Both of MLB’s 2025 Cy Young favorites came from humble pitching beginnings. Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes started his meteoric rise to stardom at the Air Force Academy, while Detroit Tigers lefty Tarik Skubal came of age at Seattle University. Neither place screams baseball immortality, but both pitchers could be flirting with historic achievements for the rest of their careers provided they stay healthy.

Skenes was the 2024 National League Rookie of the Year, while Skubal won the American League Cy Young Award last season — and their paths recently crossed as the 2025 All-Star Game starting pitchers in Atlanta. As they head down the stretch with the opportunity to collect more hardware this season, ESPN asked their teammates, team personnel and Skubal and Skenes themselves what makes the two best pitchers in the sport so special.

“Really advanced stuff and fill up the strike zone; they go right at guys,” Tigers starter Casey Mize said, summing up the feelings of those who have watched both aces. “So, they’re in advantageous counts a lot, applying a lot of pressure. The biggest thing to worry about is getting jumped early in counts, so they have to be good early on. But it feels like when they get strike one, the at-bat is over.”

‘He’s a guy that you can talk to when he’s starting’

The similarities between the two pitchers begin with the vibe they generate throughout the stadium when it’s their turn to pitch. There’s a different feeling in the clubhouse on a Skenes or Skubal day because of how games play out when they’re on the mound.

“You just know the other team isn’t going to do very much,” Tigers infielder Zach McKinstry said when it’s a Skubal day. “Defense is kind of boring that game.”

As a smiling teammate Spencer Torkelson added, “You can almost be blindfolded playing behind him.”

Pirates outfielder Tommy Pham has his own way of recognizing when Pittsburgh’s ace is pitching. It begins when Pham gets dressed to come to the park.

“He wears a suit to the field, so I started trying to keep up with him on ‘Skenes Day,'” Pham said. “I call out Skenes Day by wearing a suit with him so he’s not the only one.

“And we normally don’t need to score a lot of runs that day.”

Despite Skenes’ formal attire and nasty stuff, it stands out to his teammates that Skenes is still approachable when it is his day to take the mound.

“He’s a guy that you can talk to when he’s starting,” Pham stated. “I’ve played with guys, when they’re starting, you can’t talk to them, which I feel is bulls—. But he’s not like that.”

Skubal exhibits that trait, as well, according to Detroit infielder Zach McKinstry. Skubal will talk to teammates like it’s any other game.

The confidence in each pitcher’s crafts allows for a normal day, according to the players in both locker rooms.

The Tigers also get an extra jolt of energy during their pennant race as they play meaningful games down the stretch: Comerica Park comes alive when their ace takes the mound.

“Every jersey you see is a No. 29 jersey,” McKinstry said. “They love him. And he loves what he does. And we love to play behind him.”

‘We play a defensive position, but he makes it look like offense’

If there is one difference between Skubal and Skenes, it is that Skubal is in attack mode more than anyone in the league. He leads MLB in throwing his first pitch for a strike at 70% of the time. Overall, he throws strikes 55% of the time — good for third most in baseball.

Being in the zone so often is one reason Skubal is third in the majors in innings pitched this season, after finishing eighth in that category last season.

“When it gets to those later innings, you do feel like he has a chance to go the distance,” Tigers reliever Will Vest said. “It’s because he’s so efficient with his pitches.”

Skubal has pitched at least seven innings in 10 starts this season, including his signature outing: a 13-strikeout shutout against the Cleveland Guardians on May 25. That performance still resonates in the Tigers’ clubhouse three months later, especially after his last pitch registered at 103 mph.

“The aggressiveness,” Mize explained. “We play a defensive position, but he makes it look like offense. He’s going at everybody. He doesn’t care. That game illustrated that.”

Skenes, on the other hand, ranks 33rd in first-strike percentage (62.1) with a full arsenal that allows him to attack hitters differently.

“He has a larger tool box,” Pirates assistant pitching coach Brent Strom said. “It enables him to have weapons against different types of hitters. He pitches to his strengths.”

According to Baseball Savant, Skenes has thrown seven different types of pitches this season — as compared with Skubal’s five — and Skenes’ swinging-strike percentage ranks seventh. It all adds up to a pitch mix that keeps hitters baffled, even when they get pitches to hit.

“It’s full-on ‘here it is, hit it,'” Pirates catcher Joey Bart said. “He’s not scared of anyone.”

‘Everything is by the numbers, and he leaves nothing to chance’

Every player, no matter the position, has a routine to prepare for competition. But Skenes is especially unique in that regard.

One day, between starts, Pham asked to stand in the batter’s box while Skenes threw a bullpen session.

