Nearing the Ides of March, about the time when spring training can shed newness for monotony, the embodiment of pitching elevated to its highest form goes about his pregame bullpen work like a neurosurgeon preparing for the operating theater. Paul Skenes is nothing if not deeply, seriously, scientifically, almost maniacally purposeful.
The last amber hour of sunshine in Sarasota, Fla., illuminates his stern face as Skenes stands three steps askew from the bullpen rubber. He steps quickly in and without breaking stride or tempo places his right spike against the rubber, flows into his delivery and launches his first pitch. A few other pitches follow in the same way. There is none of the casual game-of-catch preamble common to such routines. The Angled Walk-In, as the move is known, allows Skenes to feel the counter of his upper body as his hand gets the baseball into the loaded position. It is but one key part to the careful choreography of Skenes’s movements, which are as finely calibrated as the engines of the military jets he dreamed of flying until he grew into the world’s most dominating pitcher. He knows pitchers who mindlessly toss the ball but never get turned sideways properly. It is a wasted throw. Skenes will have none of those.
Midway through his warmup routine, Skenes stops. An announcement is made to the crowd to stand for the national anthem, which tonight is played on steel drums. Skenes places his glove on the ground. Facing the flag, he stands with his shoulders back, his chest out, his stomach in and his left hand in line with the stripe down his left pants leg. He places his heels together and slightly splays his spikes so that they create approximate 45-degree angles. He removes his Pirates cap with his right hand and holds it to his left shoulder so that his right hand covers his heart. He holds this position of attention until the very last note is played.
To see Skenes at attention recalls a famous story they still tell at Air Force, where Skenes attended as a freshman and sophomore before transferring to LSU and ascending, rocket-like, to the No. 1 pick of the 2023 draft. It was August of 2021. At 4:45 p.m., per tradition to mark the end of day, the U.S. flag on campus was lowered as the national anthem played. Cadets came to attention and saluted. The ceremony carried heavier weight this day in the wake of the deaths of 13 Marines in a bombing attack at the Kabul airport. Looking up a hill, Skenes noticed two cadets near a golf cart who had not bothered to come to proper attention.
Upon the last note, he marched up the hill and confronted them.
“We just lost 13 Marines in Afghanistan today,” he said. “You stand right for the national anthem and respect the flag.”
With similar determination, Skenes is pushing the physical boundaries of pitching. Last season, despite not making his major league debut until May 11, he threw 100 pitches at least 100 mph, almost twice as many as any other starting pitcher. He threw six different pitch types and hit all 24 increments between 79 and 102 mph. He posted the lowest ERA (1.96) and WHIP (0.95) in the past 113 years among first-year pitchers with at least 23 starts.
Throwing at the highest end of humanly possible velocity puts a pitcher at greater injury risk. A study released last December by MLB, after canvassing more than 200 on- and off-field experts, identified “the most significant causes” for an epidemic of pitching injuries to be “the increased velocity of pitches, the emphasis on optimizing ‘stuff’ … and the modern pitcher’s focus on exerting maximum effort.”
“I didn’t read it,” Skenes says. Nor does he plan to.
He is one of 21 pitchers over the last four seasons to average at least 96.6 mph with their four-seam fastball in the first two innings of games (with a minimum of at least 150 fastballs). Nineteen of those 21 high-velocity starters have suffered significant injuries, including 13 with Tommy John surgery. The only two unscathed hard throwers are Skenes, 22, (tied with Jacob deGrom as the hardest throwers of the group at 99.3) and the Rays’ Joe Boyle, 25, who has thrown 68 ²⁄³ major league innings.
“The thing that I would be interested more in is what the guys that aren’t getting hurt are doing,” Skenes says. “I saw it last year with [Aroldis] Chapman. You know, [Gerrit] Cole, [Justin] Verlander … those guys who go a very long period of time without getting hurt.”
Three days later, Cole was on the operating table getting his right elbow repaired with Tommy John surgery by Dr. Neal ElAttrache.
“You’re signing up for a very risky business,” ElAttrache says about high-velocity pitching. “It’s higher risk than it’s ever been. It’s pretty dangerous.
“Some people’s body and the way that they trained in order to throw that hard happened in a more natural way. They were a winner in the Darwinism contest. There are a lot of guys, however, that made it to this elite level of competition by achieving that kind of velocity in a way that was not healthy for them.”
ElAttache can look at the shoulder and elbow of a pitcher and see risk without ever watching a pitch.
