Skenes Didn't Rebuild His Curveball — He Killed It. Here's What He's Building Instead.

“There’s a lot of things that make it a business and it’s work, it’s a job for us for sure,” Paul Skenes told MLB.com, “but on some days more than others, you got to remember you love the game and why you started playing it in the first place.”

That’s a quote about perspective, not panic. And yet, the public narrative around Skenes right now is almost entirely about panic. The framing from national outlets has settled into a familiar shape: young Cy Young-caliber arm, first taste of real adversity, hitters catching up. No discussion of adjustments. No discussion of what Skenes might be doing differently. Just a talented pitcher absorbing punishment.

The pitch data tells a completely different story. Skenes hasn’t been sitting in the pocket waiting for the rough stretch to pass. His arsenal has undergone one of the most dramatic overhauls you’ll see from a pitcher this early in his career, and the evidence suggests it’s already working.

The curveball is gone

This isn’t a usage dip. It’s an execution. Skenes threw his curveball 4.8% of the time last season, totaling 144 pitches. This year: 0.8% usage. Ten pitches across 14 starts. The curveball and slider are both functionally dead, dropped from the active arsenal entirely.

What makes this interesting is what didn’t happen next. No new pitch appeared to fill the gap. The volume redistributed to what was already in his hand. The changeup absorbed the largest share, jumping from 10.9% to 16.8% usage. The sinker picked up another 3.0 percentage points. The rest of the arsenal shifted around the edges.

The pattern is simplification rather than addition. Two pitch types that weren’t earning their share of the arsenal are gone, and the remaining offerings are getting more reps. The arsenal went from six pitch types to four primary weapons plus a splitter, no new shape introduced, just a tighter, more consolidated mix.

What’s absent from the chart matters as much as what’s on it. No new pitch type appears. No cutter, no sweeper variant, no different breaking ball shape. The pattern looks like a pitcher actively editing his repertoire, not one struggling to find something new.

The changeup is carrying the putaway role

The most significant beneficiary of the curveball’s disappearance is the changeup, and the way it’s being deployed reveals a count-based strategy that’s sharper than last year’s.

Overall, the changeup sits at 16.8% usage. But at two-strike counts, it jumps to 26.8%, making it the most frequently thrown offspeed pitch when Skenes needs a swing-and-miss. Its 38.5% whiff rate leads every pitch type in the arsenal with a usable sample.

That two-strike lean toward the changeup is part of a broader count differentiation. Skenes’ two-strike fastball usage dropped from 47.5% to 45.3%, while first-pitch fastball usage ticked up slightly to 49.0%. Last year, the gap between those two contexts was 0.7 percentage points. This year it’s 3.7. The count strategy is more polarized, fastball-heavy early, offspeed-heavy when ahead, and the changeup is the pitch that widened the gap.

There’s a cost to the expanded role. The changeup’s whiff rate has dropped from 43.9% to 38.5%, and its xwOBA-against rose from .123 to .199. That’s the natural tension of showing hitters a pitch more often, they see it better, they foul it off, they occasionally put it in play. On June 9 against the Dodgers, Max Muncy reached out for a changeup out of the zone and poked an RBI single to left, scoring Freddie Freeman from third. That’s the kind of contact the changeup didn’t surrender at 10.9% usage.

Still, the tradeoff looks favorable. A changeup generating a .199 xwOBA at 16.8% usage is doing more total damage prevention than one generating a .123 xwOBA at 10.9% usage. The per-pitch efficiency dropped, but the volume of elite outcomes increased. Whether that ratio holds as hitters accumulate more exposure is the longer-term question.

The fastball changed shape

While the changeup’s story is about deployment, the fastball’s story is about movement. Skenes’ four-seamer gained 1.8 inches of induced vertical break year-over-year, from 11.6 to 13.4 inches. That jump registers above the 95th percentile of historical year-over-year changes. It’s not a subtle drift. It’s an extreme movement shift.

The velocity went the other direction, dipping from 98.2 to 97.1 mph, though a tick of velocity at that level matters less than what the new shape is producing. The fastball’s xwOBA improved from .280 to .258, and average exit velocity against dropped from 91.5 to 90.1 mph. More ride, slightly less velo, better outcomes on contact.

The whiff rate held essentially flat, 29.5% versus 29.6%, which means the gains are showing up in contact quality, not swing-and-miss. That’s consistent with a higher-riding fastball generating more pop-ups and weaker fly balls rather than more empty swings. It’s a different kind of effectiveness than the one his velocity alone would suggest.

One complication: beat reporters have noted that opposing hitters are still barreling his higher-velocity pitches, including the four-seamer. The improved aggregate xwOBA is real, but barrel damage may be concentrated in specific sequences or locations that the season average smooths over. The fastball is better on balance. It’s not invulnerable.

