One day at Wrigley Field last May, Paul Skenes was pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, carving out a small piece of baseball history in his second big-league game. Just two years before, he was a sophomore at the Air Force Academy, learning to fly C-17 transport planes in preparation for a career in the military. Now he was dominating the Chicago Cubs. He struck out the first seven batters he faced. By the end of the fifth inning, he had increased his strikeout total to 10. More impressive, he hadn’t allowed a hit.
To end the sixth, Skenes, whose name rhymes with “beans,” unleashed a fastball that was foul-tipped into the catcher’s glove for an 11th strikeout. The Cubs remained hitless. At that point, Skenes had thrown exactly 100 pitches. He wouldn’t throw another. When the Pirates took the field in the bottom of the seventh, Pittsburgh’s manager, Derek Shelton, replaced him with Carmen Mlodzinski.
No-hitters are not wildly uncommon — since 1901, when the American League was formed and rules were standardized, each season has averaged around two of them. But for most of the sport’s history, they represented a peak expression of individual achievement on the mound. They weren’t quite sacrosanct, but pulling a starter when he hadn’t allowed a hit was sure to produce headlines, and no small amount of animosity in the clubhouse. Now, here was Skenes, the most heralded young pitcher in years, three innings away from throwing a no-hitter in his second start. It felt like an opening salvo by a future Hall of Famer.
Instead, he watched from the dugout as Mlodzinski allowed a single to the third batter he faced, a short fly to left field, and all the drama of the day was gone. When I asked Skenes about that, he noted that in his first start, the week before, he had been removed after 84 pitches. “The fact that they let me go 100 in Chicago,” he told me recently at the Pirates’ spring-training base, in Bradenton, Fla., “was even more than they were planning on.” And no-hitter or not, 100 pitches is pretty much the most anyone gets to throw these days.
Over the past two decades, analysts have identified a treasure trove of competitive advantages for teams willing to question baseball’s established practices. (Eventually that meant every team.) Sacrifice bunts, for example, squander the game’s signature currency: outs. Though spending an out increases the chance of scoring a run, it makes the kind of big inning on which games often turn far less likely.
But perhaps the most significant of competitive advantages was hidden in plain sight, at the center of the diamond. Starting pitchers were traditionally taught to conserve strength so they could last deep into games. Throwing 300 innings in a season was once commonplace; in 1969 alone, nine pitchers did it. But at some definable point in each game, the data came to reveal, a relief pitcher becomes a more effective option than the starter, even if that starter is Sandy Koufax or Tom Seaver — or Paul Skenes.
That moment usually comes in the sixth or seventh inning, once hitters have had several opportunities to size up the pitches that the starter is throwing. Waiting in the bullpen these days are a cadre of specialists with fresh, powerful arms. “They all throw 100 with a wipeout slider,” the Texas Rangers’ second baseman Marcus Semien told me. With a laugh, he added, “I’ll take the starter.” Late in the game, Semien seldom gets the opportunity.
This has become a problem for Major League Baseball, which needs all the stars it can find. In 1968, Bob Gibson started 34 games for the St. Louis Cardinals and finished 28 of them. In the process, he became a national celebrity. Last season, no pitcher managed more than two complete games. Six times, pitchers were pulled from games after the seventh inning when they had no-hitters underway. It even happened to Skenes again later in the year, after seven innings at a July 11 game in Milwaukee.
The drama of a pitcher’s attempting to complete a no-hitter, battling not just fatigue but luck — a bloop off the end of the bat can break up a no-hitter just as easily as a line drive — remains one of the game’s greatest pleasures. But with pitching injuries increasingly common, and the benefits of bringing in a reliever after going twice through the batting order statistically unassailable, the circumstances under which starters are allowed to continue have dwindled. Astonishingly, even a no-hitter is no longer reason enough. “In the heat of the moment, it feels short-term, ‘let’s have something cool happen,’” says Craig Counsell, the Cubs’ manager. “But at the risk of someone’s health? I don’t think it’s that cool.”
