How Paul Skinis’s Hit Helped Propel Him to Instant Major League Baseball Dominance

ARLINGTON, Texas — The first thing Paul Skinis told the Pirates after signing with them was that he wasn’t good enough.

At least not yet.

It was late July 2023, and the newly selected first-round pick—after one of the best pitching seasons in college baseball history—was in Bradenton, Fla., for a meeting with his new employer. Skinis, director of player development John Baker and pitching coordinator Josh Hooper were settling into Hooper’s office at the Pirates’ spring training complex.

Even the most optimistic predictions about Skinis couldn’t have predicted this future. Less than a year later, the 6-foot-6 pitcher is set to start in the National League All-Star Game on Tuesday. He’s the first player to make the All-Star team in a year after being selected first overall.

And the accolades are well deserved: Skinis has taken Major League Baseball by storm, dominating batters with a 1.90 ERA through his first 11 games, and grabbing the limelight, fantasies and attention along the way.

But the road to professional stardom first ran across Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the three men met to chart a development path. Their goal was clear: figure out how to guide baseball’s most charismatic player of the past decade to dominance in the major leagues. Baker and Hooper came prepared with a host of suggestions, but they asked Skinis to evaluate himself before they shared them.

“Without looking at our list, he listed it.” [our recommendations] “We talked about the things he was thinking about himself,” Baker, who has a similar meeting with every player who joins Pittsburgh’s minor league system, told Yahoo Sports. “It’s the only time I’ve ever been in an environment like that with a new player.”

“His list was more comprehensive than ours, and it was also more self-deprecating.”

One of the most important items on Skinis’ agenda was adding a third pitch that could better help him neutralize left-handed hitters. He burned all the batters in his third year at LSU—he posted a 1.69 earned run average in 122 2/3 innings with 209 strikeouts and an OPS of .449—but he did so while relying almost exclusively on a combination of two pitches, a fastball and a slider. The mustachioed flamethrower occasionally showed a quality changeup, but he told Baker and Hooper he wanted something different, something better, something that could fool the best hitters on the planet.

And so Skinz got to work, crafting and tinkering with what would eventually become the Splinter, a unicorn display with the speed of a diver and the vertical depth of a splitter. It’s a breathtaking cheat code that sends the player crashing to the ground, and it helped Skinz quickly rise to stardom.

Developing such an effective pitch in such a short period of time speaks volumes about what makes Skinis unique. Only someone with a rare combination of athleticism, competitive intensity, work ethic and intellectual humility could have learned and deployed such a show.

Skinis made the launcher, and the launcher made Skinis.

While Skinis played on the field during his brief five-game professional debut last summer, Pirates officials didn’t get to see the field in person until late last winter.

Sources tell Yahoo Sports that Skinis spent part of last summer at the University of Georgia, where he worked alongside Bulldogs coach Wes Johnson. Johnson, one of the most respected minds in pitching, was Skinis’ coach at Louisiana State University and played a crucial role in developing him into one of the most promising prospects in Major League Baseball history.

Late last season, Hooper and Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin traveled to Athens, Ga., to see the pitch in person. Their report was nothing short of amazing.

“I remember hearing about it…that he was throwing something 95-96 that had a negative effect. [vertical movement]”Nobody’s ever seen that before,” Baker told Yahoo Sports.

“It was one of those situations where if I heard that about another player, I would say, ‘Yeah, that’s true.’ But you hear that about another player. [Skenes]“And you say, ‘Yeah, that might be true.’ And we saw that when he showed up in spring training.”

Pirates’ Henry Davis also saw an early introduction to the field during the offseason.

“The ball was more vertical than the changeover ball sometimes and was deeper,” Davis told Yahoo Sports. “But this time it was more like 92-94. He wasn’t at full fitness, just seeing how the ball would complement his arsenal.”

“The biggest thing is he had a vision of what it was going to be,” said assistant pitch manager Jeremy Bleach. “Our staff helped guide him maybe the last five yards.”

The final product is the pitch. Unmatched: It has so much vertical movement that Statcast classifies it as split. However, its average velocity is 94.1 mph and has reached 97 mph on multiple occasions. On a per-run basis, the pitch — which Skinz refers to as a sinker — has already become the most effective pitch in Major League Baseball this season, According to Statcast’s Play Value metric.

“It’s crazy … some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen, obviously,” Davis said. “And he was a full-time player for almost two years?”

In fact, it was just two years ago that Skinis played his final game at the Air Force Academy before transferring to Louisiana State University. That game, a regional playoff against the University of Texas, was a game in which Skinis played catch and hit for the Falcons.

Once Skinis arrived in Baton Rouge, it quickly became clear that his future was on the mound. The moment the swaggering pitcher began competing in fall training games, his new teammates began to absorb the type of person and player he had joined their program.

Two of Skins’ former LSU teammates — Nationals outfielder Dylan Crews and Rays first baseman Tre’ Morgan — were in Arlington, Texas, over the weekend to participate in this year’s Futures Game featuring the best up-and-coming players in the minor leagues. In interviews with Yahoo Sports, Neither of them showed any surprise. About Skinis’s fast track to big league stardom.

“When I was with him in college, I thought he was a big-league player starting on a big-league team at that moment,” said Cruz, who was selected second overall in last year’s draft. “He’s a special talent.”

Still, Morgan was amazed at how well Skinis has taken his edge to the highest level. “It’s amazing to see him do what he did in college — literally the same thing — against the best hitters in the world,” he said.

But Skinis is not the same pitcher he was a year ago. He has developed his skills and become a force not only against lefties, who he has been looking for another answer to, but also against right-handers. That wasn’t the case last season, when he was crushing college players. But that’s changed now.

On the other hand, the essence of Skinis — the determination, the fastball, the slider, the energy on the mound that resembles a satisfied Rottweiler enjoying himself while chewing up opponents — that’s unshakable.

Besides, investigative introspection and constructive self-criticism are a big part of what makes Skinis a person of his generation. It would have been easy, even understandable, for him to rest on his laurels and stubbornly cling to the pitching mix that had propelled him to such great heights in college. Many pitchers, baseball players, and people in general need to first experience failure in order to recognize that change is necessary.

Not skinny.

“He wants to be – not [just] “He’s great, he wants to be the best,” Bleach said.

The present and future of the Pittsburgh Pirates adapted before he needed to, even before his bosses had a chance to tell him. His willingness to improve—and the incredible physical abilities he gained in designing a new, magnificent stadium—propelled him to a rapid ascent and 11 major league debuts.

“He could knock major league hitters out of the game with just his fastball,” Baker said, looking back.

“But I don’t know he’s an all-star.”