About once a week last summer, Jim Riggleman found himself checking the Pittsburgh Pirates schedule to see when Paul Skenes pitched next.
Riggleman spent almost five decades in baseball. He managed five major league teams and coached for four other clubs, but never the Pirates. And yet here he was, 72 years old and out of the game, reaching for the TV remote at his home near Clearwater, Fla., and watching the last-place Pirates. That’s the effect Skenes, the National League’s reigning Rookie of the Year and current Cy Young favorite, has on baseball people.
“It looks almost effortless out there,” Riggleman said by phone recently.
There is appreciation in that. But there is also apprehension.
Every so often, a starting pitcher comes along and captures baseball’s collective consciousness for a time, exceeding the hype and mystifying big-league hitters. Fans flock to the ballpark to bear witness. Fernando Valenzuela. Dwight Gooden. Dontrelle Willis. Riggleman managed two of them: Kerry Wood and Stephen Strasburg. When these guys take the mound, said Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland, “Everybody in the world feels good that day.”
Everybody except those in the batter’s box.
Skenes, who starts today against the Tampa Bay Rays, is the latest in the line of must-watch aces. The 22-year-old right-hander had a 1.96 ERA last season and started the All-Star Game a year after being drafted No. 1 overall. He threw 100 fastballs of at least 100 mph, but the majority of his devastation was wrought with splinkers, sweepers, sliders and curves flung between 83 and 94 mph — “off-speed” stuff.
“You just don’t see stuff like that,” Leyland said.
But because Skenes arrived at a moment of maximal awareness of the scarcity and fragility of dominant starting pitchers, he has invoked a more complicated reaction than Doc, the D-Train or Fernandomania. The baseball industry is reckoning with conflicting emotions: the wonder of watching greatness in real time, and the fear it won’t last. Even as clubs exercise increased caution, arm injuries continue to befall Cy Young Award candidates and future Hall of Famers with alarming regularity.
Late last summer, Riggleman noticed Skenes was getting extra rest and lower pitch counts. It made sense to Riggleman. It also reminded him how much has changed. “If being as careful as they can be with a power pitcher doesn’t work,” he said, “then nothing is going to work.”
Before the baseball universe fixated on a flimsy ligament in the elbow, it saw apex starters as something closer to immortals. For now, Skenes is in that realm — untouchable ace, one of the sweetest sights in baseball.
Asked recently whether he understands his importance to today’s game, Skenes demurred. “I’ll let everyone else talk about it,” he said. Many are willing. This spring, evaluators rated Skenes the No. 2 starter in the sport, behind Detroit Tigers left-hander Tarik Skubal, who has undergone two arm surgeries.
An executive said of Skenes: “There may be no single player whose own arm health is more important to the health of the sport.”
In his MLB career, infielder Neil Walker played behind some of the top starting pitchers in the sport at the time: Gerrit Cole in Pittsburgh, Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard in Flushing, Luis Severino in the Bronx, Sandy Alcantara and Pablo López in Miami, Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola in Philadelphia. Their start days brought a different energy to the ballpark.
But Walker never felt a stadium buzz for a regular-season game like what he felt in Nationals Park on June 8, 2010: Strasburg’s debut. Walker, batting second for the Pirates, was caught in a capital-letters Baseball Moment. He was aware of Strasburg’s super-prospect status.
“Your first reaction as a major league player is, well, this guy can’t be as good as they’re saying,” he said. But if watching minor-league footage hadn’t convinced Walker otherwise, seeing Strasburg breeze through the first three innings would have.
“We knew there was something special going on,” Walker said. “You didn’t know where it was going to go, or how long it was going to last.”
Stephen Strasburg started his career with a 14-strikeout performance. (Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)
After Delwyn Young’s fourth-inning home run, no more Pirates reached base against Strasburg. He struck out two in the fifth and three in the sixth. Riggleman gathered his coaches. The plan had been for Strasburg to throw six innings. “But it was total domination,” Riggleman recalled. “He hadn’t even broken a sweat.” In a suite upstairs, general manager Mike Rizzo okayed sending Strasburg back out for the seventh.
Strasburg struck out the side. He got a standing ovation and a curtain call.
Fifteen years after Strasburg’s 14-strikeout debut, Riggleman, knowing what he knows now, poses a rhetorical question: “Should we have sent him out for the seventh?”
That Riggleman had checked with the GM at all spoke to the evolution of the sport. Protecting a young ace’s arm hadn’t been in Riggleman’s managerial marching orders back in 1998 when the Chicago Cubs called up Wood. In his fifth start, Wood tied Roger Clemens’ MLB record with 20 strikeouts, shutting out the Houston Astros and allowing only two base runners — a hit by pitch and an infield single. Wood was a revelation. Fans demanded to see more of him. Riggleman didn’t get grief for leaving him in games too long, but for taking him out early. Wood averaged 109 pitches per start that summer. His pitch count went as high as 133.
By comparison, the Washington Nationals played it safe with Strasburg. He didn’t clear 100 pitches in any of his 12 starts as a rookie.
But the result was the same: elbow injuries in August of their rookie seasons. Wood rehabbed for a month, returned to pitch a postseason game, then tore his ulnar collateral ligament the next spring and underwent Tommy John surgery. Strasburg had Tommy John surgery straight away.
