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Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal has been a lights-out starting pitcher for three years now, proving his success has been anything but a flash in the pan. Now established as one of the best starters in all of baseball, he's begun to draw comparisons to All-Star pitchers of the past.
Milwaukee Brewers catcher Eric Haase was with the Tigers in 2020 when Skubal first came up and recalled his first impressions to The Athletic's Cody Stavenhagen.
“I don’t want to say I called it,” Haase said. “But in 2020 … it was (Casey) Mize and (Alex) Faedo and (Matt) Manning and all those guys. Skubal was not really talked about. I was like, ‘I don’t know what we’re talking about here, but that’s David Price.’ I just kept saying that.”
Over the past few years, Skubal has gone from effective to deadly. In 2023, he began to hone his changeup, turning it into one of the toughest pitches in the game. Over the past three seasons, it has a whiff percentage of just below 50 percent, according to Baseball Savant.
“If he just threw all fastballs, he would be hard to time up,” Tigers manager AJ Hinch said. “But the fact that he can disrupt timing with the changeup … kind of a three-dimensional pitcher who can do whatever he wants at any point. Ahead in the count, behind in the count, you want to be super aggressive; he can create movement and soft contact. He gets a lot of miss. It’s an exceptional pitch for his arsenal because it rounds it out to being a dominant-type arsenal.”
Kerry Carpenter, an outfielder and career Tiger, explained why the changeup is so difficult for opposing hitters.
“It looks like he throws it with the same intent as his fastball,” he said. “Those are always pretty tough when pitchers really sell it. … I’ve seen it before, and yeah, I struck out on it in live at-bats. So I can understand why people don’t like it.”
Against the Brewers on Monday, a 9-1 Tigers win, Skubal threw his changeup 34 percent of the time — more than any other pitch. Nine of Milwaukee's 15 swings at the pitch were misses.
