at 6-1 with momentum and young players and a manager they love. Which is where I want to take the tone of this Paul Skenes narrative. 

It's easy to celebrate the nasty pitches and smokeshow girlfriend and all that shit. But really it's incredible that Paul Skenes could take the Pirates to the playoffs where he'd pitch game 1 and very likely win. Which means he would, in fact, lead the Pirates to being playoff favorites at least in the Wild Card round. 

The only thing more impressive would be watching Bob Nutting fuck this up once again. Will he sell or does Paul keep him in the owners box? Tune next trade deadline to find out.