Pirates ace Paul Skenes shut down the strongest team in the American League with eight strikeouts.

For years, pitchers would look over their shoulder, often to catch a glimpse of the radar gun’s reading. While intuition matters, having real numbers about fastball performance helps pitchers plan, adjust, or just give themselves a mental boost.

Plenty of pitchers do this, from bullpen arms to All-Stars—and that includes Paul Skenes, especially when he’s pitching at home.

“I probably look at it more than I should,” Skenes admitted. “If you see me turn around, I’m not checking velocity—I’m looking at the data. It’s great that we can display those numbers.”

The data on the Pirates’ scoreboard shows vertical and horizontal movement, allowing Skenes to track his pitch trajectory. He can fire triple-digit four-seam fastballs, but with six other pitches he uses at least semi-regularly, the movement helps him understand how his secondary pitches will play off the fastball.

That was clear in today’s game. Skenes leaned heavily on his four-seam fastball—throwing it 51 times out of 96 pitches over six innings—and matched his season high with 10 whiffs on that pitch. It set the tone for his eight strikeouts, and while he didn’t factor into the decision, Henry Davis’s late-game swings helped the Pirates beat the Blue Jays 5-2.

The score was tied 2-2 in the seventh when Davis led off with a double and eventually scored on a wild pitch. In the eighth, he hit a deep sacrifice fly to add an insurance run. After Skenes’s rare rough outing against the Brewers last time out, Davis stepped up under the spotlight.

“I think his consistency between starts is what makes him so good,” Davis said. “He’s basically always the same.”

Skenes’s four-seam fastball was the key to his rebound, generating 10 whiffs and 11 called strikes. He filled the zone often (63%), and the Blue Jays had almost no answer for it.

“We really didn’t need to go away from it,” Skenes said. “That wasn’t our game plan. The first four-seam I threw tonight showed up poorly in the data, but then I threw a pitch I hadn’t thrown all year. So, it moved differently than anything so far, and we just kept going with it.”

According to Baseball Savant, the second four-seam fastball had 14 inches of induced vertical break (IVB). IVB is the upward movement a fastball gets from vertical spin, and generally, the higher it is, the tougher it is for hitters to read. It can create the illusion of the ball rising.

Skenes entered the game with an average IVB of 11 inches on his four-seam fastball. So against Addison Barger, that pitch moved three inches more than usual. Imagine how hard it is to hit a Paul Skenes fastball—and then it moves about 27% more than normal.

Skenes got more IVB than usual on his fastball, and Toronto couldn’t do much against him. As the game went on, he mixed in more pitches, striking out four batters with his changeup—a pitch that pairs perfectly with his four-seamer.

The Blue Jays scored twice in the third inning—the first earned runs Skenes had allowed at home since June 3. Because of those runs, he didn’t get the win, but against the AL’s best team, he tossed six innings, allowed just five hits and one walk, and showed again why he’s the frontrunner for the NL Cy Young Award.

“I didn’t even realize it had been that long,” manager Don Kelly said. “I think sometimes he’s so good when he’s out there that you just expect it, which isn’t really fair to him, because that’s not normal in baseball.”

Of course, pitching isn’t all about the numbers, and Skenes doesn’t spend the whole game sneaking glances at the scoreboard—usually just early in his outing. But when his pitches are working and his command is sharp, he’s proven what he’s capable of.

“The data is one thing, but executing pitches is another,” Skenes said. “These are big-league hitters. They’re really good. They can hit good pitches, hit those unicorn pitches, or whatever you want to call them—the ones with elite pitch grades, or anything else. I think it just comes down to execution.”