THE IDEA HERE is to profile the Detroit Tigers‘ Tarik Skubal, the most dynamic and charismatic pitcher in baseball, a young man whose run of dominance over the past three seasons is approaching historic levels. This gig is pretty straightforward: We seek answers from the past to the questions raised by the present. How did this mountain of aggression, a man who occupies the pitcher’s mound like an invading force, develop this all-consuming drive? What motivations and grudges and insecurities boil inside him, and what dots on his personal timeline tell the story best?

Where did he come from, and how did he get here?

The key is to ask the right questions of the right people, trigger the best memories, elicit the most profound stories.

Or just have someone read the location on a caller ID.

Russ Skubal, Tarik’s dad, says he noticed the Northern California area code and city of my phone number. I tell him I live nearby, in a little spot called Suisun Valley, a formerly quiet and undiscovered slice of vineyards and hellish wind that has become less quiet and more discovered as it gains prominence as a wine region. “I know it well,” he says. “I used to coach high school basketball right by you.” He lets out a mirthless laugh. “The principal didn’t like me much, so I only lasted two years.”

He coached former NFL wide receiver Stevie Johnson and former NFL linebacker James-Michael Johnson at Rodriguez High and was convinced he would have won a state title if he had been given two more seasons.

“You know, Tarik played two years in the Tri-Valley Little League,” he says. “We lived right around the corner from the fields.”

My response is somewhere between a stammer and a grunt. My wife and I had four sons play in that league. I coached in it for a decade. One or more of my sons had to have played on the same field as Tarik. I undoubtedly saw that name, not a common one, written on a lineup card or scorebook multiple times. I probably wrote it myself.

I did not remember Tarik Skubal.

I texted my son Andrew, six days younger than Tarik, and asked him if he knew he once shared a field with the best pitcher in the big leagues. “What????” he replied. I texted my friend, Chris Foley, who coached his three sons in the same league for as long as I did. “Seriously??” he responded.

This is the man who was named the American League Cy Young winner last season in a unanimous vote after crafting one of just 39 Triple Crown seasons — leading the league in ERA, strikeouts and wins — in MLB history. This is the man who, at 28, is even better this season: 10-2, a 2.02 ERA, a preposterous 0.81 WHIP, 10.5 strikeouts for every walk. This man, the odds-on favorite to start next week’s All-Star Game, someone with a name so unique it would seem impossible to forget, had somehow flickered in and out of our lives without any of us making the connection.

I jokingly tell Russ this doesn’t speak well of my reporting skills, and he says, “Think about this: How many times do you think we sat together in those little bleachers and didn’t even know it? What a crazy world.”

Later that night, in the Tigers’ clubhouse after Skubal beat the Athletics for his ninth win of the season, I tell Tarik what I learned from his father. “Holy s—,” he says. “Holy s—.” We set out to piece it together. Do you remember this kid or that coach? Which team did you play on? Remember the cars parked in the mud beyond the left-field fence?

At this point it must be said that Skubal is a remarkably good sport, and perhaps the most accessible, friendly and accommodating superstar in the game. The combination of a 90-minute rain delay and a sloppy game against the Athletics means it’s nearly 11 p.m. as he stands at his locker and happily reminisces. He just pitched six innings and gave up four runs; not his best, but the Tigers won, and Skubal says, “If that’s what qualifies as a bad game for me, I’ll take it.” He left the dugout and went directly to the weight room, where he put himself through his customary post-start, two-hour weight workout. “Total body lift, and I go decently heavy,” he says. “Bench, row, split-squads, dead lifts — you’re going to be sore after a start, anyway. The idea is to keep your high days high and your low days low.”

We’d spoken at his Comerica Park locker two or three times before the revelation of our shared but forgotten past, and he’s as blown away — well, almost — as I am. He’s immediately transported back to Cordelia Tri-Valley Little League, where the wind blasted through the massive eucalyptus trees so violently you could close your eyes in the dugout and imagine you were hearing waves crash against rocks, and where the tall weeds behind the outfield grass were home to legions of ticks that made their way home on just about every kid who played.

“The f—ing ticks,” he says. “Every night my mom would check my elbows, my armpits — everywhere.”