“We’re learning more about the appearance of the shoulder and elbow structure,” he says, “and that tells you what that person has been doing since they’ve been growing. And some of those features are permanent increased risk factors.”
The Darwinism contest takes years to reveal its verdict. Says Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer, 40 and in his 18th MLB season, “Get to Year 4. Manage your workloads. Understand your body. Then there’s a threshold. Once you get to Year 4, you’re pretty … I’m not going to say good, you’re never completely good … but there is a threshold once you pass it. Your risk factor goes way down. Your ability to get to your 10th year goes way up.”
Whether or not Skenes is a Darwinism winner, he is taking no chances. With his trainer of eight years, Eugene Bleecker, who favors a handlebar mustache for himself and water-filled training gadgets for his clients, Skenes cuts no corners, cheats no reps, leaves no imperfection unaddressed. His desire to throw as hard as he can for as long as he can is no different than his standing at attention. Purposeful.
“I’m trying to know more than anybody else,” Skenes says. “There is an element of chance to it. There’s also an element to do everything you can and know your body. And I think that a lot of people they just don’t know what they don’t know. I’m trying to be the first guy to do these things, right?”
Someday he wants people to look back and study what he did to throw so hard for so long, the way he thinks today of Cole and Verlander.
“Yeah, that’s the goal,” he says. “Nobody in the big leagues has my stuff. We’re writing our own book. Because I’ve tried it the other way. It doesn’t work. It’s my game out there. There is no model for me.”
This is not the first time the Air Force prepared someone to push the limit of how much speed the human body can endure. On Oct. 14, 1947, Air Force captain Chuck Yeager launched his Bell X-1 experimental jet from the bomb bay of a B-29 20,000 feet above the Mojave Desert. He climbed another 22,000 feet. There he would see if he could fly faster than the speed of sound. Many people thought it impossible. Severe aerodynamic buffeting would cause instability, they thought, or, good heavens, disintegration. Yeager pushed the rocket engine. He kept pushing until the aircraft hit 700 mph—Mach 1.06. Breaking the sound barrier was surprisingly uneventful. After 20 seconds he cut the engine and glided to the dry lake bed below. It wasn’t until eight months later that the U.S. military acknowledged it had been done.
“The way I think of the ship, the confidence I have in it and the way it’s built,” Yeager said then, “I feel you can fly it through a rock wall and it wouldn’t hurt you.”
At 6' 6" and 260 pounds, Skenes is built as if he could throw a baseball through a rock wall. His journey with Bleecker began in 2017 as a freshman catcher at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif. Bleecker ran a training facility in Irvine. Skenes was 6' 1" and 130 pounds. He came to the facility five times per week. By the end of the year, Skenes had added 57 pounds.
As a junior, Skenes went to Bleecker with an idea: “Can you also train me to pitch?” Bleecker put him on a mound. Skenes threw 82 to 84 mph. A year later, he touched 95. He was 4–0 with three shutouts and three home runs when COVID-19 wiped out the rest of his senior season.
After two-way duty at Air Force as a catcher and closer, Skenes transferred to LSU. The Tigers’ pitching coach, Wes Johnson, was a former pitching coach of the Twins.
“I showed up the first day and Wes has a sled loaded up with 90 pounds,” Skenes says. “He’s like, ‘Push this there back and forth four times.’ You know, 150 feet four times. Then we’re going to do jumps and all that. And that’s how we got ready to throw.”
He was throwing 97 in the fall. His catching days were over. He was too good of a pitcher. The next spring he hit 103.
“The whole time I was in college I basically was growing into my body,” he says. “And now I’m kind of built into my body. When I got to LSU, I was like, I’m built. And then I was looking at pictures of when I got to LSU versus when I left LSU and I was like, Whoa, because there was like a 20-pound difference.
Skenes and his team, which includes Bleecker, Johnson (who still works with him in the offseason), Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin and a host of nutritionists, mental skills coaches and other high-performance experts, have essentially built the Large Hadron Collider of pitching: baseball’s answer to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Skenes did not devote himself full-time to pitching until the fall of 2022. Inside of two and a half years he has been the No. 1 pick, started the All-Star Game, won the Rookie of the Year award, finished third in Cy Young Award voting and was named an Opening Day starter.
“It’s the combination of the quality of the pitches with an assassin’s mindset,” says Pirates general manager Ben Cherington. “He’s also just really big and strong and intimidating.
