Inner Half

With baseball’s award season coming to a close, I wanted to do an in-depth dive into some of the award winners and what made them so special at their job. The first player we’ll look at is the NL Cy Young Award winner: Paul Skenes.

For those who aren’t familiar, the Cy Young Award is voted upon by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BWAA) to award the best pitcher in both the NL and the AL (look out for my rundown on Skubal as well). 

Now, Let’s talk about Skenes, the generational 23 year-old pitcher that you should be paying attention to.

Playing for the Pirates will do a pitcher no favors, and it’s probably sooner than later that we see this guy throwing in another uniform for a more established organization. If he doesn’t, I’ll be disappointed as a baseball fan because this guy is a generational talent. Despite his poor fortune of throwing in Pittsburgh, Skenes’ 2025 numbers on a high level looked like this (per Baseball-Ref):

Skenes’ 2025 Numbers

32 GS, 10-10 W-L, 187.2 IP, 1.97 ERA (217 ERA+), 2.36 FIP, 0.948 WHIP, 216 K (29.5 K%), 42 BB (5.7 BB%)

Holy moly. Seeing a 10-10 Cy Young winner brings memories of deGrom pitching for the Mets. 

Skenes is in his second season as a MLBer. He threw 133.0 innings last year and tallied a 1.96 ERA. His 2025 ERA being 1.97 is mind-bogglingly impressive because it shows that hitters cannot figure him out, even through his second season. His 217 ERA+ tells us he was 117% better in terms of ERA than league average. His 2.36 FIP (FIP is based on his ability to control strikeouts, walks and home runs put on ERA’s scale for readability) is a bit elevated from his ERA, but it still led all of the MLB! 

He was one of 6 pitchers in all MLB to hold a sub-1 WHIP, meaning he was tremendous at limiting base traffic by limiting walks and hits. That statement is backed up by his 5.7 BB% (walk percentage), tied for 10th lowest in baseball (with Garrett Crochet and Joe Ryan). 

Pitch Mix

Where Skenes truly shines is his ability to get strikeouts. He ranked 4th in strikeout percentage at 29.5 K%. If you’ve ever watched this kid pitch, you know he’s got an intimidating presence on the mound before you even see him start winding up. He’s a 6’6”, 260lb stoic and he dices lineups apart.

If we take a trip over to his Savant page, you see that fastball velo in the 95th percentile, at 98.1mph on average. Yes, that’s the norm these days, but he throws the 4-seamer almost 40% of the time and hitters have been able to put up just a .204 BA against, a .331 SLG against, and a .262 wOBA against the pitch. The expected stats even suggest he’s getting unlucky with some of those results. What this tells us is no matter the hitter, his fastball is either hard to hit (likely) or the hitter is left in situations where they don’t know what to sit on (also likely). On the latter point, he threw a first-pitch strike 60.8% of the time, frequently getting ahead of hitters and forcing them to play from behind in counts. 

In addition to the fastball, Skenes features the sweeper, split finger, changeup, sinker, slider and curveball. You’ll frequently hear about Skenes’ “splinker,” a new pitch term because he throws the split finger so hard (93.7mph), it qualifies as a fastball. Splinker is simply a hybrid word of “splitter” and “sinker.” 

According to his Savant page, all of his pitches are credited with a 0 or positive “run value,” besides his curveball (-4 RV). Run value refers to how much each pitch is changing the run expectancy in a given plate appearance. If the pitcher lowers the run expectancy with the pitch, that pitch gains a positive run value. For all of Skenes’ pitches to earn 0 or positive numbers is very impressive and shows he’s not one-dimensional in overpowering opponents.

Splits

Any pitcher is going to be evaluated based on the “splits” they manage. Examples of splits are how a pitcher performs versus lefty or righty hitters, how a pitcher performs at home or away from home, etc. There can be splits for many things. For Skenes, his versus L and versus R will be important. As a right handed pitcher, there’s a general understanding that lefties will perform better against him than righties because of their viewpoint as a hitter.

Lefties slashed .210/.272/.334 with a .268 wOBA.

Righties managed a slash line of .186/.227/.276 with a .223 wOBA.

So that handedness theory holds true in the numbers, but either way, those numbers aren’t good by any stretch, further proving his dominance.

Further going down the splits route, Skenes was equally dominant in the first half (2.01 ERA in 121.0 IP) of the season as the second half (1.89 ERA in 66.2 IP). More notably, he held decent TTO splits, or Time Through Order splits. It is general knowledge that a pitcher will perform better against a lineup the first time through and slowly begin to weaken numbers-wise the second and third time through. 

Skenes’ 1st time through the order, he held a 0.61 ERA and a slash line against of .202/.247/.276. Check. The second time through the order he held a 2.04 ERA, with a slash line against of .189/.245/.291. Check.

The third time through the order is where you see pitchers’ numbers inflate. Skenes’ numbers inflated, but weren’t awful. His third time through the order he held a 4.42 ERA with a slash line of .212/.272/.397. 

It shows that Skenes did not simply dominate a lineup once or twice through the order. He remained a very solid starter even after they had seen him twice already. That’s really hard to do against big league hitters and should not be skimmed over.

Conclusion

Because I want you to keep reading my posts, I’ll stop there. The moral of the story is that Paul Skenes is really good and he’s doing things other pitchers simply can’t do. The numbers say so and the film says so. I strongly urge you to watch him pitch on YouTube just to get an idea of the physical presence he holds on the mound. It’s almost half the battle in some cases.

Skenes’ outlook is very positive. This won’t be a one-off run. When he was pitching for LSU in college, he probably could have been dominating big leaguers like he was the college bats. He will be here for a while, and if the universe is just, he won’t be in a Pirates uniform for too long. He deserves to be a part of a playoff rotation and to display his stuff on a national level because the greater baseball world needs to see it.

Next, I’ll look at the AL Cy Young winner: Tarik Skubal.