Paul Skenes humorously peels back layer behind ace's pitch selection: 'I’m too stupid to call my own pitches'

“Some teams are doing the from the dugout stuff,” Skenes said, when elaborating on the Pirates’ approach to calling pitches, “but we do it where Henry calls the game, and Joey and Endy and our other catchers — they all call the game for themselves.”

Skenes explained that often there’s no need for conversation between him and Davis. They read and react and typically find themselves on the same page.

“We see how it’s going in the bullpen, we see how it is between innings during the game,” he said on “McAfee.”

“Sometimes a pitch just sucks, so we just stop calling it. Nothing really needs to be said then.”

Davis has an array of pitches to pick from. Skenes’ arsenal features a four-seam fastball, changeup, slider, sinker and splitter. The two-time All-Star began Tuesday’s gem against the Rockies with six consecutive strikeouts. Although Skenes is quick to brush off praise, it’s clear his intuition is a major factors in his prolific performance.

Skenes described how he tinkers with certain pitches over the course of an outing and, more generally, throughout a season.

“We’re constantly working on all of the pitches,” Skenes said. “I might have made some changes to the changeup or my sinker or something else. I think a lot of the time it’s like kind of subconscious of me, where I make changes to the pitch, and it either gets better or worse, and then we either have to fix it or keep riding with it.”

Last season, the LSU product followed up his 2024 NL Rookie of the Year campaign by posting a 1.97 ERA, the best in MLB in 2025. No other qualifying major-league starting pitcher had gone sub-2.00 since Justin Verlander did it with the Houston Astros in 2022.

Skenes got off to a rough start this time around. After pitching for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, he gave up five runs and lasted only 2/3 of an inning on Opening Day. He’s been solid since.

“I think we’re getting to midseason form,” Skenes said Thursday on “McAfee.”

“I think May is kind of when it all starts to click for me. … I think everybody’s a little bit different. You get feel of pitches, you lose feel of pitches as the season goes on, so stuff that’s working right now probably in all likelihood isn’t going to be working in a month or two. But we’ll figure it out and go from there.”