“Comparisons are really dangerous … but I can make this one because it’s less about the players but more about the people. This is what I remember about Mookie Betts. A combination of incredibly high standards, a willingness to work for those, but a deep humility in how they go about their work.”
The average four-seam velocity in MLB has increased every year for the last six full seasons. Because the human body is already near its limit as far as the rotational speed it can withstand, the increases are incremental. But the universe of elite throwers is expanding rapidly. The number of MLB pitches thrown 100 mph or more tripled in just the past seven years. The number of pitchers who hit triple digits increased 55% in that time, from 40 in 2017 to 62 last year.
Extreme velocity, once thought to be a gift of nature, is now accepted as a product of nurture, given the success training centers and pitching labs have had with weighted ball programs, plyo balls, high-speed motion cameras and other innovations. One of the dangers, ElAttrache says, is how teenagers take on such methodologies when their bodies cannot withstand the forces. Their growth plates are open, and they lack the core and glute strength and back flexibility to throw with proper mechanics. These are the hard throwers in whom ElAttrache can see the price of structural risk in the elbow and shoulder.
“You’ll get guys that come in physically and don’t look like they should be able to be a high velo guy,” ElAttrache says. “They’re 5' 10", 5' 11", six feet, 190 pounds, 180 pounds, and you know that they’ve been doing some high velocity training unless they’re built like a defensive lineman from the waist down. It’s really difficult to generate the velocity in the parts of the body you’re supposed to, the safe power generators. That’s your legs, your butt and your core. That’s where the velocity comes from.
“Then you have to have flexibility in your spine so that the differential between the rotation of your hips and your shoulders is sort of optimal. You can’t get that kind of power naturally in a small stature person.”
Jared Jones, one of Skenes’s teammates in Pittsburgh, is generously listed at six feet and 190 pounds and is the fourth-hardest thrower among the aforementioned group of 21 (98.2 mph). Jones, 23, says he was 5' 6" or 5' 7" and 150 pounds as a high school freshman. “From my freshman year to my sophomore year I went from 90 [mph] to 97,” he says after a spring training outing.
He weighs 70 pounds less than Skenes and throws almost as hard. “We’re two very different pitchers,” Jones says. “He works more east-west and I work more north-south.”
Two weeks later, Jones, who missed two months with a lat strain last season, was shut down with an elbow injury.
Asked if he worries about velocity, Cherington says, “Yes, of course. We have a group of young pitchers who happen to throw hard. Of course, you’re holding your breath a little bit. We’re also trying to win games. The pitchers themselves, are we really helping them in their lives and careers if we try to pull back from that somehow? I would build the best support around them as possible, build the best recovery strategies possible and keep learning about the best prevention strategies.
“I’m not going to tell Jared Jones to go slower. These are competitive athletes who want to be the best versions of themselves. Even if I did, he’s not going to listen to me. He knows what plays.”
By now the injury risk from throwing hard is well known. A 2018 study by former Red Sox trainer Mike Reinold, for instance, followed high school athletes on a six-week weighted ball training program. He found they gained a 3% improvement in velocity but suffered a 25% elbow or shoulder injury rate. (Most occurred in the subsequent season.) The author later wrote, “Based on what we have learned, this seems to make sense. We know that throwing weighted balls is an added stress to the joints. We know that they increase shoulder external rotation. We know that this can enhance velocity, but also increase stress on the arm.”
A slight increase in velocity at greater risk of injury is a deal most young pitchers are happy to accept. From 2010 to ’20, MLB teams drafted and signed 94 pitchers out of high school in the first round, mostly because of high velocity. Nearly a third of them (31) have never played a day in the big leagues. Nearly two-thirds of them (61) never accumulated as much as 2.0 career WAR. The best of them—Max Fried, Blake Snell, Noah Syndergaard and José Berrios—threw between 90 to 94 mph in high school.
The Tigers drafted Jackson Jobe out of high school with the third pick of the 2021 draft. Jobe, who is 6' 2" and 190 pounds, hit 96 mph as a junior and 99 as a senior. This spring training he averaged 97.9 mph on his four-seam fastball, behind only Hunter Greene (99), Sandy Alcantara (98.4), Jack Leiter (98.3) and Skenes (98) among starters.
“Once the horse is out of the barn and you see guys can be more successful throwing a hundred or making a ball break 21 inches, you’re not going to get them to spin it less or throw it less hard,” ElAttrache says. “The only thing you can really do realistically is provide less exposure. Protected exposure.”