Skubal moved from Northern California to Kingman, Arizona, and was all-state in basketball and baseball in high school. Hidden by geography and young for his grade, he had just one Division I offer, from Seattle University. He was drafted by the Tigers in the ninth round after a fine career in Seattle despite Tommy John surgery costing him a year and probably some significant money.

“That’s the beauty of the game of baseball, and the beauty of my career,” Skubal says. “I think my career is pretty relatable to a lot of kids. I hope so, anyway. I didn’t have the most streamlined process. I didn’t have a lot of Division I offers, didn’t go high in the draft, not an immediate prospect, no big signing bonus. I didn’t have any of that.”

I suggest to him that our widespread amnesia regarding his time in our midst tracks with the trajectory of his career, that maybe we hold the distinction of being the first in a long line of people who missed on Tarik Skubal.

THE MOTIVATIONS AND grudges and insecurities, they’re all there, amiably fueling a drive that transforms itself on the mound into an entirely different vibe: a roaring bear of a man, 6-foot-4 and officially listed at 240 pounds, who throws every pitch like it’s an accusation and a dare, each one seeking the strike zone like blood rushing to a cut. His pitching coach at Seattle University and the first person not to miss on Tarik Skubal, Elliott Cribby, describes Skubal’s high leg kick and swerving motion as “a fish chasing a lure in the water,” and I defy anybody to do better.

The route from there to here wasn’t easy from the start. Tarik was born with a clubfoot on his left leg and underwent surgery as an infant. “Tarik never let it get in the way,” Russ says. “He never told a coach he couldn’t run because his foot hurt. To me, it’s the most inspirational part of his journey, and the inspiring part is that you can take any weakness and make it a strength.”

Skubal was raised in small-town Kingman with three brothers who became four when Tyler, three years older than Tarik and a freshman in high school, asked his parents if his friend Wil Jones could live with them. Wil was navigating difficult family circumstances, and Tyler remembers the conversation lasting “five minutes, tops,” before the Skubals agreed. “Our core principle as a family and as educators is to do what’s right for kids,” says Russ, now an elementary school principal. Wil, an excellent basketball player who loved to compete at just about anything, fit the family dynamic.

Tarik’s competitive zeal, exemplified by his combustible nature on the mound, came to national attention during Game 2 of last season’s AL Division Series in Cleveland. After the fifth of his seven scoreless innings, Skubal stormed off the mound to a resounding chorus of boos and quite obviously yelled at the Guardians‘ fans to “shut the f— up.” His mother, Laura Skubal, took to social media to chide her son with an age-old mom move: the invocation of the middle name. “Tarik Daniel!!” she replied to a post showing her son raging. Tarik responded the next day by saying that he hadn’t heard that admonishment since high school and that he found it “interesting” that his mom would have a problem with his language since he remembers her being tossed from high school gyms during his and his brothers’ basketball games.

So the fire burns hot, and it appears to have been set organically. “I probably wasn’t the greatest father,” Russ says, laughing. “I believe life has a natural pecking order. Everybody talks about building up kids’ self-esteem. The way I see it, self-esteem comes from the word self. You have to believe you’re awesome yourself. Nobody can do that for you.”

Tyler, now 31, was Tarik’s most frequent and most combative opponent. They would wrestle or play one-on-one basketball games, what Tyler calls “Skubal Games” played by “Skubal Rules,” which meant the defense calls fouls and “nobody ever thinks they foul, so most Skubal Games started out competitive and ended up as boxing matches.”

Tyler, described by his dad as “competitive but nice,” would complain to his parents about Tarik’s persistence.

“He won’t stop hitting me,” Tyler would invariably say.

“Well,” Russ told him, “hit him back.”

“I did, but he won’t stop.”

“Then you didn’t hit him hard enough.”

They all cite the same stories, putting their fingers on the same dots on the timeline: Tarik in seventh grade, playing in a championship basketball game to complete an undefeated season, entering the team huddle after the third quarter, his team down double digits, and declaring, “I’m not losing this game,” and then going out and scoring 12 points in the final six minutes to prove it.

Tyler left Kingman and played college basketball at Dubuque for a season. He came home for a break after Tarik had led his junior varsity team to an undefeated season, and Russ, ever the coach, decided it was time for a test. “I wanted to see how good Tarik was,” he says now, so he arranged for his sons to play one-on-one — Skubal Rules in full effect — to see whether Tarik could hold up against his stronger brother.

