Tarik Skubal Is a Crafty Flamethrower

On Monday afternoon, across his seven innings of shutout work against the Cleveland Guardians in Game 2 of the ALDS, Tarik Skubal threw five pitches that moved to his glove side. His other 87 pitches — fastballs, sinkers, and changeups — went the other direction. Here’s what that looked like on a pitch movement plot:

Skubal’s “Oops! no breaking balls” approach was an extreme version of the arsenal that powered his Cy Young-caliber campaign, and may well be his primary plan as he takes on the Guardians in Game 5 of the ALDS on Saturday. Unlike most of our contemporary aces, Skubal doesn’t dominate with huge shapes or funky angles. There are no Sale-esque sweepers, knee-buckling splitters, gravity-defying heaters, or mind-meltingly flat vertical approach angles. Few pitchers thrive while concentrating 95% of their pitches in one quadrant of the pitch plot. But Skubal does. He excels by pitching like a turbocharged Kyle Freeland.

Setting velocity aside, the Freeland pitch plot is not unlike Skubal’s:

Guys like Freeland, Martín Pérez, Erick Fedde, and Lance Lynn aren’t big leaguers because they blow away hitters with velocity, movement, or deceptive release points. Their one weird trick is limiting hard contact by throwing different pitches that look the same out of the hand.

At the decision point, hitters aren’t sure whether they’re getting a four-seamer, a sinker, a changeup, or a cutter. The mix of similar shapes at differing speeds cultivates a state of confusion, ideally keeping these soft-tossers off barrels.

Thanks to Marek Ramilo and Jack Lambert, two Driveline staffers who provided data and visualizations for this article, there is a new way to quantify the Kyle Freeland effect. It’s called Match+, which is a part of their larger effort to quantify interaction effects in a pitcher’s arsenal. (If you’re a pitching nerd, as I am, the full presentation — “Quantifying Arsenal Effects: A New Paradigm in Pitching Models” — is a must-watch. This novel approach — Stephen Sutton-Brown is working on something similar for Baseball Prospectus — accounts for the relationship between all the pitches in a pitcher’s repertoire in an attempt to move “beyond Stuff+,” as they put it.)

Match+, as Marek and Jack describe it, is essentially a measurement of how long the pitches in a specific pitcher’s arsenal remain on the same trajectory prior to the hitter’s decision point. Pitch plots show this in two-dimensional space; Match+ models the pitch trajectories in three dimensions. (For a great visualization of three-dimensional pitch trajectories for individual pitchers, check out Carter Kessinger’s Shiny app.)

Once a given pitcher’s arsenal is constructed in three-dimensional space, Match+ calculates the “entropy” between pitch pairs, estimating, for example, the ability of a hitter to distinguish between Skubal’s changeup and his curveball. In this example, by the time the batter reaches his decision point, he can tell Skubal’s changeup and curveball apart pretty easily:

Perhaps relatedly, Skubal abandoned his curveball in his latest start, the one pitch in his arsenal that does not match well with the other four. On Monday, he went full Match+ mode, leaning only on pitches that have high levels of entropy with one another. Look at the entropy curve for the changeup and sinker, for example. At the point the batter must decide to swing, he has no sense of which pitch is coming:

By Marek and Jack’s Match+ model, Skubal sits among baseball’s leaders. Look at his cohort — outside of Paul Skenes, these are artisan pitchers, craft merchants:

Part of Skubal’s Match+ success comes not just from the inter-pitch but also the intra-pitch diversity of his shapes. In other words, he can manipulate the shape of one pitch type to make one pitch into many. In his Game 2 start, his four-seamer ranged from zero to 10 inches of horizontal movement; his changeup had a similar amount of variation in the vertical direction. You can really see it on his full-season pitch plot — look at how the pitches in the top-left quadrant form an unbroken bridge:

Compare Skubal with another ace who happens to be a Match+ laggard: Dylan Cease. Cease, for my money, is the prototypical ace: hard carry fastball, gyro slider, loopy knuckle-curve. Look at how much space there is between each of his three pitches on a plot from his last couple starts of the regular season:

Cease’s movement profile is exactly what I would expect for a pitcher who gets lots of whiffs — huge shapes and high speeds makes contact difficult for hitters. Even if you know what’s coming, you still might not catch up to it. Skubal doesn’t have the same prototypical whiff monster profile, but he still finds a way to get batters to swing and miss.

Even though Skubal is living in basically one quadrant of the pitch plot, he touches both the vertical and horizontal edges of that quadrant, maximizing movement within his sphere of influence. And unlike Freeland, Skubal can touch 102 on the radar gun. This starts to reveal the limitations of talking about y-axis pitch movement in terms of speed rather than time. If the name of the game is to make the hitter commit to a specific pitch type at their decision point, Skubal’s velocity speeds that decision up. More velocity equals less time.

Skubal deceives hitters with similar shapes, in the style of a crafty lefty like Freeland or Pérez. But his top-end velocity turns a relatively tricky job into a chaotic guessing game.

The funk factor likely enhances this deceptive quality. There’s no FunkFactor+ (yet), but Skubal’s delivery appears designed to confuse hitters’ timing. The first phase of his delivery is smooth, patient, controlled. Then the front leg comes up. Look how high his leg gets. It’s between his arms!

As his leg falls to the ground, all hell breaks loose. No longer smooth and controlled, Skubal goes into herky-jerky, fast-forward mode, speeding his delivery up as soon as the ball breaks from his glove. Why else would a future Hall of Famer at the height of his powers swing at this pitch?

The funky lefty delivery is part of the puzzle, but I think Skubal’s success can primarily be attributed to his ability to level up the crafty contact-suppressor archetype with top-shelf stuff. Between the delivery, the high-velocity fastball, and the goofy, low-spin seam-shifted-wake changeup, it doesn’t matter if he lacks the shape diversity of a Cease or a Sale. He’s doing things his way, like if Dakota Hudson chugged three original flavor Four Lokos. Skubal is a different type of ace — the crafty flamethrower.