It’s a concept ElAttrache calls “de-loading.” In the past 10 years the average start has decreased from 96 pitches to 85. No pitcher under 23 has thrown 162 innings since Alcantara threw 197 ¹⁄³ innings for the Marlins in 2019. (He blew out four years later.) The next phase involves giving pitchers more rest and cutting high-intensity bullpens. Skenes, Jones, Leiter (25) and Jobe (22), are part of a new generation of elite throwers who will throw harder but less often.
The Tigers’ plan for Jobe, for instance, is to reduce his between-start throwing and manage him through about 130 innings this season. (He threw 97 ¹⁄³ innings last year.) “Two things matter,” Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris says of monitoring Jobe and young hard throwers like him. “One, we try to focus on how their body moves, because the power and shapes emanate from the way your body moves on the mound. The second thing is a development system is really important. Identifying the right players is important. But the development system you’re dropping them into is also important.”
Five ounces. That’s all a baseball weighs, about the same as your cellphone. But the pitching motion is so violent that there is a millisecond when the ulnar collateral ligament is threatened harm just by the weight of the baseball.
The moment of exposure comes just after maximum layback, when the elbow is flexed, and the lats start to fire to internally rotate the arm to move it forward. It’s the point of maximum acceleration, the stepping on the gas of the throwing motion. The weight of the ball causes a small bit of lag between the flexion of the upper arm and the violent internal rotation of the humerus. “At that millisecond lag,” ElAttrache says, “is when the ligament is sort of on its own. All the strain is going to the medial side of the elbow, where that little ligament is there to fend for itself.”
To borrow from ancient anatomy, the UCL is the Achilles’ heel of pitching. A pitcher can train like a steam locomotive, build muscles into pistons of lean strength and monitor sleep and nutrition like an astronaut. But there is nothing the pitcher can do about strengthening his UCL, a pitching lifeline only 26.7 millimeters long. “So,” ElAttrache says, “what you’ve got to hope is that the amount of time that the ligament is seeing that kind of strain is minimized because of the mechanics.”
Mechanics is an old-school word. Pitching and the forces upon the shoulder and elbow have changed so much that compared to even 10 years ago, as ElAttrache says, pitchers like Skenes and Jobe face “a different ball game from what they’re doing and the way their bodies are moving. There are some physical rules that apply, but what they’re doing now is different enough and the forces they are training with and performing with are significantly different enough that we have to come up with a different method of keeping them in the sport.”
“Mechanics” sounds too clunky. Skenes and Bleecker talk about “movement” and “flow” and “floating,” as if this is more ballet than a construction project. Such terms form the basis of how they train: mastering skill-specific, finely woven movements that translate to the mound without the strain of throwing the baseball.
One of their favorite drills involves strapping what looks like a backpacker’s bedroll to the back of Skenes’s shoulders. It is a plastic cylinder filled maybe a quarter of the way with water. With his hands on the water bag, Skenes mimics the pelvic and shoulder turns of his delivery. He can do the drill on a mound or on flat ground. The second the pitcher loses his proper spine or shoulder angle, the water will slosh to one side, like the bubble in a level. The feedback is instant. The instability from above forces Skenes to create stability in his lower half.
As a tall, highly touted pitcher drafted No. 1 out of college, Skenes often is compared to former Nationals righthander Stephen Strasburg, whose career was cut short by injuries. Both have a quirk in their delivery: After they take the ball out of their glove, they raise the right elbow higher than the right shoulder and then rotate the arm to the loaded position. But there is a major difference in timing as it relates to injury risk.
The moment of truth in a delivery is when the front foot hits the ground. That is go time, the beginning of throwing a punch. At that point the ball should be raised in its loaded position and the bend in the arm should be 90 degrees or less. When Strasburg’s foot landed, the ball was not yet raised. He was “late,” a major red flag that creates more strain on the shoulder, which leads to greater valgus torque on the elbow. Skenes at foot strike, despite the early high elbow, has the ball in the loaded position and his arm at a 90-degree angle.
Then comes the secret to Skenes’s delivery, the part he’s worked hardest to master. It’s the separation between the pelvis and torso rotations. “If the differential in your rotation is greater, the less effort you have to place in generating velocity with your arm,” ElAttrache says. “It’s the same thing in the golf swing, by the way. Tiger [Woods] used to refer to it as the x-factor.”
