Tarik Skubal emerged as the hands down most valuable pitcher in baseball this season. Just ask his Detroit Tigers who deployed him as their ONLY starting pitcher from August onwards and rode him all the way to a miraculous playoff berth.
This breakout was a long time coming for Skubal who spent the last few years either injured or battling inconsistency. Now, he’s being considered the top starting pitcher in fantasy baseball and a first round pick as we head into 2025.
Here, I’m going to talk about the adjustments he made on his way to becoming an ace, why they worked, and what to expect from him next season.
Health = Wealth
First off, Skubal was finally fully healthy. He frustratingly tore his flexor tendon in 2022 just as he was finally getting his footing in the league. That injury knocked him out for a calendar year and called his long term upside into question.
Neither he nor the Tigers knew if his UCL was intact until that surgery was underway. If it wasn’t, he would’ve been forced to undergo his second Tommy John surgery in seven years after tearing that UCL in college. Luckily, it was just a flexor tear and he returned late in 2023.
He put an extra emphasis on strength training during his rehab and wanted to fine-tune his release point and mechanics in the process. The end result was more velocity, slightly more extension, and dropping his arm slot some.
Upon returning, he pitched his way to a 2.80 ERA and 30.3% strikeout rate across 15 starts to close 2023. Yet, he found a whole new gear this past season.
Bigger, Faster, Stronger
Amazingly, Skubal’s velocity ticked up again before 2024. His fastball previously sat between 94 and 95 MPH and got up around 96 MPH in 2023. Suddenly, it was sitting 97 MPH and jumped above 100 MPH for the first time in his career. He maxed out at 101.7 MPH this past season, the second fastest pitch thrown by a starter all season.
Opposing hitters slugged .611 and hit 22 home runs off his four-seam fastball during Skubal’s first full season in 2021. Last year, they slugged .286 and hit just three home runs off it.
His changeup also became a star. He added two full inches of arm-side run to it as he again dropped his horizontal release point and adjusted his grip on it. That, he said, improved his command of it dramatically and let him throw it in any count to any hitter. So, that pitch got nastier, he was able to throw it more often, and it played ridiculously well off his new and improved fastball.
Tarik Skubal, Elevated 96mph Fastball and 88mph Changeup, Overlay.
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 7, 2024
A good look at the drop on his changeup. pic.twitter.com/nywk0WfOcf
Command is King
Better command – or at least the confidence to not worry so much about hitting spots perfectly – seemed to underscore Skubal’s entire breakout. At the All-Star game, he told Lance Brozdowski that he takes a “shotgun” approach to command where he just wants the ball in the strike zone while avoiding the heart of the plate rather than trying to hit spots.
His walk rates have dropped since returning from the flexor tear while his chase rate has improved, two marked signs of improved command. Also, he’s totally reworked his repertoire and method of attack against hitters from both sides of the plate with an added willingness to throw different pitches in different counts and situations compared to before.
For right-handed batters, these changes are subtle. He turned to more changeups because that pitch is downright un-hittable.
For LHB, it was night and day.
Skubal had leaned on his slider for most of his career – it was his most thrown against LHB every year until the last – and he became a bit predictable. Instead, he threw more changeups (despite it being considered somewhat taboo to throw same-handed changeups) and leaned on his sinker.
Letting that sinker flourish was another off-shoot of his new mindset with command. Check out the differences in where he located it in 2023 vs. 2024.
In 2023, he was very careful with it and tried to hit spots. Look at that heat map, it seems like he was set on either nailing that spot perfect up-and-in or throwing it back door for a called strike. Now check out 2024.
He’s daring them to hit it and most of the time, they still couldn’t (.257 xwOBA against). Either they’re afraid of the slider and can’t adjust in time or he’d paint it, like this.
— baseball (@RandomOuts) November 8, 2024
Bottom line, improved command and execution allowed Skubal to open up his repertoire in a more meaningful way than he ever had as a pro.
Results
It’s tough to understate just how dominant Skubal was as all these adjustments coalesced. His 2.38 ERA trailed Chris Sale by one hundredth of a point for lowest in the league. His 25.6 K-BB% also trailed Sale – this time by less than one percentage point – for best in the league. Same with his 2.89 SIERA ever so slightly. Yet, he was more valuable than Sale in fantasy because he simply pitched more.
Skubal was one of just nine pitchers to throw more than 190 innings. Of those nine, he struck out the most batters (228), had the hardest average fastball velocity (97.0 MPH), and allowed the fewest runs (51 in 192 IP).
He was elite on a per inning basis and nearly pitched the most in the league. As innings become more scarce across baseball, those who can deliver volume without sacrificing effectiveness are unicorns.
That volume was key to his growth. His only other complete MLB season was in 2021 when he threw 149 innings across 31 appearances - that’s fewer than five innings per game – as he often struggled with home runs and getting himself stuck in long, tiresome innings. Now, he’s in a completely new echelon of pitcher.
What’s Next
With this, Skubal is expected to be the first or second pitcher off the board in next season’s drafts. He’ll vie for the right with phenom Paul Skenes, the only starting pitcher to throw a harder fastball than him.
As drafts get closer, I suspect both Skubal and Skenes wind up going off the board in the first half of the first round. With a relatively less exciting second tier of hitters and incredibly analogous second and third tiers of pitchers, these two offer a possibility for you to get an edge on your entire draft room.
Also, they offer immense risk since pitchers will always deal with more injuries than hitters. That is the only risk for Skubal though, who is certainly one of the two best pitchers in baseball.