“Then the next day, I asked who’s throwing a pen because I needed to test out my contact lenses again,” Pham explained. “And Skenes says, ‘Hey, I’m throwing a pen.'”

Pham gave him a confused look, knowing Skenes had thrown the day before.

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, I throw every day, except for the day before my start,'” Pham recalled. “When I found that out, I was like, yeah, he’s different. I’ve never seen anybody do that.”

Strom noted that not every bullpen session is built the same. There’s purpose to the preparation.

“His work is very organized,” Strom said. “Very thoughtful. Everything is by the numbers, and he leaves nothing to chance. He’s very cerebral. He understands what’s necessary.”

Bart recalled Skenes’ early days with the club after getting called up in May 2024. The catcher recognized the detailed preparation of the former LSU star even then, including how Skenes readied for his very first outing against the Chicago Cubs.

“I remember the first pregame meeting last year,” Bart said. “He ran the meeting in his debut. I was like, ‘Go ahead and take it, dude. You got it.’ He has been groomed for this.”

That kind of intense and directed preparedness has gained attention and admiration around the league, and it is what Skubal identified as Skenes’ most impressive trait.

“He seems like he has his routine and preparation already figured out at a young age,” Skubal said. “It took me until I was 26 to be a good big league baseball player and figure that out. And he’s doing it at 23. That’s four years faster than me. Yeah, that’s really impressive.”

‘He just wants to show that there is something memorable about greatness’

There’s an aura of self-assuredness to Skubal that stands out as compared with even other aces, according to those around him. He has been called a “bulldog” with a “killer” mentality by his teammates: He won’t back down, no matter the circumstance.

“He comes after you,” Torkelson said. “In big situations, he trusts his best stuff. You kind of know what you’re going to get, and it’s still hard to hit.”

That confidence enables Skubal to put himself in pitcher’s counts (0-1, 0-2, 1-2, 2-2) 45.7% of the time, more than any other hurler in the game, according to ESPN Research. And until you show you can hit one of his best offers, he’ll just keep throwing it. He has 93 strikeouts on his changeup, second only to Philadelphia Phillies starter Cristopher Sanchez.

That mindset is what stands out most about Skubal to Skenes.

“He can go after hitters straight up,” Skenes said. “He gets them out quickly, which is why he pitches deep in games. He does that better than anyone else in the game. But it starts with going right at them. That takes confidence.”

Skubal has a commanding presence, according to Tigers play-by-play announcer Jason Benetti. It doesn’t hurt that his size (6-foot-3 and 240 pounds) naturally creates some intimidation when he is on the mound, but he makes himself known whenever he is in the game.

“On the day the All-Stars were announced last year, the Tigers were in Cincinnati, and he struck out [Elly] De La Cruz and there was this big primal scream — and that’s this indelible memory for me,” Benetti said of Skubal. “Because that is a guy that people hear about that there’s noise about, and he wants that.

“He ends innings and outings at 102 mph because he just wants to show that there is something memorable about greatness, is the way I would put it. He has greatness.”

TAMPA, Fla. — Giancarlo Stanton will return to the New York Yankees‘ lineup Tuesday night after missing three games with what the team described as general soreness, manager Aaron Boone told radio station WFAN.

Stanton will play right field in one of the two games against the Tampa Bay Rays, but Aaron Judge is not expected to appear in the outfield in either.

There is no set timetable for Judge’s return to the field. He was scheduled to test his right elbow with long toss Tuesday.

“I don’t know yet,” Boone said. “What I’ve said is I’m waiting on the trainers to say, ‘Thumbs up.’ He’s expected to long-toss again today, so I don’t expect it here in Tampa. Could it be Boston? Maybe. I just don’t know yet.”

Boone added that Judge might not regain full throwing strength this season.

“I don’t think we’re going to see him throwing like he normally does at any point this year, but that’s OK,” Boone said. “We’ve got to feel like he can go out there and protect himself.”

The Yankees are coming off a three-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals and hold a three-game lead for the final American League wild-card spot. Offensively, they will be satisfied if Judge can simply remain productive at the plate. Since being activated from the injured list Aug. 5, Judge has been limited to designated hitter duties. He entered the week batting .333 with 39 home runs, 91 RBIs and a 1.134 OPS, all among the league leaders. His home run Sunday was his first extra-base hit since returning.

Judge’s inability to play the field has reduced the team’s flexibility. Stanton is batting .299 with 12 home runs, 34 RBIs and a .953 OPS this season, but his long injury history makes any outfield assignment a risk. He did not debut until mid-June because of tendinitis in both elbows. After playing three straight games in the outfield last week, he missed three consecutive games with soreness. He has declined to specify where the discomfort occurred.