“I worked him pretty good,” Tyler says. “If I remember it right, I started out up 7-0 and then it became a Hack-a-Shaq. I don’t think we shook hands after that one. He’s always had an absolute love of competition. That’s where the fun is, getting lost in the battle. That guy that roars off the mound, yelling at the world? That’s the guy I’ve known my whole life.”

GIVEN THE AGE proximity to my youngest son, I asked Skubal, back at his locker after the A’s game, if he was on the 9- and 10-year-old all-star team. “I was an all-star every year I played,” he says, which elicits a playful eye roll from teammate Alex Cobb, sitting two lockers to the left. Skubal said he thought he was on the 11-12 team as a 9-year old (Cobb: another eye roll) but didn’t get on the field. It clearly still chafes — “Stupidest thing ever,” he says. I don’t think this happened in our league, but I don’t say anything. He moved around a few times when he was little. The leagues and the teams probably smudge in the brain after nearly 20 years.

Finally, I play the ace.

“If you were on that team, I thought you might remember sifting through the infield dirt to find my son’s teeth.”

Skubal’s eyes widen in both pure wonder and sheer terror.

Bingo.

“That’s your son?” he asks.

I nod.

“Oh. My. God. Dude.”

He takes a moment to compose himself and puts one of his massive hands over his mouth, perhaps to keep a wayward clubhouse projectile from delivering unto him the same fate. He turns to the few teammates who remain at his end of the room: Cobb, Tommy Kahnle, Casey Mize.

“This thing scarred me,” he tells them. “He’s at second base. We’re doing double-play stuff. Guy at third base fields it, throws it. He loses it in the sun. He lost how many teeth? Like, eight?”

“It was two,” I say, “but he’s …”

Skubal is not hearing any of it. He’s back there on that field, a little boy again, feeling the shock shiver through his body, seeing the ball and the teeth and the blood. He’s seeing teammates and coaches panning for teeth out near second base and someone holding up an incisor like the World Series trophy. Fine. You win. Eight it is.

“It was unbelievable,” he says. “I was there, so I was on that team. I’ll never forget it. That was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball field. Teeth were everywhere. Blood was everywhere. They were sifting through dirt to get busted-out teeth. And then they put them back in!”

Cobb shudders a little and winces. Deep inside every pitcher lives a fear of taking a ball to the teeth, and Cobb — 37 years old, 13 years in the big leagues — appears to be hating the direction of this conversation as he hangs on every single detail.

“And he played!” Skubal says. “He stayed on the team! He played the next week! His teeth were, like, dead. Weren’t they dead? I’ll remember that the rest of my life. I swear. It was crazy. It was the most blood I’ve ever seen on the baseball field. The most blood I’ve ever seen.”

I send Andrew the recording of Skubal’s animated recollection of one of his worst days.

“My god that’s beautiful,” he texts back.

Word spread. The Tri-Valley Little League dads of 2006-07 were having a moment. The texts and phone calls were flying. It turns out Tarik and Andrew were teammates on the all-star team the following summer as well. Andrew didn’t remember Tarik, and Tarik didn’t remember Andrew, only his teeth. We’re all electrons bouncing around the universe, finding our own orbit, until we walk headfirst into a reminder that we’re all connected. One dad in our circle remembered Skubal but hadn’t linked it to what we’re seeing now. My friend Foley was the manager of that all-star team. He wrote to me, “Silva always gives me s— about keeping Michael off that all-star team. I just called him and told him why Michael didn’t make it.” Foley’s son, Matthew, known as “Chewy,” was on that team. I read Skubal a different text Foley sent me that day:

“Sent this to my boys: Never forget, there was a time when the manager looked into the dugout and tossed Chewy the ball and told him to take the mound when Tarik Skubal was available and ready to go.”

Skubal booms out a big laugh.

“I bet Chewy deserved it,” he says.