As Skenes’s hips turn, his shoulders remain square to third base. Think of opening a stubborn pickle jar by holding the lid and turning the container, creating power through opposing forces. As Skenes turns his shoulders to deliver the ball, his spine is erect and he’s working through a flat plane. He is efficiently transferring energy up his spine. A pitcher without proper rotational differential must compensate by arching their back. The adolescent who has been trained to throw hard but doesn’t have the core strength or timing for proper differential generates power unsafely through angulation of the shoulder or arm behind him.
It wasn’t until Skenes got to LSU that he nailed the timing of this rotational differential. He had been rotating his shoulders too early. “The thing I developed most while I was there is just body awareness,” he says.
When Skenes’s hand finally does follow the turns of his hips and torso, he releases the ball out of a low slot. Though Skenes is more than six inches taller than Jones, his release point is almost three inches lower than Jones’s and four inches lower than MLB average.
“It took some work to get there,” Skenes says. “Now it is natural. I think part of that was catching at Air Force because you have to stay through there. But I look at videos of how I used to be and I think my torso was the same angle more or less but my arm was [higher]. But really, once I got to LSU, my chest sped up, my hips sped up, everything sped up and that just naturally got me here [lower].”
After seven years of lab work, Skenes found a way for his arm to move more naturally. He directs his energy in a smooth path toward home plate with such force that he still has energy to dispense in the deceleration phase. Like a cannon firing, there is blowback and recoil. His right leg swings in front of him. His right arm and his shoulders swing back in the direction whence they came. Skenes and Bleecker work on this recoil action in the water bag drills. Bleecker says the recoil increases velocity and reduces stress on the elbow. Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez, a small power pitcher, had this same kind of recoil action.
Put it all together, and in only three seasons as a full-time pitcher Skenes has crafted what he believes is a highly efficient way to move his body. Before the 2023 draft, Bleecker produced a video of Skenes’s delivery in which he said, “If you’re a big league team and you’re looking at this and you’re thinking about a guy like this, there should not be any kind of injury concern that people generally have.”
Pitching is more dangerous and costly than ever. Last season teams spent $688.3 million on 167 injured pitchers, amounting to 14% of all money paid to players. That cost to teams for pitchers who can’t pitch more than doubled in just seven years (from $329.3 million in 2017). The injuries are growing more serious. Injured pitchers sat out for an average of 92.1 days, up from 70.7 in 2017.
“It does feel to me more than ever,” Cherington says, “that for the first time there’s some landscape of people that are really taking this seriously. O.K., how do we learn everything we need to learn to start to figure out if there are solutions?”
Deep in that landscape is Skenes. He may have outgrown the old Air Force size restrictions and become too good of a pitcher to be a catcher. In short time his purposefulness led him to define the state of the art of pitching. “I miss hitting bombs,” he says of his two-way days, “but I don’t miss striking out. I think I just have a mind for the game of getting hitters out more than beating pitchers.
“It’s fun to beat hitters with stuff. But I think beating hitters with the mental game is the most fun. That’s the most satisfying, when you know what they’re thinking, and you exploit that.”
Back in 1948, when the Air Force finally allowed Yeager to talk to the press about breaking the sound barrier, he gave them little with which to work. “A nice feeling,” was how he described the historic moment.
“If you have a gold mine,” he explained of his reticence, “you don’t tell anybody where it is.”
Skenes is the Chuck Yeager of pitchers. He is not just pushing the envelope; he is rewriting it. Just as Yeager had engineers behind the scenes who made upgrades to the X-1’s adjustable stabilizer, which smoothed out the airflow, allowing the record breaker to happen safely on the ninth run, Skenes has a team working on mitigating the risk of throwing at high speeds. And like Yeager, he keeps many of his secrets close to his flight vest.
“The way I like to think of it,” Skenes says, “I’m ahead of the curve with everything I do. Whether I am or I’m not is another thing. I really don’t know.
“And I want to be the guy that figures something out before anyone else and have the people around me figure stuff out before anybody else. Again, whether or not that’s the case, it’s tough to know because if you have an edge you don’t want to share it. You’ll see it before you hear about it.”
Watching Skenes throw a baseball is like watching the flyby of an F-15E Strike Eagle, a marvel of engineering that weighs almost 19 tons yet can zoom up to Mach 2.5. We are captivated not because these machines exude separate values of thrill and danger, but because, like braids of a steel cable, they are so entwined they become one. At this level of speed there cannot be one without the other.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Paul Skenes Is Aiming to Break Baseball’s Ultimate Barrier.