Skenes was a rookie last season, gratified to have made it to the majors. If Shelton wanted to protect his arm, who was he to argue? By midseason, though, Skenes was a phenomenon. When he started a game at PNC Park, where the Pirates play, attendance jumped. That matters for a club that hasn’t won even half its games in any season since 2018. “The closest thing we’ve had to an ‘event’ here in Pittsburgh since I arrived are the days that he pitches,” says Ben Cherington, who has been the general manager of the Pirates since 2019.
After the season, Skenes, 22, won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award. At spring training in Florida this year, his image decorated a Pirates banner at Sarasota airport and a flag that flapped from a lamppost in downtown Bradenton. That success confers some bargaining power. Skenes told me that if he has a no-hitter going late in a game this season, and he feels strong enough, he’ll ask to complete it. Still, Shelton is tasked with winning, not producing memorable moments. “I understand that fans want to see guys come out for the eighth and ninth,” he says. But he cautions that several variables need to line up for that to occur. He lists a few of them: Is the game close? Have the innings been stressful? Is the bullpen rested?
Over the last few years, baseball has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. Rule changes have accelerated the game’s pace, and a new generation of dynamic and enormously talented young players has arrived in the majors. Still, the sport’s decades-long trend toward cultural irrelevance remains worrisome. In that sense, M.L.B. can hardly afford to marginalize some of its biggest names by putting them on the field, as Skenes was last season, only about 5 percent of the time, and almost never when a game’s outcome was in doubt.
For the importance of marquee starters to be revived, baseball’s executives must somehow persuade managers to act in a way that, the data tell them, is contrary to their teams’ best interests. Skenes’s arrival in Pittsburgh last summer as an instant standout brought that conflict between entertainment and strategic thinking into sharp focus. Here was a pitcher who might have the ability to rank among the best of those who have preceded him, except that the sport itself won’t let him.
Rob Manfred, M.L.B.’s commissioner, remembers traveling to Yankee Stadium from upstate New York on an August weekend in 1968 to attend his first big-league games. On Saturday, Mickey Mantle hit two home runs, but that was only the prelude. “I was more excited about Sunday,” Manfred says, because Mel Stottlemyre, his favorite pitcher, was starting for the Yankees.
Stottlemyre, who had just thrown a shutout against the Oakland Athletics, had 15 wins and a sterling 2.27 E.R.A. The game turned out to be a bust; Stottlemyre allowed seven runs and was removed in the second inning. But Manfred, who was 9 at the time, hasn’t forgotten the anticipation he felt. “To the extent that there’s an erosion in the significance of that starter position, you lose that,” he said. The average length of a pitching start these days is around five innings. It’s hard to base a decision to attend a game on a player who is going to participate in only half of it.
This doesn’t happen in other sports. If you’re at an N.F.L. game and the score is close as it nears the end, you’ll see the star quarterback leading his team down the field. If you’re watching the Golden State Warriors in the N.B.A. playoffs, you won’t see Stephen Curry benched after three quarters and held out for the rest of the game. To be sure, neither football nor basketball has a position so demanding that it requires players to skip games as part of a scheduled routine. “There’s already some inherent acceptance in our game that a starting pitcher is physically incapable of handling beyond a certain workload,” says Mike Fitzgerald, who oversees data analysis for the Arizona Diamondbacks. “But it’s debatable exactly what that workload is.”
What’s not debatable is that the workload used to be far higher. “They’re trying to get you out of the game as quick as they can,” Lance Lynn, who pitched for St. Louis last season, says of the data analysts. “It doesn’t matter what kind of effort you put in. They already have it planned.” The diminished status of the modern starter has put the traditional markers of excellence out of reach. Twenty-four pitchers in baseball history have won 300 games, for example, but nobody else will; the outcomes of too many games are decided from the sixth inning onward, when the starters are already out.
“I can’t stand the direction of the game, with all the analytics legislating that you can’t go three times through the lineup,” says Max Scherzer, who pitches for the Toronto Blue Jays, and, at 40, is nearing the end of a glorious career. In 2018, Scherzer struck out 300 batters, one of only 19 pitchers since 1901 to achieve that feat in a season. There is not likely to be another.