SKUBAL’S REAL BASEBALL origin story begins on a Wednesday night in Peoria, Arizona, late September of his senior year in high school. He was pitching in the Arizona Fall Classic, an annual travel ball extravaganza, and he was on: hitting 90 mph with his fastball, keeping hitters off balance, showing hints of the mound presence that would come to define him. For the first time, the scouts noticed — “We couldn’t get out of the parking lot,” Russ says — and Tarik went home with a wad of business cards from pro scouts and one from a college pitching coach: Cribby.

Three days later, on Saturday morning, the Skubals made the three-hour drive back to Peoria so Tarik could pitch again. Sore and exhausted from playing a high school football game the night before — he was, no surprise, a lineman — Tarik threw 82 to 84 mph, and the postgame parking lot was clear sailing.

“They all thought it was a fluke,” Tarik says.

Except Cribby, who kept at it.

“I’m not calling that guy,” Tarik told Russ. “There’s no way I’m going to school up there.”

But Russ persisted, and Tarik called. Cribby invited him to Seattle for a camp during Christmas break. “Not an official visit,” Russ is quick to point out. “We paid for the flights, the hotel, the camp.” Seattle University’s head coach, Donny Harrel, was dealing with a family situation that kept him away from the camp, and he left Cribby with strict orders that no scholarships would be offered until he got back.

Cribby watched Skubal throw — wearing, as he remembers it, K-Swiss shoes that Russ bought in a hurry because rain moved the camp indoors — and immediately offered him a scholarship.

“I could look in his eyes and see everything you could ever want if you’re trying to build a program,” Cribby says. “I couldn’t let him go home without an offer. He was hiding under a rock, and I was terrified someone was going to find him.”

Skubal didn’t know about Perfect Game, the one true religion of the travel ball set, until he talked to college teammates. He didn’t know the first thing about how professional baseball worked, only that he wanted to play it. “It’s a good thing I didn’t get drafted out of high school,” he says. “I didn’t know anything, but I guarantee I would have signed. I would have been, ‘Sure, let’s go play.'”

Skubal, citing his family’s financial constraints growing up because his father was a schoolteacher/coach and there were five boys “eating everything in the house,” wants to take an active role within the Major League Baseball Players Association to bring equity to youth baseball. “We weed out players because of financial burdens,” he says. “I think kids are playing too much baseball. I encourage kids to play all sports, but it’s hard when 12-year-olds are getting recruited. Now you think you have to be good at 10. I wasn’t good until I was 26.”

The humility is endearing and genuine, and Skubal was a late bloomer, to be sure, but that senior year in high school was a turning point. Russ remembers pro scouts traveling to Kingman to watch Tarik throw a bullpen after he had committed to Seattle. “That was my only outside source that he might be good,” Russ says. “When people drive to Kingman and want to stop, there must be a reason.”

Skubal’s sophomore season at Seattle, he struck out 10 in a Friday night start at UC Irvine with superagent Scott Boras in the stands, and the next day Skubal, his parents and Cribby were guests at Boras’ Newport Beach office. “We were looking around like, ‘Is this really happening?'” Cribby says. Boras became Skubal’s adviser shortly thereafter, and at the end of the 2026 season — or sooner, if the Tigers pony up a megadeal to extend Skubal — Boras will negotiate a free agent deal that could hit $400 million.

In spring training of 2022, before he became this guy, before last year’s Cy Young season that helped drag the Tigers — a team that unloaded players at the trade deadline — to the playoffs, and before he followed it with a season that looks as if it might be even better, Bryce Harper stood in the batter’s box and told Tigers catcher Jake Rogers, “This guy is the best lefty in the game.” Harper struck out and announced, “That guy’s going to win a Cy Young,” as he walked back to the dugout.

So maybe it’s more accurate to say Skubal didn’t become great until he was 26, after he used the rehabilitation time following flexor-tendon surgery in August 2022 to transform his changeup from a reliable swing-and-miss offering into the most formidable pitch in the game. Everything he throws revolves around the changeup, a pitch that takes up residence in the hitters’ minds and works its magic even when Skubal doesn’t throw it. His fastball-changeup combination is almost laughably unfair. He commands the fastball in ways that shouldn’t be possible for a pitch traveling at such speeds; in a typical setup, he will slice the outside corner with it and then throw the changeup, coming out of the same tunnel with the same arm action, to the same spot, only to have it drift off the outside corner, leaving hitters swinging like so many cats chasing so many lasers.