The results are still elite, and possibly suppressed

Here’s where the gap between public narrative and underlying performance is widest. For all the anxiety about Skenes’ rough stretch, his 2.54 FIP sits well below his 2.84 ERA, and his .250 xwOBA-against aligns almost exactly with his actual results, a gap of just +0.003. These outcomes are earned, not lucky. His 5.0% walk rate sits in the 95th percentile, and his barrel rate confirms the contact quality the pitch-level data already suggested.

The sustainability check is striking. The BABIP of .270 against a league average of .287 isn’t borrowing against future regression, it’s consistent with a pitcher who limits hard contact. And the one indicator that’s flashing isn’t a warning; it’s arguably upside. Skenes’ LOB% dropped from 82.4% to 67.6%, which means he’s been stranding fewer runners in scoring position. LOB% tends to regress toward the mean. If it does, Skenes’ ERA has room to come down, not up.

The rough stretch was real, a 4.50 ERA over his last five starts, but the last three starts have already pulled back to a 2.20 ERA, including six innings and two earned runs against the Dodgers on June 9.

The sinker is the real vulnerability

Not everything in the restructured arsenal is working. The sinker has become a contact-quality problem despite absorbing 3.0 percentage points of additional usage.

The numbers are stark: whiff rate collapsed from 16.7% to 6.1%. Average exit velocity against surged from 87.5 to 93.2 mph. The xwOBA rose from .284 to .305. And the spin rate declined from 2268.1 to 2194.6 rpm, a drop that falls below the 10th percentile of historical year-over-year changes.

There’s also a consistency issue. The sinker’s release-point horizontal spread widened from 2.1 to 3.6 inches, meaning Skenes is delivering it from a less repeatable slot. That’s the kind of inconsistency that lets hitters identify the pitch earlier in its flight.

The counterpoint is fair: the sinker was never designed as a whiff pitch. It’s a contact-oriented offering meant to generate ground balls, and some whiff-rate decline at higher usage is expected. The exit velocity numbers also come from just 33 balls in play, a sample that can swing on a handful of hard-hit grounders.

But 93.2 mph average exit velocity is hard to write off entirely, even in a small sample. If the sinker keeps getting barreled at this rate, it becomes the most obvious target for the next round of arsenal editing.

Third time through: an open question

There’s a pattern in Skenes’ time-through-the-order splits that’s worth watching, even if the evidence isn’t yet strong enough to diagnose.

Skenes’ OPS by pass: .547 in the first time through (123 PA), .409 in the second (114 PA), and .952 in the third (61 PA). The jump from second to third is dramatic. But the current sample doesn’t answer whether this pattern is new, pre-existing, or an artifact of a narrower pitch mix that gives hitters fewer pitch shapes to eliminate on later passes.

There’s also a complication at the other end. Skenes’ first-inning ERA sits at 6.43, which inflates his first-TTO numbers and makes the third-TTO spike look more dramatic by comparison. The real degradation may be from the second pass to the third, and even that gap needs more context before it becomes a thesis.

This is a question to track, not an answer to publish.

Early signs the adjustment is taking hold

The last 14 days offer a small but encouraging signal that the adaptation period may be closing.

Every major indicator swung sharply toward Skenes’ season norms in the most recent 14-day window. The whiff rate nearly doubled compared to the stretch that captured the worst of the rough patch, the hard-hit rate dropped by 20 percentage points, and xwOBA came back in line with his full-season marks. The chart carries the full comparison, the direction is consistent across the board.

The caveats are real. Walk rate also climbed in the recent window, 8.5% versus 4.3%. Barrel rate ticked up from 5.7% to 7.3%. And 71 plate appearances is a sample that can move with two bad starts. This is directional evidence, not proof.

What changes the story

The public read on Skenes, young ace enduring his first MLB adversity, misses the most interesting part of what’s happening. This isn’t a pitcher waiting out a slump. The curveball and slider disappeared from the arsenal. The changeup’s role expanded into a primary two-strike weapon. The fastball’s movement profile shifted to an extent that registers as historically extreme. No new pitch appeared to replace anything that was dropped.

The pattern looks far more like active editing than passive decline, a pitcher consolidating around the pitches he trusts rather than hoping the ones he doesn’t will start working.

The season-level results are still elite. The xwOBA confirms the outcomes are earned. The rough stretch appears to be fading. The adaptation is real.

What remains unresolved is whether the sinker’s contact-quality problems will force another round of editing, and whether a narrower pitch mix creates third-time-through exposure that a six-pitch arsenal might have masked. Those are the next tests, not whether Skenes can adapt, but whether this particular adaptation is the final version or the next iteration of a pitcher who has shown he’d rather drop a pitch than throw one that isn’t working.