The loss to baseball transcends the statistical. Starting pitchers are now rarely involved in situations of high drama. “I’m saddened by it,” says Jack Morris, a Hall of Famer whose epic 10-inning shutout won the World Series for the Minnesota Twins in 1991. “Really saddened, in my soul. Will we ever see greatness again? I don’t think we will, because pitchers are not allowed to be great.”
Only twice since he left El Toro High School, in Lake Forest, Calif., has Skenes thrown complete games — for L.S.U., against Mississippi State and Tulane in 2023. But complete games aren’t even the biggest issue. If starters routinely worked through the seventh or eighth inning and then gave way to closers — as tended to happen over the 20 or 30 years that preceded the rise of analytics — it’s very likely that few fans would be disappointed. Closers like the flamboyantly mustachioed Rollie Fingers and the imposing Goose Gossage and the seemingly imperturbable Mariano Rivera are often oversize characters whose personalities enhance their roles. Perhaps the most exciting thing that happened at Citi Field last summer was when Edwin Diaz left the bullpen to the blare of Blasterjaxx and Timmy Trumpet’s “Narco” to get those final three outs and save a Mets game.
More frustrating are the innings before that: the eighth, the seventh and, increasingly, the sixth. Instead of pitchers whom fans might buy tickets to see, they get a parade of anonymous relievers tasked with briefly throwing as hard as they can. Not so long ago, those midgame relievers were starters whose effectiveness had faltered; on balance, they were no better — and usually worse — than a starter who had been through the batting order two or three times. But in recent years, that one inning of relief from a stronger pitcher in the middle of a game has become a specialty unto itself. “That’s the shame, right there,” Scherzer says. “That a starter can no longer go 105 pitches, which is seven innings at 15 pitches per inning. That we have to pull him out before that.”
Many pitchers have strong feelings on the subject, but perhaps none express them quite as stridently as Scherzer. “We’ve got to develop starters again able to throw a hundred-plus pitches,” he told me toward the end of last season. He was in a dugout at Globe Life Field in Texas, so agitated about the issue that he couldn’t keep still. “That’s what I keep telling them!” he said. “I don’t care how we do it. But we have to do it!”
He offered his solution, a combination of sticks and carrots: If a starter doesn’t throw 100 pitches, go six innings or allow four runs, his team loses the designated hitter for the rest of the game. For recalcitrant teams, Scherzer would also remove the runner who automatically starts each inning after the ninth in scoring position on second base, creating a significant handicap. Once the starter qualifies, his team gets a free substitution, such as the ability to pinch-run for a catcher who still gets to stay in the lineup.
Such changes would bring considerable upheaval to the game. But to Scherzer, who has no power to do anything beyond advocacy, the issue is existential. Baseball’s rise in popularity began after batters lost the right to specify whether each pitch would be delivered high or low. That rule was changed in 1887, and almost immediately pitchers became the most important players on the field. If the continued emphasis on throwing hard makes them all but interchangeable, the unique confrontation of pitcher against hitter that constitutes the heart of the game will lose its intrigue. Scherzer has been proselytizing his argument for several years, as M.L.B. has continued to study the issue with what appears to be more intellectual curiosity than urgency. “To every member of all the committees,” he says, and shakes his head. “Nobody listens.”
Skenes is 6-foot-6 and 260 pounds. That’s large for a baseball player, even in the era of huge, multitalented athletes, and would rank him among the two or three biggest pitchers in the sport’s Hall of Fame. He was recruited to the Air Force Academy’s baseball team to play catcher, but his size and strength made him an especially effective pitcher. (By the time he arrived there, he was already too large to fit inside the cockpit of a fighter jet, which was his original ambition.) During his freshman season, he threw a pitch recorded at 100 miles per hour. Though he continued to both pitch and catch, his future was settled: He would throw fastballs in the major leagues. If he had stayed at Air Force past his sophomore year, he would have triggered an active-duty commitment. Reluctantly he transferred to L.S.U. — and pitched the Tigers to the 2023 College World Series title.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, who held the first pick in the 2023 draft, coveted a hitter. “If you asked me in March or early April who the No. 1 would be,” Cherington says, “I’d have said, ‘I don’t know, but I can tell you it will be a position player.’” Pitchers are riskier, their amateur successes harder to extrapolate to the big leagues, and the Pirates already had several promising young starters. “And then,” Cherington continues, “Paul just kept doing extraordinary things.” Late in the college season, the model that the Pirates use to assess talent started projecting Skenes as the top pick. “We literally kept asking, ‘Can this be right?’” Cherington says. “But it got to be clear enough in our system that it wasn’t even close. And it just became: ‘This is a different kind of pitcher. We should probably take him.’”