In hindsight, Riggleman wishes he had deployed them more conservatively. Not that conservatism has saved the sport. And not that he overdid it, particularly with Strasburg. “But looking back we probably would have underdone it,” Riggleman said, “the way they have with Skenes.” That approach wasn’t on anyone’s mind back when Wood was a rookie. No one was talking about a starting pitching crisis yet. Aces weren’t nearing extinction. A phenom taking the majors by storm wasn’t seen as some ephemeral sight, there and then gone.
Dallas Braden, the Athletics broadcaster who authored the 19th perfect game in MLB history, has two customs in his group chat with the co-hosts of the podcast “Baseball is Dead.” The first is that whenever Braden sees fire-breathing A’s closer Mason Miller warming, he texts, “He’s up.” The second is that every Skenes start day the text thread erupts with videos, GIFs and memes of Skenes’ filth. Braden often gets to the press box early just to watch Skenes on an iPad as he preps for the A’s game.
“It’s appointment television,” Braden said. “You’re seeing the craft and the art on full display. You’re seeing the marriage of preparation and talent. We’re watching that blossom. What happens when you put a dude together who’s capable of dialing up 102 mph, who has incredible feel for how to manipulate the baseball, who has a mind only interested in getting better?
“That’s a dangerous combination for anybody trying to compete against that,” Braden continued. “That’s what Paul Skenes represents. I feel very fortunate to just be around the game at a time when this dude has shown up.”
That dude showed up at PNC Park on May 11 last year.
Walker, a Pittsburgh native now working as a Pirates color analyst, wasn’t on the call for Skenes’ debut. He bought club-level tickets for himself and a friend, one of only a handful of times he’s sat in the stands since retiring. “I was like, I can’t miss this,” Walker said. “I think my brain reverted back to being a seventh grader at Pine-Richland Middle School, because it was that enjoyable. To be one of 35,000 in the stands that day, I’ll never forget that moment.”
Skenes’ importance to the sport seemed to register immediately. He’d made only 11 MLB starts when Arizona Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo named him the All-Star Game starter. After Skenes was pulled from a no-hit bid for the second time, Hall of Famer Randy Johnson urged him to fight for what he wanted. For years, Johnson had observed the decline of starting pitching, as clubs depend upon starters to throw fewer innings and less often. Now Skenes gave him hope. If your body is accustomed to a large workload, Johnson told Skenes, it will handle it.
At 6-foot-6 and 260 pounds, Skenes looks unbreakable. But no one is. Former players are often far too superstitious to utter a word about injury, yet even Walker admits, “To a certain degree you watch with your hands over your face when you see guys pumping 100 mph fastballs for seven straight innings.”
But he loves the game, and the emphasis on velocity isn’t going away.
In 2019, Strasburg faced Walker’s Marlins five times and went unbeaten with a 0.97 ERA. “It was almost harder facing him later in his career,” Walker said. The fastball had lost some life, but every pitch came from the same arm slot, and the sequencing was unpredictable even in a hitter’s count. When Walker read this offseason that Skenes had added a cutter and a sinker, he thought back to Strasburg. Even the hardest throwers eventually evolve.
Skenes’ start days are an event in Pittsburgh. Last summer, taxi drivers and store clerks talked about attending their first Pirates game in years. They had to see the new kid, the talk of baseball. When Leyland dropped in, he was asked to compare the current Pirates to his early 1990s teams. “They probably don’t have a Barry Bonds,” Leyland replied. “They’ve definitely got a Doug Drabek now.” (This is, by Leyland’s standards, a supremely high compliment. Drabek won the Pirates’ last Cy Young, in 1990.)
Skenes has breathed new life into a rebuilding franchise. He transcends the local market. He’s a certified star. When he takes the baseball, as Leyland would say, everybody in the world feels good that day. And so it bothers Braden that when a player like Skenes shows up on the doorstep of the sport he is met with apprehension. From the front offices handling these pitchers with kid gloves. From the fans anticipating injury news.
“Damn it,” Braden said, “why can’t we just enjoy what we’re seeing for the first time in a very, very long time?”
Dallas Braden pitched one of the few perfect games in MLB history, and cherishes a good storyline when he sees it. (Michael Zagaris / Oakland Athletics / Getty Images)
But he knows why. The game has made cynics of many, conditioning them to expect the worst. Time and again, those fears have proven right. It’s hard to properly appreciate greatness if injury seems inevitable.
“You’re almost that curmudgeon veteran manager on the end of the bench who’s going, ‘Oh yeah, lemme guess, you got another fireballer up here, huh? Great curveball? How long is that going to last?’” Braden said. “It’s like, s—, can’t we just be excited about the fireballer? Who knows. Maybe we look up in 10 years and talk about what didn’t happen.”
There’s no telling what the state of starting pitching, or of Skenes’ career, will be in 10 years. There’s a lot Braden hopes will return. He’d like to see more starters trusted to throw 200 innings, get deeper into starts, turn over lineups and finish games. He’d like durability to be a prized (and well-paying) trait. He’d like clubs to be less protective of young pitchers.
And he’d like to restore the feeling that used to spread throughout the baseball industry when an ascendent starter like Paul Skenes pitched.
“Let’s get back to a place where story time actually involves you listening to the story,” Braden said, “as opposed to interrupting right after ‘Once upon a time …’ and going, ‘Oh, I know how this ends.’”
The Athletic‘s Cody Stavenhagen contributed to this story
(Top photo of Skenes: Justin K. Aller / Getty Images)
