Tarik Skubal has found ways to improve on his Cy Young campaign
After one of the more dominant games in baseball history on Sunday, let’s look at the adjustments he’s made this year.
One would think improving on a Cy Young caliber season would be nearly impossible. Detroit Tigers’ ace Tarik Skubal is arguably making it happen. Instead of resting and simply trying to repeat his outstanding 2024 campaign, Skubal has continued to fine tune his game and add wrinkles to keep hitters off balance this season.
Skubal finished the 2024 season with a 2.39 ERA and a 2.49 FIP across 192 regular season innings. He then made it 211 innings in total by throwing 19 more frames in the postseason with a 2.37 ERA and a 2.38 FIP. His ERA this year is 2.49 with a truly outrageous 1.97 FIP across 11 starts and 68 2⁄3 innings of work.
His 30.3 percent strikeout rate has leveled up to 33.8 percent in 2025. His 4.6 percent walk rate last year has been trimmed to an even, and ridiculous, 3.0 percent so far this year. He’s absolutely pounding the strike zone with a 57.8 percent zone rate, compared to 56.6 percent last year, and hitters still rarely are able to do much against him.
There are some quick answers as to how he’s managed to improve on greatness. He’s averaging 97.7 mph with his fourseamer after averaging 96.8 mph last year. His sinker velocities are basically the same as the fourseamer, but he’s made a little adjustment by throwing a few more sinkers this year, particularly to left-handed hitters. More importantly, Skubal is throwing 32.2 percent changeups as compared to 26.9 percent last year. Using the best changeup in the game more often is probably the simplest single answer to his improvements.
One of the other notable changes has been dialing in the movement of his fourseam and sinking fastballs just a little more to accentuate how he uses the two fastball types. Against right-handed hitters, Skubal uses about 34 percent fourseamers and 19 percent sinkers. Against lefties, he’s actually using a lower percentage of sinkers than he did last year when he was close to 55 percent sinkers. Now it’s down to 40 percent, with his fourseam usage up from around 9 percent to 18 percent. Still, it’s mainly sinkers to lefties, fourseamers to right-handed hitters.
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