At first glance, Skenes looks like the most complete incarnation yet of a specific type of analytics-friendly pitcher, one who seems purpose-built to hurl fastballs and sliders as hard as he can for as long as he can before ceding the mound to relievers. And at some level, that’s what he is. But Skenes’s path to becoming a top pitching prospect was different from everyone else’s. As a catcher, he wasn’t exposed to a recruiting subculture that emphasizes pitch velocity and spin rate more than actually getting batters out in games. “He wasn’t on that summer grinder circuit, and doing velo programs since he was 4,” Cherington says, referring to training routines designed to increase pitch velocity. “And maybe,” Cherington added, “you start to think that he’s this good because he didn’t do all those modern pitcher things.” In fact, Skenes shows signs of evolving into another kind of pitcher, one in the image of those durable starters who preceded him. “I do think that — knock on wood — Paul Skenes has the capability, over the next two or three years, of starting to finish games,” Cherington says.
Skenes hopes so. As a former position player, he’s accustomed to being in the lineup every day and rarely being removed during a game. “The goal is to go out there and pitch nine innings every time,” he says now. “That’s not going to happen. But I try to get outs as quickly and efficiently as possible, and hopefully have the bullpen throw as little as possible.” Such efficiency was crucial when starters expected to get through games. These days, it clashes with another dictum of baseball analytics: that the only controllable outcome of an at-bat for a pitcher, at least in a positive sense, is the strikeout. Once a ball is hit, what happens next will depend on an amalgamation of factors, including the ability of the fielders, how hard the wind is blowing and pure luck. Those lazy outfield flies might just end up in the stands.
To avoid that, when pitchers get ahead in the count, they usually throw a pitch or two nowhere near the plate. “You’re going out of the zone, in the dirt, just hoping they swing,” says Logan Gilbert of the Seattle Mariners, whose 208⅔ innings last season led the majors. Trying to induce swings can add a couple of pitches per batter, the difference between finishing the sixth inning at 75 pitches and an untenable 95.
Strikeouts also get pitchers noticed. “That’s what gets you drafted high and moves you through the minors,” says Daniel Bard, a former first-round pick who pitched parts of nine seasons in the majors. “If you can do that while keeping your walks down, you can be really, really good.” Skenes’s frequency of striking out hitters is the highest of any Pirate ever. But he knows that also compromises his ability to work deep into games. To Skenes, every at-bat should end in three pitches — a three-pitch strikeout. “But at some point, I’m like, ‘OK, let’s get this at-bat over with,’” and he’ll throw a pitch designed to get a ground ball. “At the end of the day, I want to put up as many zeros as possible,” he says, referring to scoreless innings. “But if it’s just five innings and no runs, I’m not super-happy about that either.”
Neither is Manfred. Lately, Major League Baseball has shown a willingness to tinker with its rules, counteracting some of the stultifying effects of analytics-driven baseball. Among other adjustments, it outlawed the shifting of fielders from one side of second base to the other, and enlarged the bases. After last season, when Skenes’s 11-3 record and E.R.A. under 2.00 focused attention on how the role of even the top starters has changed, many of the sport’s stakeholders expected Manfred to issue some kind of edict about pitching, possibly a rule change that might be provisionally implemented in a minor league so that the ramifications could be studied. Instead, M.L.B. released a report on pitching injuries that revealed little that wasn’t already known. “I haven’t even read it,” Skenes says.
Manfred describes himself as “uncomfortable” restricting how teams deploy their pitchers during games. “I don’t see how you can, in the context of competition,” he says. Instead he suggests limiting how often pitchers can be recalled from the minors, or how many can be on a roster. Not surprisingly, pitchers favor financial rewards, such as a bonus for anyone who throws 180 innings in a season. A more oblique solution, one suggested to me by Fitzgerald of the Diamondbacks, would award additional draft picks to the teams whose starters remain in the game the longest over the course of a season.