Skubal’s career is proof that joy, and not just spiteful vindication, can come from proving people wrong. When he signed his contract, for an above-slot bonus of $350,000, a fine sum but far less than the $1 million he could have commanded without the arm injury, he told Cribby, “It’s fine. I’m going to make my money in the big leagues.”

“In my eyes, I haven’t accomplished anything in this game,” Skubal says. “That’s what keeps me hungry. I haven’t won a World Series, and that’s all that matters. And when, God willing, I win a World Series, I’ll probably tell you I haven’t accomplished anything because I haven’t won two. That’s just how I was raised.”

When I ask him how his life has changed in the past year, with the accolades and the attention and the growing consensus that the game is seeing something it hasn’t seen since vintage Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw or maybe even Pedro Martinez, Skubal thinks for a moment and says, “My coffee maker broke, and I’m just going to buy a new one. Just buy a new one, right? I tried to fix it for a little bit, but nah, I’m going to buy a new one. That’s a luxury, I guess.”

Skubal calls the Cy Young “the highest award a pitcher can win,” but through the first half of this season he is putting together an argument to be in the AL MVP conversation. If he can somehow pass Aaron Judge and possibly Cal Raleigh, he would become the third full-time pitcher this century — and just the third full-time starting pitcher since 1986 — to win an MVP award. He is economical and dominant, the rarest combination in an era when it’s near-biblical for hitters to work counts in an effort to chase starters as early as possible.

“Part of my process is that I’m 100 percent bought-in on executing every pitch,” Skubal says. “I expect each one to go where I want it to. I don’t let any negative thought enter my mind. I don’t hit my spot 100% of the time. I probably hit my spot 20% of the time, but the game’s best do it a little less than me. I’m not trying to be perfect.”

Skubal listens patiently to a recap of something his manager, AJ Hinch, said a few days after Skubal threw the best game of his career, and one of the best games of anybody’s career — ever. Against the Guardians on May 25, Skubal threw a 94-pitch complete game shutout (a “Maddux” in pitching lingo, and Skubal’s first complete game) and struck out 13. His last pitch was a third strike to Gabriel Arias at 102.6 mph, the fastest strikeout pitch thrown by a big league starter in any inning in the Statcast era.

The complete game issue is among the most tiresome of the terminally exhausting subset of analytics vs. old-school. Always remember that Bob Gibson threw a complete game every four days and Juan Marichal once threw 227 pitches and now everybody’s soft and managers are afraid to let anyone face the same hitter three times. Hinch, whose job is to assess baseball games as dispassionately as possible, said he would let more starters pitch into the ninth if they, like Skubal, threw 85 pitches and allowed no runs through eight. But the calculus of his job is to determine whether a starter’s 107th pitch to start the ninth is going to be better than closer Will Vest‘s first pitch.

Skubal listens to this as if he has heard it before — maybe every time he is removed from a game — and didn’t believe it then, either. This is a man for whom “five and dive” constitutes the three most mortifying words in the language. But does his manager have a point?

“Yeah,” he says, the whatever in his tone as obvious as the sun. “But I’ll always think my pitch — whichever one it might be — is the best option.”

You like it old-school? Skubal will make your old-school look brand-new.

MY WIFE FOUND the official photo of that all-star team, taken days before the tooth incident. Kneeling bottom left, the proof: 9-year-old Tarik Skubal, with Andrew Keown standing directly behind him. Skubal’s posture is straight out of an anatomy textbook: his dark eyes set in a steely glare, his right hand above his left as they rest on his right thigh. The tan line on his right wrist gives him away as a kid who spent most of his summer wearing a baseball glove. Nearly every other 9- and 10-year-old is looking out from under a cap either pulled down too low or cocked too high. They’re all slouching or leaning or just looking like kids who can barely remain still long enough for a shutter to click. They’ll all be rolling in that dirt and grass within seconds.

One little boy, however, is all business. “Even then he was a little serious,” his father says. Tarik, in fact, is the only one who looks as if he has higher aspirations than the 9- and 10-year-old all-star team. He’s posing not for the job he has but the one he wants. He looks as if he knew, even back then, that someday everybody — even those who don’t remember — would come to see it.