Sitting in front of his locker at Yankee Stadium, Tarik Skubal wants to run a search on Baseball Savant.
One of the best pitchers in baseball, at least in this way, is just like us.
On the mound, Skubal does a lot of things that nobody else does. He has thrown the five fastest pitches by a left-handed starting pitcher in the pitch-tracking era, which dates back to 2008. He is the first back-to-back Cy Young Award winner since Jacob deGrom in 2018 and 2019. No one has struck out more batters in a row in a postseason game. He is uniquely dominant, which explains why so much of the Deadline chatter surrounds what the Tigers will -- or won't -- do with their ace, who is a free-agent-to-be.
Here's one more thing that Skubal does differently from most: He throws his changeup to left-handed hitters.
Since the start of the 2025 season, only three pitchers have thrown more left-on-left changeups than Skubal. Entering Saturday night's start against the Angels -- his first outing on the other side of the All-Star break -- Skubal is using his changeup 20.7% of the time to lefties. That's the third highest rate of left-on-left changeups behind only the Braves' Martín Pérez and the Rays' Ian Seymour.
This is not a common pitch. Before the All-Star break, left-handed pitchers threw changeups just 3.7% of the time to left-handed hitters; among only starting pitchers, it was 4.8%. The pitch is virtually an afterthought in these matchups, as it has been throughout the pitch-tracking era. The league rate of left-on-left changeups has not eclipsed 5% in any year since 2008.
This surprises Skubal.
"Oh, wow, that's not high at all," Skubal said. "What's the righty? Do you have the righty?"
That would be right-on-right changeups, which account for 4.6% of the pitches that right-handed hurlers throw to right-handed hitters.
"That's way lower than I thought," Skubal responded.
That makes Skubal an outlier. Over the last two seasons, left-handed batters are hitting just .119 (5-for-42) with a 28.0% whiff rate against his changeup. For Skubal, it is undeniably successful. And yet, it's not something that anyone else really throws.
Take Phillies All-Star lefty Cristopher Sánchez, whose changeup headlines a simple three-pitch mix. He uses it just 12% of the time against lefties, compared to 47% against righties. It's a similar story for another All-Star lefty, Arizona's Eduardo Rodriguez. Although the changeup is Rodriguez's No. 2 offering to righties (34% usage), it is his fifth pitch to lefties (11%).
For a while, the conventional wisdom in baseball held that the same-sided changeup is a bad pitch. That's not entirely true. Lefties are hitting .173 with a .303 SLG in at-bats ending on a changeup from a left-handed pitcher this year. But the fear is that if a changeup doesn't move the way a pitcher intends it to, it will float right into the hitter's bat path -- essentially, a bad, slow fastball. In this way, perhaps it is more prone to damage. In turn, most pitchers prefer to go with a breaking ball -- something that moves away from the same-sided hitter. A pitch with horizontal movement that breaks away from the hitter is almost always going to grade out better in these matchups. Think of a sweeper snapping away from a left-handed hitter, bending across the width of the plate and forcing a swing outside the zone.
"A lot of pitches, left-on-left, they'll have sweepers," Skubal said. "I don't have one. It's really hard for me to throw one. I haven't been successful at it. That's probably why I have to throw left-on-left changeups. Those guys can just throw sweepers away, and it tends to work out in their favor."
Skubal's slider averages just 3.1 inches of glove-side movement. It's not the pitch that he necessarily wants, but he can't get the ball to sweep, although he continues to try. For now, that dictates the way that Skubal attacks batters. Combined with a curveball that he rarely uses, Skubal throws breaking pitches just 13% of the time to left-handed hitters. Only three left-handed starting pitchers throw fewer breaking balls to left-handed hitters -- Pérez, Payton Tolle and Jake Bennett.
"The best pitch left-on-left is big spin going away from you horizontally, and I just can't do it," Skubal said. "And I have success with [my changeup to lefties], so why am I changing that?"
He is not. In fact, he's going the other way. Skubal threw 13 same-sided changeups in total across his first four years in the Majors. He nearly matched that in his last start before the All-Star break on Sunday against the Phillies, peppering the likes of Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper with 11 left-on-left changeups. There have only been three instances of a left-handed pitcher throwing more changeups to left-handed hitters in a single game all season.
It is another way that Skubal continues to stand out.
"It's a pitch that wasn't very common," said Tigers catcher Jake Rogers. "Now, it's in the back of their head, like, 'Hey, they're not going to throw this.' I think it's becoming more and more valuable for people that cover left-on-left heaters and sliders very well.
"We see on the report that this guy struggles with a left-on-left change, so don't be afraid to use it. ... It's such a good pitch that you've got to throw it."
Rogers refers to Skubal's changeup as an "outlier pitch," and that is yet another factor here. We're talking about one of the best pitches in all of baseball. Last year, Skubal's changeup graded out as the most valuable offering in the game, according to Statcast's run value metric. Batters hit .154 off it with a 48.6% swing and miss rate. Why wouldn't he want to throw it more often? We have seen pitchers embrace their best pitches more over the last few seasons, regardless of convention or the situation. Here, Skubal is no different. (Of note, the always-innovative Rays deployed that mindset while using a high rate of same-sided changeups in the early 2010s. "We have a bunch of pitchers who have really good changeups and are confident in them," then-Rays pitching coach Jim Hickey told Baseball Prospectus in 2013.)
Skubal's pitch usage is largely a testament to the weapon that he has created. After the 2021 season, the Tigers helped Skubal develop a new changeup. They wanted him to harness seam-shifted wake, a cutting-edge phenomenon in which the seams of the baseball catch the air in just the right way to create additional, unexpected movement. Out of the pitcher's hand, the baseball is supposed to be doing one thing. When it arrives at the plate, though, it is doing something else entirely. The hitter is fooled.
Skubal's seam-shifted changeup is a perfect complement to his power sinker, which he uses 46% of the time to left-handed hitters.
The two pitches look very similar out of his hand. But because of the seam-shifted effect, when they reach the hitter, they're moving differently.
The sinker carries through the zone, and the changeup drops down -- more than the batter expects out of Skubal's hand.
"It really looks like my sinker," Skubal said. "So against lefties, throwing it a ton, I think the changeup is a good pitch to tunnel. It gives me some depth. Gives me some miss. And if I get clipped on a left-on-left changeup, it's my best pitch. If I'm going to get beat, it's going to be on my best pitch."
It's just one more wrinkle that makes Skubal so brilliantly unique.
MLB.com senior club reporters Jason Beck and Adam Berry contributed to the reporting of this story.