Such remedies would have consequences, though. The pitchers who throw the most would include the majority of baseball’s best starters, many of whom would very likely end up on the best and wealthiest teams — the last ones you’d want getting additional draft picks. And roster limits would force the one-inning relievers to work two or three innings, which is like making sprinters suddenly start running the mile. “If you start messing with the rosters, you’re going to crush those guys,” Scherzer says. “You’re going to create injuries.” Already baseball is straining to accommodate those pitchers whose elbows, shoulders or other body parts have failed under the strain of throwing balls at such high velocities. Last season, 390 pitchers — 13 per team — spent time on M.L.B.’s injury list, missing a total of more than 33,000 days. And if you’re on the injured list, you aren’t throwing any innings at all.
Injuries to pitchers are already such a problem, in fact, that strenuous effort is made to avoid them. The professional life of a pitcher used to consist primarily of pitching, in games and in bullpen sessions between them. When Jim Kaat, who worked in more than 900 big-league games over a 25-year career, served as a pitching coach for the Cincinnati Reds in the 1980s, he instructed starters to never go more than a day without throwing as much as they would throw in a game. He believed that pitchers shouldn’t expect to complete a nine-inning game if they couldn’t even do that in practice.
These days, the act of actually throwing a ball toward a batter has been scaffolded with a regimen of exercises designed to increase velocity, but also — theoretically, at least — to help prevent the ligament tears and other breakdowns that are prematurely ending seasons and even careers. Pitchers are certainly throwing harder, yet they’re still getting hurt. And it may be that, to Kaat’s point, all this scaffolding at the expense of throwing is increasing the likelihood that complete games will, like .400 batting averages, soon exist only in the record books.
One recent Thursday in Bradenton, Skenes stood under a portico outside the Pirates’ clubhouse at 9 a.m., swinging a weighted pendulum. After that, he picked up a medicine ball and hurled it against a concrete wall in a simulacrum of his pitching motion. Next, he strapped an oversize plastic tube filled with water onto his back, stepped to the top of a ramp with the same downward slope as a pitching mound and took a stride while flinging his right shoulder forward. He grabbed a weighted ball and flipped it backhanded against the wall, then threw it from the top of the ramp. Satisfied, he walked under the stands and onto the field.
Still, he wasn’t ready to pitch. He spent the next few minutes tossing a football to a coach. He continued his game of catch with a baseball. When that was finished, he went back under the stands and across a brilliant green lawn to a mound, where Jason Delay, one of Pittsburgh’s catchers, waited in full gear. Skenes tossed a ball to Delay from in front of the mound a few times. Then he stepped back on the rubber and, for the first time that day, started to throw actual pitches.
As he threw, Cherington watched. He was monitoring his investment, but he was also clearly transfixed by the spectacle. Three Pirates coaches were clustered a few feet away, paying close attention. And underneath the portico, a group of players had stopped their own workouts to stare across the lawn at their prodigious teammate who pitches in a game, on average, only around once a week.
Last year, Skenes’s most effective pitch was a hybrid of a traditional sinker and a split-fingered fastball called the “splinker,” which tends to veer sharply downward as it nears the plate. As Skenes worked in the sunshine, he threw splinkers, and four-seam fastballs, and sliders, curves and change-ups. He also experimented with a fastball thrown with his fingers atop the seams of the ball rather than across them, and a cutter designed to tail away from right-handed hitters. One fastball seemed to be even faster than the rest — it hit the catcher’s mitt with an audible “boom” rather than a “pop.” It turned out to be the last pitch. After he caught it, Delay stood up and walked toward Skenes, and the coaches converged.
Skenes had thrown 35 pitches, the equivalent of three brisk innings. That must have been enough, because everyone bumped fists. Another pitcher was scheduled to use the mound, so Skenes moved aside and started chatting with a couple of teammates. It was just past 9:30 a.m., and his day of throwing was done.
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