Paul Skenes just made his months of frustrating changes look pointless

For months, the Pittsburgh Pirates have watched Paul Skenes search for a version of himself that increasingly looked like the one he already had.

Different stride direction. Different release points. Less crossfire. Then more crossfire again. A little more velocity one night, a little less the next. Starts pushed back. Deliveries cleaned up. Adjustments followed by adjustments to the adjustments.

Then Skenes took the mound Tuesday night in San Diego and made the whole exercise look awfully unnecessary.

Six innings. Three hits. No walks. Four strikeouts. Thirteen whiffs. No runs. Most importantly, he looked a lot more like Paul Skenes again.

His four-seam fastball averaged 97.2 mph, up from his 96.8 mph season average, and his sinker reached 98.6 mph. He threw first-pitch strikes to 15 of 21 batters and didn't allow a runner past second base. After walking 13 hitters over his previous four starts, he didn't walk anybody.

Funny how much simpler pitching looks when Skenes isn't fighting himself.

That's an oversimplification, obviously. One excellent start doesn't prove Skenes' problems are fully behind him, and Tuesday didn't magically restore the pitcher who used to reach triple digits almost whenever he needed it. But it did make the past few months considerably more frustrating in hindsight.

Tom Verducci detailed this week just how dramatically Skenes has bounced between deliveries this season. During his prolonged slump, Skenes moved away from the pronounced crossfire action that had defined his first two major-league seasons, directing his stride more toward home plate. The change shifted his horizontal release point by roughly five to eight inches.

Then he reversed course. Two starts ago, Skenes' release point moved substantially back toward third base as he returned to his traditional crossfire delivery. According to Verducci, his horizontal release went from -2.04 feet on July 31 and -2.06 on Aug. 5 — the two least-offset marks of his career — all the way to -2.83 on Aug. 19, the second-most offset of his career.

That's more than merely tinkering around the margins. Skenes was fundamentally changing the geometry of how he attacks hitters and then essentially saying, "never mind." And that's what makes Tuesday so fascinating.

Skenes didn't unveil some revolutionary new delivery against San Diego. He increasingly looked like the same guy who won Rookie of the Year and then a Cy Young Award. The crossfire was back. The velocity ticked upward. He attacked the strike zone. He leaned more heavily on his sinker. His body appeared to be moving together instead of looking like a collection of parts being constantly recalibrated.

Skenes even offered a pretty straightforward explanation afterward.

"It felt good," he told reporters after the game. "Body is probably getting into a little better spot of the flow of the delivery. It's been a little hit and miss this year. Today was a good day with that."

Maybe that really is the lesson here. For months, everyone has understandably searched for something complicated because Skenes' decline was so strange. How does arguably the most dominant pitcher in baseball suddenly lose a couple ticks? Why did his command deteriorate? Why wasn't the fastball playing the same way? Was it fatigue? Mechanics? Approach? Something physical?

Perhaps there isn't one clean answer. But there is now plenty of reason to wonder whether the constant pursuit of an answer only compounded the problem.

Paul Skenes' start vs Padres made months of mechanical tinkering look much simpler in hindsight

Verducci's most important point was that none of the mechanical changes that Skenes made this year succeeded in restoring his former top-end velocity. Skenes averaged 98.8 mph with his fastball in 2024 and 98.2 in 2025. Through his first 13 starts this season, that was down to 97.1. During the next 11, when his delivery became much less crossfire, it dipped again to 96.7. Even after returning toward his old delivery in his next two outings, it sat at 96.4.

In other words, moving toward the plate didn't fix the velocity. Moving back across his body didn't immediately fix it, either. That makes Tuesday's start important because the delivery, velocity and execution finally appeared together. And perhaps that's the version Pittsburgh should stop trying to improve out of existence.

Again, Skenes isn't completely back. The 98.6 mph sinker was encouraging, but Verducci noted that Skenes reached at least 99 mph 627 times across 2024 and 2025 — about 11 times per start — compared with only three times all season entering Tuesday. That's too enormous a difference to dismiss because of six scoreless innings.

The Pirates should absolutely continue searching for the missing power. But let Tuesday be a lesson that they shouldn't destroy everything else that makes Skenes unusual while looking for it.

His crossfire delivery isn't some aesthetic flaw that needs correcting. It's part of the deception. It's part of the horizontal attack angle that makes his fastball play differently. When you're dealing with a pitcher who was already the best in baseball, optimization has to come with an important question:

Are we actually fixing something, or are we just changing it?

That question carries even more weight for a Pirates team supposedly trying to win now. Pittsburgh improved to 65-69 Tuesday to leapfrog San Diego in the standings and remained 6.5 games out of the final National League Wild Card spot. A club fighting to preserve even a faint postseason chance doesn't have the luxury of spending months watching its ace become a mechanical science experiment.

That doesn't mean Don Kelly, Bill Murphy and the Pirates coaching staff caused every adjustment. Skenes is famously obsessive about refining his craft, and there is no basis for pretending every change originated with the organization. But helping him identify what should not change is part of developing an ace, too.

Tuesday didn't answer every question surrounding Paul Skenes, but it might have answered one of the simplest. Maybe the path back isn't another dramatic adjustment. Maybe it's getting his body right, recovering some of the missing velocity and letting Paul Skenes pitch like Paul Skenes again.

After watching him spend months searching everywhere else, six scoreless innings in San Diego made that possibility almost painfully obvious.

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