ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Paul Skenes looked like a summer intern reporting for duty in a light gray suit, white shirt and cream-colored tie, teenage acne on his face and wonder in his voice.
In a ballpark filled with six dozen All-Stars, the 22-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher with 11 major league appearances was the center of attention.
“Pretty dang cool,” he said.
Skenes is hot, like the 102-degree temperature outside air-conditioned Globe Life Field, and will start Tuesday’s All-Star Game for the National League. He will have the fewest big league games of any player in the showcase’s 91-year history, a new flavor baseball likes to savor. His splinker, a hybrid that sinks like a splitter with the velocity of a sinker, has batters muttering.
“He’s very intriguing to me, and I’m honored to sit next to him,” NL manager Torey Lovullo of Arizona gushed.
If not quite flustered by the flattery, Skenes wasn’t ripe for the hype.
“It’s an honor, but I’m 11 starts in,” he said. “Hopefully, there’s a lot more time that I can play this game.”
At this time last year, he was the top pick in the amateur draft, weeks after celebrating an NCAA title with LSU. Now he’s 6-0 with a 1.90 ERA, striking out 89 and walking 13 in 66 1/3 innings.
Cleveland’s Steven Kwan will get first look at him Tuesday. He found out in a group text from his parents that he was the leadoff hitter for the American League, which will start Baltimore’s Corbin Burnes.
“Sometimes they’ll just post stuff that isn’t even correct,” Kwan said. “I did kind of a double take, and be like: Is this really true?”
Kwan leads the major league with a .352 average and was excited to face Skenes’ arsenal of fastballs, splitters, sliders, curves and changeups. Skenes’ 99.1 mph average velocity on his four-seam fastball leads the major leagues among those with at least 1,000 pitches.
“It’s generational talent,” Kwan said. “The guy has all of the pressure on him and people probably naturally want to see him fail because of that, but he continues to excel, he continues to succeed. He says the right things. It seems like his teammates really like him.”
An imposing 6-foot-6, Skenes already produced a pair of hitless outings of six innings or more, prevented from trying for a no-hitter by the pitch limits of the analytics age. He arrived in the major leagues with a celebrity girlfriend, the gymnast/influencer Livvy Dunne.
A mustache on Skenes’ boyish face gives him an old-time baseball look, like in a daguerreotype of some 19th-century founder. Yet he is a creature of 21st-century pitching practices that include warmups with footballs, PlyoCare weighted balls and water bags.