It is so hard for anyone to stand out in Nashville because everyone in Nashville is always trying so hard to stand out.

All of those off-the-bus would-be country music stars, performing in so many Broadway bars owned by so many actual stars, entertaining all those bachelorettes in pink cowboy hats and those dudes who look like they are attending a Luke Combs lookalike contest. Music City, USA is always a good time, but it also becomes very repetitive. This town aches for someone to come along and finally snap it out of its endless two-stepping loop. Say, a big-haired blond woman from Sevierville, Tennessee. Or a Man in Black on the train a-comin’ from Folsom. Maybe a girl from a Christmas tree farm in eastern Pennsylvania.

Or a Bama-beating water bug of a quarterback who rolled in off a desert wind that blew in from New Mexico.

“Straight out the dirt, son,” Diego Pavia says, the 24-year-old laughing as he sits up and slaps his hand on a meeting room table in Vanderbilt football’s quarterbacks meeting room. “When I first got here, you would walk down to Broadway and everyone had on Alabama stuff or Georgia stuff or the bars would just have Tennessee flags out front. Now I see a lot of Vandy V’s out there. I think maybe people didn’t see that coming. Just like they didn’t see me coming.”

They see him now. We all do. One year ago, we saw the 6-foot QB (well, that’s how tall the Vanderbilt media guide says he is, but most everyone lists him at 5-10 … but, when a 5-10 sportswriter looks him in the eye, he might be 5-9 … but who cares because he’s also built like a BMW X4) lead the Commodores to the program’s first winning season, first stint in the AP Top 25 and first bowl win since the 2013 campaign. On Oct. 5, 2024, we saw him emulate his childhood hero, Johnny Manziel, by running past No. 1 Alabama, Vandy’s first win over the Tide in 40 years and first win over a top-5 team ever, ending an 0-60 drought.

And in more recent days, the world has seen Pavia at SEC media days and on Netflix, proclaiming that longtime lowly SEC cellar dweller Vandy can be a national title contender. And as the world entered last weekend, it did so dancing along with No. 2 in a music video that dropped for the song “Pavia Mafia,” as artist Axel Varela declared: “From the 505 to the world, baby!” and “Yo me enamoré del juego,” which translates to “I fell in love with the game.”

What none of us saw were those days when that love affair began for Pavia. It was on the outskirts of Albuquerque, where he grew up as the third of four children, with two older brothers and a kid sister. They were raised by Antoinette Padilla, who found herself in the role of a single mother as Diego was becoming a teenager and realized that her job as a front desk office worker wasn’t going to cover the bills. She had grown up as one of 14 siblings, also in a single-parent home, and refused to put her kids through that same struggle. So she enrolled in nursing school.

“I remember all of her books and papers spread out all over the kitchen table,” Pavia recalls. “She would cook dinner for us and we’d all eat and I’d see she hadn’t eaten anything. I’d ask her about it and she’d just say, ‘Oh, I’m not hungry.’ Now I realize that she was hungry, but that’s all we had. We were kids, so all we knew was that ‘we good, man.’ But now we know it’s because she was always sacrificing.”

Padilla was also always working. Once she began her career as a long-term care nurse, she refused to be saddled with the loans she had taken out to pay for school. She studied house flipping and started buying fixer-uppers around Albuquerque. And who do you think did the fixing?

“We would work in the yards, paint, install new windows, all of it, as kids,” Pavia says with a little shake of his head. “She would rent them out, save up and then sell them. Then she started doing cars on the side. Buy a car cheap at auction, for like $2,000, fix it up and resell it for $6,000.”

So, if one were to buy a house with windows installed or a car detailed by 13-year-old Diego Pavia, were they going to be happy with the results?

“I haven’t received any complaints yet, man.”

In their mother’s sizable wake, the three boys attacked every aspect of their lives at full throttle, especially when it came to football and wrestling. Oldest brother Roel participated in both sports at Briar Cliff University, an NAIA school in Sioux City, Iowa. Just as Mom had shown Diego how to scramble out of debt, his brother showed him the benefits of attending college.

“As he got older, he developed into a rock,” Roel says. “He hit that growth spurt and it was all muscle. That’s when the older brothers stop picking on little brother because little brother can kick your ass.”

That growth was in the shoulders and legs. It was not in height. So, even as Diego led the Volcano Vista Hawks to a perfect regular season and the state semifinals, no one in Division I college football gave the QB a serious look. But what hurt the most was when the hometown New Mexico Lobos said they were passing not because they thought he was too small, but because he was too cocky.

“He still isn’t over that one,” Vandy football consultant Jerry Kill says with a laugh. “I don’t think he ever will be over that one. That’s always been part of his gasoline.”

