The baseball gods have blessed us once again. Every ten years or so, a generational arm climbs a major league mound for the first time and wows everyone with their triple-digit velocity. Fireballers of yesteryear like Stephen Strasburg, Jacob deGrom, and Matt Harvey come to mind. But none of them arrived on the scene with the supreme facial hair, singular secondary pitch, or famous girlfriend boasted by Paul Skenes, the mustachioed Pittsburgh Pirates rookie who made his MLB debut last weekend, and who is currently melting our brains with his supercharged arm.
Skenes is making his second start on Friday afternoon in Chicago. This is notable for many reasons, one of them being that he was drafted less than a year ago. While most players chisel away in the minor leagues for at least two years, Skenes pitched in a mere 12 games on Pittsburgh’s farm before they called him up last weekend, and even then the consensus was that the Pirates waited too long.
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With Skenes showing time and time again that he was simply far too overpowering for minor-league hitters—and the Pirates in desperate need of some excitement—the team had no choice but to shuffle him up to the big leagues to see how he’d handle some of the best hitters in the world. Lo and behold, Skenes struck out seven of the 20 guys he faced, and even before that, put the turnstiles at his new home stadium to work. The Pirates drew more than 34,000 fans for the first edition of Paul Skenes day. That was on a very dreary Western Pennsylvania afternoon, too, which gave way to sunshine at seemingly the exact moment that Skenes emerged from the dugout. Those attendance numbers will presumably trend upward as the season progresses, the weather warms up, and Skenes gets even more comfortable mowing down MLB lineups.
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