The Pitcher Who Got His Kicks on Route 66
Tarik Skubal’s path to playoff baseball is as unlikely as they come
Only in baseball can the story of Tarik Skubal occur.
For the uninitiated: Skubal, a lefty for the Detroit Tigers, is currently the best starting pitcher in baseball. If you don’t know him yet, you will soon, as his star ascends to the national stage during these MLB playoffs. He’ll almost certainly win the AL Cy Young Award in a unanimous vote; after all, he earned pitching’s triple crown this year (18 wins, 2.39 ERA, and 228 strikeouts), the first pitcher to do so in a full season since Clayton Kershaw in 2011.
Nearly every pitcher to have pieced together that kind of resume was a blue chip prospect at some point, an early draft pick, a spark whose presence as a high schooler lit the baseball world’s rumor mill on fire. Take Kershaw, the last triple crown winner, for example. Dozens of scouts were in attendance during a high school playoff game when Kershaw threw a perfect game consisting of all strikeouts and then hit a grand slam on top of it. You can imagine the scouting reports that were filed that day.
That’s not Skubal’s story, though. Skubal hails from Kingman, AZ, a small town in the Arizona desert that was once a hub of Route 66 traffic. Today, it thrives on tourists traveling the Mother Road, and its main street was the inspiration for Radiator Springs in the movie Cars. There’s an old-school diner there that I’ve been to; when you order a hamburger, the cashier pretends to squeeze mustard in your face from a bottle with a yellow string inside. Then they ask if you’d like to buy the prank mustard bottle. $9.99.
Skubal’s high school had no baseball field. They played home games at the city park, an ill-maintained all-dirt diamond with a weak lump where the pitching mound should stand. The players had no locker rooms. They just showed up and played.
You know who didn’t show up? Scouts. Neither from MLB nor big-time colleges.
Skubal threw in the mid-80’s and back then, still had some baby fat. He wanted to go to BYU, but they told him no. So did Arizona and Arizona State. Even Grand Canyon University never even sent a coach to watch him pitch. One school showed interest: Yavapai Community College in Prescott, AZ. That’s where Skubal was going to go.
But, Skubal figured, if the scouts wouldn’t come to him, he’d go to them. He entered a youth tournament in Peoria, AZ, and was throwing on a back field away from the most prized high school talent. That’s when a man named Elliott Cribby walked by. Cribby was a first-year coach at Seattle University, a small Jesuit college with a baseball team desperate for pitchers. Cribby noted Skubal’s awkward, old-school delivery and sub-optimal velocity. But he also noticed that batters kept whiffing. He was desperate. He gave Skubal his card.
Back home in Kingman, Skubal didn’t want to even reach out. His dad insisted. “Dad,” Skubal said. “I’m not going to call this number. I don’t want to go to Seattle.”
But his dad finally won out. Skubal called—and pretty soon was on a plane to Seattle for a tryout in front of the head coach.
There was just one problem. Skubal didn’t pack cleats, thinking that Seattle University would provide some for him. They didn’t have any extras. So Skubal’s dad had to run over to Target and make do as best he could, buying K-Swiss tennis shoes, white. That’s what Skubal wore during the tryout. He did well enough to earn a quarter-scholarship. Good enough. He committed.
“I’ll never, ever forget that," Cribby told USA Today. “The guy’s work ethic his entire time there was insane. He wasn’t going to let anything stop him.”
In Seattle, it wasn’t overnight success either. In one of his first starts, playing against Saint Mary’s, Skubal gave up seven hits, allowed one run thanks to a balk, and another after a wild pitch. He lost weight, gained muscle, and his velocity started to tick higher. He was pitching well. And then, Skubal remembers, “My arm went dead.” Tommy John. Out for a season and a half.
Skubal spent that time charting pitches, watching lots and lots of baseball, and learning even more about the game from Cribby. When he came back for his senior year, he was a totally transformed pitcher, especially in the second half of the season. Every game, Skubal seemed to get stronger. In one start, he struck out 8. Then 10. Then 12.
He graduated, declared for the draft, and this time—without ever having Skubal seen pitch and working 100-percent off of the word of an agent (always a risky proposition)—the Detroit Tigers drafted Skubal in the ninth round.
From there, Skubal was on a rocket ship. In his first summer in the Minor Leagues, Skubal allowed one run. One run! The whole season! His first full year in the Minors, he flew up through the Minor Leagues, dominating at every level. He made his Major League debut less than two years after he was drafted.
“It’s insane where this kid has come from,” Bill McCord, Skubal’s childhood coach, recently said. “To go where he has come from, a small town where our pitching mound was powder at Southside Park, to where he is today, what a distance he has traveled…It’s such an uplifting story.”
The Tigers beat the powerhouse Houston Astros in the AL Wild Card series this week, and in Game 1, Skubal struck out six in six innings of work, surrendering only four hits and no runs. The Astros are a juggernaut, full of All Stars, and the Tigers are the youngest team in the MLB. Only one player is over 30. Detroit’s entire 26-man playoff roster combines for just $18.8M of salary. That’s in total. As late as August 10, the Tigers had fallen to eight games below .500 with a 0.2 percent chance to make the playoffs. After that day, they went 31-11 down the stretch. Whenever Skubal was on the mound, it felt like an automatic win.
Those long odds? This team? There’s no better pitcher to represent them than Skubal.
“It's why you play the game, to pitch in the postseason and to hopefully win the big one,” Skubal said this week. “That's the most important thing in this game, and that's the most important thing to me. Awards, you care about them—but I'd like the World Series ring more than anything.
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