And finally, he pounded his mitt and strutted off the mound to punctuate one of the most dominant stretches of pitching in major league history.
The Detroit Tigers left-hander won both the American League Cy Young Award and its pitching triple crown last season, yet somehow, in the season after, has only built upon those august accomplishments. Thursday night at Camden Yards, he capped a 12-start span in which he’s been virtually unhittable while driving the Tigers to the best record in the AL.
He shut out the Baltimore Orioles over seven innings, his fourth straight start of at least that length, and Detroit improved to 45-25 with a 4-1 victory.
Baltimore loaded its lineup with right-handed batters, yet advanced just one batter into scoring position. The Orioles did goad Skubal into showing his human side, however: He walked two batters for the first time in more than two months, yet in reality, was never in anything but full control.
While Skubal’s body of work is just coming together this season, his 12 starts dating from April 8 are historically surgical: He’s struck out 101 batters and walked just five. Since 1893, only Los Angeles Dodgers stalwart Clayton Kershaw – in 2015 and 2016 – and New York Mets ace Jacob deGrom in 2021 had similar stretches of precision and dominance.
On a night that felt like the first of summer, with the temperature touching a season-high 88 degrees, Skubal admitted to battling himself from the jump, when leadoff batter Jordan Westburg nearly took him out of the park to right field.
Seven innings, six strikeouts and three hits later, Skubal had conquered yet another foe – the Orioles and the elements.
“Listen, he’s one of the best in the league and will counter whatever they’re doing and stays in the fight a ton,” says Tigers manager A.J. Hinch. “He didn’t quite have the command he normally has, which doesn’t mean he had bad command tonight.
“It just means it was not perfection. If that’s your off day and it’s seven scoreless? Pretty good pitcher.”
Indeed, Skubal has been so good for so long – he’s earned the right to consider two so-so starts to begin this season the outlier – that any critiques of his work come off as so much nitpicking.
“I’ll go and work on my command in my bullpen,” Skubal deadpanned.
But seriously. If this is his worst of late?
“Twenty-four balls? How many throws?” asked Skubal, who was then informed he made 98 pitches.
“That’s pretty good. It just felt like my misses were bigger. But it’s two walks. It’s not the end of the world.”
Especially when the Tigers are just getting started. They’ve built an eight-game lead in the AL Central, are well on course to earn a first-round playoff bye and suddenly have a group seasoned by 2024’s stunning run to a wild card berth and trip to the AL Division Series.
Sure, Skubal is just a starting pitcher, albeit one with a 7-2 record, a 1.99 ERA, and a generational 111-9 strikeout-walk ratio. Yet there’s really no way to oversell his contributions to the Tigers, not when they’ve lost rookie Jackson Jobe to Tommy John surgery and still enjoy deploying Hinch’s “chaos” pitching plans that can zap the bullpen.
A Skubal start provides oxygen that can last the whole week, a benefit that’s immeasurable even within his 3.1 WAR entering Thursday, tops among AL pitchers.
“We can use the bullpen aggressively on both ends of his starts because he’s been so reliable,” says Hinch. “Now, he doesn’t have to be perfect. He doesn’t have to carry any more than his share of the responsibility.
“But I get to react accordingly to how he does for the next couple of days. So when he pitches well and deep into the game, we feel that benefit for two and three and four games until he gets on the mound again.”
That’s what made Thursday’s start so instructive. Skubal needed to wriggle out of a first-and-third jam in the second and was up to 48 pitches after three innings.
And then what? Consecutive nine-pitch innings in the fourth and fifth, all six outs coming on ground balls.
That’s value.
“That’s probably what I’m most proud of. I’m prouder of the grind-it-out than when you’re on early,” says Skubal, who nonetheless leads the AL in strikeouts.
His ERA over these dozen starts is 1.47, though Skubal stops short of calling it the greatest stretch of his career. He puts his ’24 finish – including three postseason starts – above this stretch.
“That’s the best I’ve thrown a baseball,” he says, “and I’ll continue to chase that and elevate my game.”
For now, he’s chasing deGrom and Kershaw and by the end of this season certainly looks like he’ll catch them in one regard: Multiple Cy Young awards.
Those trophies come as a result of the dominant days, the 13-strikeout shutouts like the one he authored four starts ago.
They also come on the nights that are a relative struggle, that end with 98 mph past rookie Coby Mayo and an exultation worthy of the toil.
“I felt like I finished stronger than I started,” says Skubal. “That’s why the emotion came out.”
And summer’s just getting started.