Paul Skenes is the ultimate example of MLB’s load management dilemma

It wasn’t long before Pittsburgh Pirates star Paul Skenes became Major League Baseball’s primary source of must-see television programming.

While the top draft picks from 2020 (Spencer Torkelson), 2021 (Henry Davis) and 2022 (Jackson Holliday) are currently in Triple-A, last year’s top draft pick should actually be the National League’s starting pitcher at next week’s All-Star Game.

In 11 career starts (nine quality starts) over the past two months, Skenes has a 1.90 ERA, 0.91 WHIP, 12.1 K/9 and a mustache-waving bravado that made him a fan favorite in the City of Pierogi Love before he ever threw a pitch in the majors.

Every time he climbs the hill, there’s a good chance something special will happen.

But during Thursday’s masterful game against the Milwaukee Brewers, the Internet was nearly in an uproar because he wasn’t given the chance to finish something special.

After throwing seven innings without a hit and striking out 11 batters, Skenes was pulled from the game after 99 pitches.

Two pitches later, the no-hitter was gone.

(Pittsburgh won the match 1-0, by the way.)

That situation is not all that unusual in the current baseball hype surrounding pitch counts and player stress.

It happened three times in May alone, with Ben Brown (93 pitches), Kyle Bradish (103 pitches) and Max Fried (109 pitches) each getting the hook after seven no-hit innings.

In each of those three cases – and with Skenes on Thursday – the manager had to make a difficult decision.

When you send the starter back to start the eighth inning, you unofficially commit to keeping him there until he allows a hit or gets the job done. This means you’re potentially throwing 125 or more pitches in an era where even workhorse starters rarely reach 110.

The vast majority of managers would do exactly what Derek Shelton did.

“It had nothing to do with the number of throws… It was just about trusting your eyes,” Shelton told reporters after the game.

But because he is still a beginner, this particular incident struck a chord.

What’s striking about all this commotion is that Pittsburgh had been surprisingly lenient with Skenes’ workload up until Thursday.

He threw only 34 innings in the minor leagues before being called up to the big leagues, but he threw 100 pitches, in six no-hit innings with 11 strikeouts, in just the second start of his career.

On June 23, he threw seven innings for the first time, hitting 102 MPH on his 98th and final pitch of the game. He went 102 pitches the next time he came out, and had 107 pitches last Friday. It was his fourth time in triple digits in 10 starts.

In contrast, AL Rookie of the Year favorite Luis Gil has reached the 100-pitch mark just once in his 18 starts.

And yet here we are, ready to burn Shelton at the stake for allowing load management to get in the way of a possible history.

While I think he made the right decision by taking Skenes out, it’s hard to disagree with the fans who are up in arms right now. This is the worst kept secret about load management:

It doesn’t fucking work.

Even though the focus has been on pitch counts for over a decade, we spent a lot of time at the beginning of this season discussing what can be done to keep pitchers healthy. Meanwhile, we saw one big name after another get sidelined in early April.

In the past two calendar years, 65 MLB pitchers have required Tommy John surgery. And that’s just the most threatening of the many forearm, elbow, shoulder and back injuries that load management has not prevented at all.

It’s been less than a week since Pittsburgh… other Star rookie pitcher Jared Jones went on the IL with a lat injury. He had yet to surpass 100 pitches in a start.

Look, I’m not advocating a return to the days when Nolan Ryan was allowed to throw 235 pitches in a 13-inning game before being allowed to take the mound again three days later.

But you could easily argue that the industry-wide obsession with pitch counts actually does far more harm than good. Pitchers are trained/programmed to exert maximum effort on what they know will likely be 100 pitches max, with ligaments that simply aren’t built to survive that kind of constant tension.

theScore’s Travis Sawchik dug into this idea when Tommy John hell broke loose in April and found that the average velocity of fastballs has been steadily increasing for years, from 90.9 MPH in 2007 to 94.5 MPH in the first few weeks of this season.

The average minimum fastball velocity increased from 85.6 MPH to 91.5 MPH during the same time period.

The TL;DR lesson I can take from this is that they don’t make people like Greg Maddux anymore.

The art of pitching – picking the spots where you can get away with a “get me over” fastball or a slightly lower-spin breaking ball – is gone, like the dodo, replaced by guys giving it everything they’ve got for what is more or less a predetermined number of pitches.

We all know this to be true. We obsess over Statcast data. We swoon over Mason Miller’s 103 MPH rounds. We snicker at Jhoan Duran’s spinners and Seth Lugo’s curveball spin rate. And if a pitcher’s velocity is a shade below his standard, he gets asked about it postgame.

(But don’t ask Jack Flaherty.)

Still, we dare to wonder what’s wrong with letting a promising rookie throw 125-plus pitches in hopes of a no-hitter, partly because with more than a week’s rest he should be able to recover before making his next start after the All-Star Break?

Skenes threw 39 four-seam fastballs on Thursday.

They were all traveling at 96 MPH or faster.

And his slippers were downright filthy.

That guy was well prepared for all 99 pitches.

Sending him back for another two innings of 99 pitches would be like asking a marathon runner about to cross the finish line if he can last 32 miles today instead of the usual 26.2.

Wouldn’t he have been worse off then?

Maybe he would have fared as badly as Matt Harvey and Stephen Strasburg, who gave it their all in the 2015 and 2019 World Series respectively?

We will never know.

But until we can somehow convince flame-throwing pitchers to back off a little during their starts (a ship that sank long ago), maybe we shouldn’t be so outraged when a manager values ​​UCLs over no-nos.