Instead, Pavia settled for New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, where he led his team to the 2021 junior college national title. That night, his heroics for the Broncos were being shown on local New Mexico television. Bellied up to the bar in the Las Cruces Hooters were Kill and longtime mentee Tim Beck, the just-hired head coach and offensive coordinator at New Mexico State. They were watching the game to scout a quarterback — initially, Pavia’s opponent. But when the fire hydrant playing QB for NMMI ran through Iowa Western for a 34-yard touchdown and an early 14-0 lead, Kill looked at Beck and said, “Hell, man, we’ve been watching the wrong guy.”

That wrong guy became the right guy for the New Mexico State Aggies, as Pavia led the bottom-10 stalwart to a 7-6 record in 2022. The following year, the Aggies went 10-5, the program’s first double-digit-win season in more than six decades. Pavia most relished the Aggies’ win over New Mexico in Albuquerque, even more than their stunning upset at Auburn. Unfortunately, he went viral after that Rio Grande Rivalry win when video surfaced of him urinating on the UNM logo at its indoor practice facility. That incident came up again at season’s end, when New Mexico State earned an invite to the New Mexico Bowl, hosted by the Lobos, and the Aggies weren’t allowed to use that facility to prepare for the game.

“That was embarrassing and inexcusable and no one knows that more than Diego Pavia,” Kill says. “But I also told you he was still mad about what happened coming out of high school.”

“We all make mistakes,” Pavia admits now.

When Kill retired following that magical 2022 season, Pavia nearly made another mistake, though at the time most believed his mistake to be the decision that he made, not the one he backed out on. Suddenly a hot commodity at the dawn of the NIL era, Pavia accepted an invite and a nice payout to transfer from New Mexico State to Nevada. Then his phone rang. It was Kill, whose retirement had lasted all of a few weeks.

“I went to Las Cruces to try and convince Tim Beck to come help us with our offense,” Clark Lea says of the trip he took in late fall 2023, just as he had wrapped up his third season as head coach at Vanderbilt, his alma mater. It was a crushingly disappointing year, the Commodores starting 2-0 but finishing 2-10. “Jerry sat in on some of our conversations and we all connected immediately.”

Soon Beck was headed to Nashville with several of his offensive players in tow. Kill tells the story that he was on the beach in Mexico, three margaritas deep, when Beck and Lea finally convinced him to join them. Pavia tells the story that Kill then called him and said, “Don’t make a mistake and go to Nevada. I’m moving to Nashville and you’re coming with me.”

Pavia loves Kill and Beck so much that he made the move without hesitation, even leaving money on the table at Nevada. He also refused to leave Vandy after the storybook tale of 2024, telling the “Bussin’ With The Boys” podcast that he had passed on a $4 million-plus NIL offer from an SEC rival to remain in Music City. What’s more, he won an injunction versus the NCAA for one more year of eligibility, instead of being penalized for time served at the junior college level.

“I think that it is easy to see the guy who likes to talk a little and who likes to celebrate a lot and think, ‘Oh, he’s that guy,'” Lea says. “But look at what he has done to be here and stay here, and look at the 50 people who come from New Mexico to be with his family at our games. That’s someone who loves this place.

“Talk to our basketball office or [Vandy baseball head coach] Tim Corbin, and they will tell you that Diego is in their offices, asking about what it takes to win. He has big dreams for himself, but he came here and all of those people come here with him because they love it here.”

Now, everyone else is coming, too, to be with the Pavia Mafia to watch college football at, of all places, Vanderbilt. Yes, he is most definitely prone to hyperbole, but Pavia’s observation about the gentle transfusion of black and gold into the college football identity of the bars along the Cumberland River is no exaggeration. It’s visible. As are the construction cranes that cover FirstBank Stadium, long the SEC’s time capsule of football venues, and the ground being broken to replace the team’s cramped subterranean 1990s football facilities.

All of that renovation was already on the books before Pavia arrived. But the kid who used to flip houses with his mother has injected that sweat equity investment mentality into Nashville’s business community and Vanderbilt’s alumni base.

Nashville is a city that has been constructed atop the idea of having a good time. Residents and visitors alike have never had a problem finding that good time everywhere from Tootsies to the Titans. Now, thanks to the QB that no one saw coming, they are discovering a good time at a place that has been hiding in plain sight since it hosted the state of Tennessee’s first college football game in 1890.

“Building stuff is fun, man,” Pavia says. “It isn’t easy. But nothing worth it is ever easy. So when that work pays off, let’s enjoy it, Vandy. We earned it because we built it.”

Straight out the dirt?

“Straight out the damn dirt.”